# Richard Jeffrey Newman > In a world that seems more and more troubled by disruption, It All Connects is where I work out for myself how to live in, with, and through the identities that define me. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### A Bit About Me URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/about/ Last updated: 2025-08-27T13:13:32.000Z If you want more than you can glean from either the official or irreverent bios below, check out my [Scrapbook](https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/), where you can get a snapshot of what goes through my mind on a pretty regular basis. If you want a more intimate window into all things Richard Jeffrey Newman, take a look at the “Four Things About Me” section in the *Four by Four* issues of my newsletter, [It All Connects](https://www.richardjnewman.com/blog/), to which you can subscribe [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal). If you have a question you’d like to ask me directly, just [let me know](https://www.richardjnewman.com/contact/) and I’ll do my best to answer. If it’s the “canned” stuff you're after, read on. #### On this page ## My Official Bio Richard Jeffrey Newman is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, [*T’shuvah*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/tshuvah-2/) (Fernwood Press 2023), [*Words for What Those Men Have Done*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/words-for-what-those-men-have-done/) (Guernica Editions 2017), and [*The Silence of Men*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/the-silence-of-men/) (CavanKerry Press 2006). He has also published three books of translation from classical Persian poetry, [*Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/selections-from-saadis-gulistan/) and [*Selections from Saadi’s Bustan*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/selections-from-saadis-bustan/) (Global Scholarly Publications 2004 & 2006) and [*The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahameh*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/the-teller-of-tales-stories-from-ferdowsis-shahnameh-2/) (Junction Press 2011). His essays and reviews have appeared in a range of publications, including *The American Voice,* *On The Issues,* [*Salon*](https://www.salon.com/1999/11/19/korea%5F3/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* [*Unlikely Stories*](https://www.unlikelystories.org/content/the-lines-that-antisemitism-and-racism-draw?ref=richardjnewman.com), American Book Review, [*LitHub*](https://lithub.com/reading-across-america-the-longest-running-series-in-queens/?ref=richardjnewman.com), and [*Solstice*](https://solsticelitmag.org/content/the-first-time-i-told-someone/?ref=richardjnewman.com). He has been curating and hosting the [First Tuesdays](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) reading series in Jackson Heights since 2012\. Newman is retired Professor of English and Creative Writing at SUNY’s Nassau Community College, where he taught for thirty-six years. ## The Irreverent Bio ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2024/11/_smartass.jpg) That’s me, in the summer of 1985, in a classroom at Edinburgh University, proudly wearing the “smartass” tee shirt my mother, with great affection, bought me because I was indeed a smartass. Based on what I can see of the back cover of the book I'm reading, it's [Liz Lochhead’s](https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/liz-lochhead/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *True Confessions.* This is the bio that guy would write: *When Richard Jeffrey Newman was three years old, his mother thought he would make a great model for the new line of Lee’s jeans for kids that they were selling in the Lee’s store on Northern Boulevard. So she dressed Richard in cuffed-because-they-were-much-too-big-for-him jeans, suspenders, a fancy pair of shoes, and his favorite shirt. No matter how hard she tried, though, she couldn’t get him to stand still long enough for the Lee’s label just above his young butt to be clearly visible. His modeling career was over before it even started.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2024/11/_me-modeling.jpg) *Nonetheless, Richard is convinced that writing makes him happier than modeling would have done. He’s published six books of poetry and translations; he runs* [*a reading series*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*; and he teaches English, creative writing, and, occasionally, Women’s and Gender Studies at a large, urban community college, where he served for six years as an elected officer on his union’s Executive Committee.* ## What Those Bios Leave Out **A partial list:** I am a father, a husband, a brother, a son, a friend. My favorite Korean food is [agujjim](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agwi-jjim?ref=richardjnewman.com). When I was just a little older than I am in the “modeling” picture above, my favorite song was [Good Vibrations](https://youtu.be/Eab%5Fbeh07HU?si=V1CS2WgSrnhm7Y5x&ref=richardjnewman.com), by the Beach Boys. In junior high school, I planned to become either a computer programmer or a biologist. I've never been skinny dipping, but I have made love under the full moon in a forest. One of my favorite books is [*The Waves*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FWaves?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Virgnia Woolf. A piece of music I often turn to for comfort is Keith Jarret's [Köln Concert](https://youtu.be/skkiVoI7sBk?si=lo32FqSa%5F3qg7DVs&ref=richardjnewman.com). I am a survivor of childhood sexual violence. I started losing my hair at fifteen and smoked pot for the first time when I was seventeen. When I was in my late twenties and early thirties, I thought I might become a [composer](https://soundcloud.com/user-512255240/sets/my-music-from-the-80s?si=9b56db6770d245f798f0ca35e476e0eb&utm%5Fsource=clipboard&utm%5Fmedium=text&utm%5Fcampaign=social%5Fsharing). During my teens, (often violent) antisemitism was a regular part of my life. My nickname in high school was Lurch, after the character on the original [The Addams Family](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FAddams%5FFamily%5F%281964%5FTV%5Fseries%29?ref=richardjnewman.com). My 11th grade English teacher predicted I'd grow up to play blues piano in a bar on Bleecker Street. That never happened, but I did play in 1986 at The Bitter End in a showcase featuring the guy who was my best friend at the time. It has been decades since I believed in a god. My first celebrity crush was Valerie Bertinelli in the original [One Day At A Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One%5FDay%5Fat%5Fa%5FTime%5F%281975%5FTV%5Fseries%29?ref=richardjnewman.com). I speak three languages other than English–Hebrew, Korean, and Persian–none of them particularly well and Hebrew almost not at all anymore, since it has been decades since I last used it with any frequency. I'm a good cook and I will try almost any kind of food at least once. My superpower is that I can fold a fitted sheet. ### My Services URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/services/ Last updated: 2025-06-03T15:35:43.000Z ## What I Offer - [**Readings & Talks**](https://www.richardjnewman.com/readings-workshops-talks-2/) - [**Working With Other Writers**](https://www.richardjnewman.com/working-with-other-writers/) - [**Writing For Your Business**](https://www.richardjnewman.com/writing-for-your-business/) If I had to boil everything I'm going to say in this section of my website down to two sentences, it would be these: *I write about things that matter to make connections that matter. During the course of my career, I've helped writers and professionals of all kinds do the same*. Precision, fidelity, and truthfulness are the touchstones of my work, regardless of who I'm working with or what they've hired me to do. The truth I pursue as a poet and writer might be very different from the truth I pursue with a business client, or with students, but to be untruthful in any of those roles is to court failure. Click on the links above to learn more. Or, if you already know what you'd like to talk to me about, [contact me directly](https://www.richardjnewman.com/contact/). ### Read•Watch•Listen URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/work/ Last updated: 2025-07-15T20:41:31.000Z ## READ #### On this page #### Poetry - "The Words," by Salvador Espriu, [tr. review of translations](https://www.trreview.com/post/the-words-by-salvador-espriu-translated-by-sonia-alland-and-richard-jeffrey-newman?ref=richardjnewman.com) (poetry, translation) - “On February 4, 2020, instead of watching Donald Trump deliver his State of the Union Address,” [Second Coming](https://michaelbroder.substack.com/p/second-coming-no-16-feb-4-2025) - “Ibn Abd al-Aziz Sacrifices A Jewel,” by Saadi of Shiraz in [The Loch Raven Review](https://thelochravenreview.net/nine-persian-language-poets-mehdi-akhavan-sales-mahsati-ganjavi-siavash-kasrai-esmail-khoi-sheida-mohamadi-fereydun-moshiri-rumi-saadi-mushrifuddin-muslih-ibn-abdullah-shirazi-and-ahmad/?ref=richardjnewman.com#Saadi) (poetry translation - Scroll down a bit after you click the link and you'll find this poem.) - “Sunset,” [Humana Obscura](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h9Bub16sAhH0T0JytS-4iRZvn49CDBBr/view?ref=richardjnewman.com) (page 52) - “The People in Gaza Keep Dying,” [New Verse News](https://newversenews.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-people-in-gaza-keep-dying.html?ref=richardjnewman.com) (poem) - “What Filled The Room,” [Contrary](https://contrarymagazine.com/2022/what-filled-the-room/?ref=richardjnewman.com) (poem) - “After Drought,” “This Sentence Is A Metaphor For Bridge #20,” and “Just Beyond Your Reach,” [iamb: poetry seen and heard](https://www.iambapoet.com/wave/10-richard-jeffrey-newman?ref=richardjnewman.com) (poem) - “A Dream In Three Parts,” [BigCityLit](https://nycbigcitylit.com/article/a-dream-in-three-parts/?ref=richardjnewman.com) (poem) - “Because I Can’t Not Know What He Saw,” [Voice Male Magazine](https://voicemalemagazine.org/because-i-cant-not-know-what-he-saw/?ref=richardjnewman.com) (poem) - *From The Book of Sinera,* by Salvador Espriu on [Asymptote](https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/from-the-book-of-sinera-salvador-espriu/?ref=richardjnewman.com), (poetry translation) - *Five Poems by Salvador Espriu* on [EuropeNow](https://www.europenowjournal.org/2023/05/01/five-poems-by-salvador-espriu/?ref=richardjnewman.com) (poetry translation) - *A Canticle Rehearsal in the Temple & The Waters Do Not Return, Even to Meribà,*by Salvador Espriu, on [Plume](https://plumepoetry.com/a-canticle-rehearsal-in-the-temple-and-the-waters-do-not-return-even-to-meriba/?ref=richardjnewman.com) (poetry translation) - “Thank You For Thinking It,” [ANMLY](https://anmly.org/ap25/richard-jeffrey-newman/?ref=richardjnewman.com) (poem) #### Prose - “I Was A Creative Writing Program Dropout: One Poet’s Story,” [Majuscule](https://majusculelit.com/i-was-a-creative-writing-program-dropout/?ref=richardjnewman.com) - “The First Time I Told Someone,” [Solstice](https://solsticelitmag.org/content/the-first-time-i-told-someone/?ref=richardjnewman.com) - “The Lines That Antisemitism and Racism Draw,” [Unlikely Stories](https://www.unlikelystories.org/content/the-lines-that-antisemitism-and-racism-draw?ref=richardjnewman.com) - “Towards A Discussion of Male Self-Hatred,” [The Good Men Project](https://goodmenproject.com/guy-talk/towards-a-discussion-of-male-self-hatred/?ref=richardjnewman.com) - “The Longest Running Series in Queens,” [LitHub](https://lithub.com/reading-across-america-the-longest-running-series-in-queens/?ref=richard-jeffrey-newman.ghost.io) - “Attar’s ‘Tale of Marhuma:’ The Woman With a Manly Heart,” in *Modern Language Studies 46(2).* Read my translation of Attar's poem and an accompanying essay here: [Attar's Tale of Marhuma: The Woman With a Manly Heartin Modern Language Studies 46(2)Attar's Tale of Marhuma - The Woman With a Manly Heart.pdf14 MBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2024/11/Attar-s-Tale-of-Marhuma---The-Woman-With-a-Manly-Heart.pdf "Download") - “[Sexual Charades In Seoul](https://www.salon.com/1999/11/19/korea%5F3/?ref=richardjnewman.com),” in Salon.com --- ## WATCH #### “Do Not Wish For Any Other Life,” from *T'shuvah* [Owen Bloomfield's](https://www.owenbloomfield.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) setting of “Do Not Wish For Any Other Life,” one of the sequences in [*T'shuvah*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/tshuvah-2/)*,* premiered on April 19, 2024 in Kitchener, Ontario in this performance by [The\_\_\_Experiment](https://www.theblankexperiment.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com). #### Trembling/Light The singer [Ayelet Rose Gottlieb](https://ayeletrose.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) found my poem “[Light](http://www.lovelifepoems.net/love-poem/light-by-richard-jeffrey-newman?ref=richardjnewman.com),” which was originally published in [*The Silence Of Men*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/the-silence-of-men/)*,* on the internet and asked her record company to contact me to see if I’d be willing to let her use it on an album she was doing with her group [Pneuma](https://www.pneumaquartet.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com). I said yes, of course. #### Claiming The Politics of My Survival In March of 2018, in the aftermath of the allegations against Harvey Weinstein and others, I was invited to give a talk during Nassau Community College’s Sexual Assault/Harassment Awareness Week about my experience as a survivor of childhood sexual violence. While this was not the first time I spoke publicly as a survivor, it was the first time I made the connection between that aspect of who I am and my politics. #### Reading from *T’shuvah* at the 2023 New York Poetry Festival #### Launch Video for *Words For What Those Men Have Done* [*Words For What Those Men Have Done*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/words-for-what-those-men-have-done/) was published in Canada, in 2017, by [Guernica Editions](https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771832090?ref=richardjnewman.com). Unfortunately, I was not able to be in Toronto for the launch. The publisher was kind enough to let me record this video for the event. #### Featured Reading for Rimes Of The Ancient Mariner --- ## LISTEN #### Part 1 of "As If It Were Real," on Queensbound [Queensbound](https://www.queensbound.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) is a collaborative audio project founded in 2018 by [KC Trommer](https://www.kctrommer.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) that seeks to connect writers across the borough, showcase and develop a literature of Queens, and reflect the borough back to itself. This is poetry for the people online and in public spaces. #### Kayumars & Hushang from *The Teller of Tales: Stories From Ferdowsi's Shahnameh* I made this recording of the stories of the first two kings in [*The Teller of Tales*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-teller-of-tales-stories-from-ferdowsis-shahnameh-2/)*,* Kayumars and Hushang,for an online celebration of classical Persian literature, though I confess I do not remember who sponsored the event and I am unable to find any trace of it online. --- ## INTERVIEWS #### Conducted by Catherine Fletcher for Green Linden Press [Interviews & Reviews — Green Linden Press![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/icon/favicon-1.ico)Green Linden Press](https://www.greenlindenpress.com/interviews-and-reviews?ref=richardjnewman.com#/richard-jeffrey-newman/) #### Conducted by Jaime Alejandro on Arts Calling #### Conducted by Steve Harper for The Podcast Business Network #### Conducted by Rachelle Escamilla on KKUP [Rachelle Escamilla](https://soundcloud.com/rachelle-escamilla?ref=richardjnewman.com "Rachelle Escamilla") · [Richard Jeffrey Newman on KKUP](https://soundcloud.com/rachelle-escamilla/richard-jeffrey-newman-on-kkup?ref=richardjnewman.com "Richard Jeffrey Newman on KKUP") #### Conducted by Melissa Studdard on Tiferet Talk [Richard Jeffrey Newman | Tiferet Talk with Melissa StuddardJoin us for a dynamic conversation about poetry, translation, and teaching with Richard Jeffrey Newman. Newman is the author of the poetry collection The Silence Of Men; the translator of two masterpieces of 13th century Iranian poetry, Selec­tions from Saadi’s Gulis­tan and Selec­tions from Saadi’s Bus­tan, and translator of The Teller of Tales, a portion of the Shahnameh, the Persian national epic. He is also co-translator, with Professor John Moyne, of A Bird in the Gar­den of Angels, a selec­tion of work by Rumi. As well, Newman serves as Per­sian Arts Festival’s Lit­er­ary Arts Direc­tor, co-curates the monthly Shab-e She’r (Night of Persian Poetry) at the Bowery Poetry Club, sits on the advi­sory boards of The Trans­la­tion Project and Jack­son Heights Poetry Fes­ti­val, and is a speaker with the New York Council for the Humanities. He is an Associate Professor of English at Nassau Community College. Tiferet Journal has recently published a compilation of twelve of our best transcribed interviews. To purchase The Tiferet Talk Interviews book, please click here.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/icon/favicon-2.ico)BlogTalkRadioFire Engineering Podcast![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/thumbnail/120847_LMRXCgdq.jpg)](https://www.blogtalkradio.com/tiferetjournal/2012/04/22/richard-jeffrey-newman-tiferet-talk-with-melissa-studdard?ref=richardjnewman.com) #### Recorded in 2008 for The Jackson Heights Poetry Festival --- ## REVIEWS I'VE WRITTEN [Review of Contestable Truths, Incontestable Lies, by Stephen Sherin American Book ReviewReview of Contestable Truths, Incontestable Lies, by Stephen Sher.pdf276 KBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2024/11/Review-of-Contestable-Truths--Incontestable-Lies--by-Stephen-Sher.pdf "Download") [Review of Antisemitism: Here and Now, by Deborah E. Lipstadtin American Book ReviewReview of Antisemitism- Here and Now, by Deborah E. Lipstadt.pdf986 KBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2024/11/Review-of-Antisemitism--Here-and-Now--by-Deborah-E.-Lipstadt.pdf "Download") [Review of Rubāiyāt: For The Martyrs of Two Wars, by Ruth Valentinein American Book ReviewReview of Rubāiyāt- For The Martyrs of Two Wars, by Ruth Valentine.pdf2 MBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2024/11/Review-of-Ruba-iya-t--For-The-Martyrs-of-Two-Wars--by-Ruth-Valentine.pdf "Download") [Review of Inclined To Speak, edited by Hayan Chararain American Book ReviewReview of Inclined To Speak- An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry, edited by Hayan Charara.pdf2 MBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2024/11/Review-of-Inclined-To-Speak--An-Anthology-of-Contemporary-Arab-American-Poetry--edited-by-Hayan-Charara.pdf "Download") --- ## THE ARCHIVE These essays date back to 1989, when I first started publishing on manhood, masculinity, and male sexuality. Some of what I say in these essays is dated; some no longer reflects what I think or believe; but you can also find here, however differently I would express myself now, my early attempts to articulate ideas that I have been thinking and writing about for a very long time. [1988 - His Sexuality, Her Reproductive RightsAn essay critiquing the notion that men have reproductive rights over pregnant women's bodies.His Sexuality, Her Reproductive Rights.pdf7 MBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2025/01/His-Sexuality--Her-Reproductive-Rights.pdf "Download") [1989 - Fertility and Virility: A Meditation on SpermAn essay reconsidering the social and cultural significance of semen and sperm.Fertility and Virility.pdf195 KBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2025/01/Fertility-and-Virility.pdf "Download") [1990 - In My Father's ImageAn essay in which I come to terms how my relationship with my father impacted other relationships.In My Father's Image.pdf5 MBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2025/01/In-My-Father-s-Image.pdf "Download") [1991 - Circumcision - The False InitiationAn essay critiquing the practices of medical and ritual circumcision.Circumcision - The False Initiation.pdf6 MBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2025/01/Circumcision---The-False-Initiation.pdf "Download") [1994 - Inside The Men Inside "Inside Christy Canyon"An critical essay about my experience with heterosexual pornography.Inside The Men Inside "Inside Christy Canyon".pdf1 MBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2025/01/Inside-The-Men-Inside--22Inside-Christy-Canyon-22.pdf "Download") [1994 - The Way She Touched MeA critical essay about one of my experiences with the sex trade in Seoul, South Kores.The Way She Touched Me.pdf6 MBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2025/01/The-Way-She-Touched-Me.pdf "Download") [1998 - Born Again? Once Is Enough Thank YouAn essay about The Promisekeepers, a right wing Christian men's group published in On The Issues.Born Again? Once Is Enough Thank You.pdf4 MBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2025/01/Born-Again--Once-Is-Enough-Thank-You.pdf "Download") ### Video URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/video/ Last updated: 2024-02-25T20:48:23.000Z ## Settings Of My Work [Ayelet Rose Gottlieb](https://ayeletrose.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com)’s jazz ensemble [Pneuma](http://ayeletrose.com/site/1012?ref=richardjnewman.com) made a lovely video of their musical setting of “Light,” one of the poems from [*The Silence of Men*](https://richardjnewman.com/my-books?ref=richardjnewman.com#silence). The piece is from their album, [Who Has Seen The Wind?](http://ayeletrose.com/site/1669?ref=richardjnewman.com), which is well worth getting. --- ## Readings & Talks --- --- --- --- --- ## Interviews ### home URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/home/ Last updated: 2024-12-05T20:09:44.000Z ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2024/10/my-signature.1.png) **Poet • Essayist • Educator • Consultant** --- *Take refuge on this path* *the page gives you to roam.* *Hunker down against* *the shadow cast by prayer* *and build yourself a line* *that won’t efface itself.* *Language is not wine.* *You cannot pour it freely.* ### My Books URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/ Last updated: 2024-11-02T23:30:50.000Z _No content available._ ### My Scrapbook URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/ Last updated: 2024-10-31T00:39:48.000Z _No content available._ ### Events URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/events/ Last updated: 2024-10-29T17:41:52.000Z _No content available._ ### It All Connects... URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/blog/ Last updated: 2025-05-24T21:23:32.000Z _No content available._ ### Get In Touch URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/contact/ Last updated: 2025-01-12T14:57:33.000Z Your name Email address Message ### Readings & Talks URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/readings-workshops-talks-2/ Last updated: 2025-02-20T03:00:51.000Z #### Readings & Talks ***Without fail, Richard delivers a powerful message and a challenge to his audiences: rethink the way you understand the dynamics of gender, abuse, power. From his perspective as a survivor, an academic, and an artist, Richard engages and connects deeply with his audiences, tackling complex, often intellectually and emotionally difficult issues with calm and sophistication. Especially in our current moment, Richard's is a distinctive and crucial voice.** —Sarah Hosey, former Coordinator of The Women’s Studies Project at Nassau Community College & author of Home Is Where the Hurt Is: Media Depictions of Wives and Mothers ## About My Work Deciding who to book for the reading or talk you are planning requires research into who might be a good fit for the program you have in mind. To facilitate that process—since the fact that you’re on this page suggests you might be interested in me—I’ve gathered here in one place some information to help you decide if what I have to offer is indeed a good fit. You can learn about the books I’ve published [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/) and read examples of work I’ve published online [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/work/#read). If you’re interested in getting a sense of what I’m like in front of an audience, you can also check out [videos](https://www.richardjnewman.com/work/#reading-from-t%E2%80%99shuvah-at-the-2023-new-york-poetry-festival) of [readings](https://www.richardjnewman.com/work/#launch-video-for-words-for-what-those-men-have-done) and [talks](https://www.richardjnewman.com/work/#claiming-the-politics-of-my-survival) that I’ve [given](https://www.richardjnewman.com/work/#featured-reading-for-rimes-of-the-ancient-mariner). Overall, my work can be divided into two categories: my own poetry and essays and the translations I have published of classical Persian poetry. I do not experience these categories as self-contained wholes, but it’s probably useful if I talk about them that way here. ### Poetry and Essays Almost everything I write is rooted in the impact feminism had on my life as the first lens through which I was able to name as sexual violence what the men who violated me did to me when I was a boy. While much has changed in how we view male survivors since I first discovered feminism in the 1980s, we still tend to see men solely as perpetrators, enablers, or bystanders, not as sexually vulnerable human beings who can be, a significant number of whom have already been, sexually victimized. Inherent in acknowledging this duality is the challenge of making visible the differences between how men and women experience sexual violence, while at the same time not eliding or otherwise minimizing men's responsibility and accountability in a male dominant society where sexual violence is normalized. The desire to meet that challenge is an energy that animates all of my work, even when the subject matter is something other than sexual violence itself. ### Literary Translations In the early 2000s, I was commissioned by the now-defunct International Society for Iranian Culture (ISIC) to produce book-length literary translations of selections from five masterpieces of classical Persian literature. When ISIC first approached me, I declined. I speak and understand some spoken Persian, but I am neither literate nor anywhere near natively fluent in the language. In response, ISIC’s executive director encouraged me to see the work they were asking me to do as part of the long history of poet-translators who rely on semantically accurate “trots” (some call them “ponies”) in rendering the source text into a literary form in the target language. In the end, I agreed for two primary reasons: - ISIC’s goal was to use those translations to open a window onto Iran’s culture and history through which most Americans had never had the opportunity to look. Given that President George W. Bush had recently named Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil,” I thought the kind of cultural exchange ISIC wanted to facilitate using the translations was important. - My son is Iranian American. It seemed to me that young Iranian Americans like him, who may never have the opportunity to read classical Persian literature in its original form, deserve access to this part of their heritage not in the dry and pedantic language of scholarly translation, but in versions that, because they “sing” in English, at least “harmonize” with the Persian original. The translations I published, which you can learn more about [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/), are out of print, but I know, based on the responses I get both when I give readings from them and when I give the talk called “On The Trail Of A Tale: Benjamin Franklin’s Persian Parable” (see below), that they have been successful in achieving ISIC’s goal. ## What I Offer In addition both to the two subject areas I’ve just described and the readings and talks I describe below, my work in the literary community also includes more than a decade of hosting and curating the [First Tuesdays](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) reading series in the town where I live. I’ve written a little bit about that experience, and the unique, cento-building, approach we take to the open mic, on [LitHub](https://lithub.com/reading-across-america-the-longest-running-series-in-queens/?ref=richardjnewman.com). If you’re interested in learning more about how that works and how it can help build an open mic series into a community, or if you’re interested in having me host a reading event using that approach for you, [please get in touch](https://www.richardjnewman.com/contact/). ### Readings If you’re interested in seeing me “in action,” so to speak, there are videos of me reading on the [Read•Watch•Listen](https://www.richardjnewman.com/work/#watch) page. I especially enjoy the challenge of tailoring what I read to a theme, because it offers the opportunity to weave my work into the larger story of whatever the theme happens to be. I’ve given readings focused on vulnerability, love, manhood and masculinity, healing from sexual violence, Jewish identity, and more. If you’re thinking about incorporating a poetry reading into your program or event and you think my work might be a good fit, [please get in touch](https://www.richardjnewman.com/contact/). ### Talks Rather than tell you in the abstract about the subject matter I am most qualified to speak about, it’s probably easier to tell you about some of the talks I’ve given: #### **Claiming The Politics of My Survivorship** In the 1980s, when I began to come to terms with what the men who violated me did to me, men’s sexual violence against girls and women was just beginning to make its way into our mainstream discourse. No one was talking about the sexual abuse of boys. It was in feminism, in other words, that I discovered both the language to name as sexual violence what those men did to me and the perspective to see myself as a survivor, not a victim. Moreover, in its uncompromising insistence that the only person responsible for an act of sexual violence is the one who perpetrates it, feminism also gave me the gift of anger. Whatever else may have been true about how being violated impacted me, in other words, once I started reading the work of feminist writers, I never wavered in my certainty that what those men did to me was their fault, not mine, and that they, therefore, not I, deserved to be the target of the rage I felt. In this talk, I explore what it means to claim the politics of feminism as the starting point of my own healing. #### Choosing a Genre A crucial question to ask yourself if you plan to publish what you write about your own trauma is why you believe the work deserves a reading public. Or, to put that question another way, why you think readers need your work. Implicit in both those questions is the question of the genre in which you choose to write and why. I have written both poetry and creative nonfiction about my experience as a survivor of childhood sexual violence. Taking as a starting point my own experience with the different kinds of work each genre does, this talk explores why a writer would choose poetry over creative nonfiction, or vice versa, when writing about their own trauma. #### The Ethics of Bearing Witness To Violence and Trauma in Poetry No one—not the perpetrator, not the victim, not the witness (if there is one)—comes away from trauma unchanged. As a result, to *bear* witness to trauma in poetry—the verb is not incidental—is to carry the burden not just of saying who did what to whom, but also of articulating your stake as the poet in the act of witnessing, of being able to make what the act of witnessing did to you part of the experience of the poem. This talk explores some of the ethical considerations arising from the choice to write a poetry of witness. #### On The Trail of a Tale: Benjamin Franklin’s Persian Parable Benjamin Franklin’s *Parable Against Persecution* was, in its time, one of his most popular pieces of writing, telling the story of how God admonished Abraham for refusing hospitality to a Zoroastrian. Franklin wrote the *Parable* in the style of the King James Bible and often passed it off as a chapter of Genesis, especially when arguing in favor of religious tolerance. What Franklin didn’t know is that the original version of the story told in the *Parable* was a poem by the 13th century Iranian poet Saadi of Shiraz. This talk, which can be adapted into a workshop for teachers who might be interested in teaching this material, traces the path Saadi's poem took across three continents, four languages, and at least three religious traditions to get from 13th century Iran to 17th century America. [Please get in touch](https://www.richardjnewman.com/contact/) if you'd like to discuss having me speak at your event. ### Working With Other Writers URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/working-with-other-writers/ Last updated: 2025-02-20T02:58:29.000Z **“Working on your poetry with Richard Jeffrey Newman is as much a pleasure as it is a privilege. Lifelong master-teacher that he is, he comes to the process with a treasure-trove of guidance and information to offer, helping you to build on the unique iterations and stylistic gestures of your own work. In my case, Richard's patient, but also frank and direct tutelage played a major role in the recent acceptance of my first poetry collection—poems I had nurtured largely in a decades-long, self-imposed isolation—by an established and indeed respected publishing house.”* —Henry Sussman, retired professor, Comparative Literature ## Working With Individuals Regardless of who are you are or why you are writing, putting your thoughts and feelings into words for an audience other than yourself means pursuing a connection between your facility with language and the person you understand yourself to be, all within the context of the text or texts you want to produce. I’ve been helping writers of all kinds, at all levels, nurture, grow, and hone that connection for four decades. If you're looking to take your writing to the next level [let's talk](https://www.richardjnewman.com/contact/). ## Working With Groups Poetry workshops can be: - Generative (focused on producing new work) - Revision-based (focused on getting feedback on work you've already produced) - Craft-based (focused on a particular element of form or craft) - Purpose-based (focused on a specific, usually theme-based outcome) The first three kinds of workshop are generally intended for people pursuing poetry as an art form in and of itself, those who see themselves as writing for a public, which can include print and/or digital publication, sharing work at an open mic, or writing occasional poems—birthday, weddings, funerals—for friends and family. The fourth kind of workshop, which I have called purpose-based, is usually intended as a way to elicit self-expression about a particular issue by anyone concerned with that issue, whether or not they are or aspire to be a poet. In 2023, for example, I completed facilitatortraining with the [Institute for Poetic Medicine](https://www.poeticmedicine.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) to lead poetry workshops for survivors of domestic abuse and sexual assault; and in 2013, I took part in a program called "[Poetry Heals](https://www.tapinto.net/towns/livingston/sections/health-and-wellness/articles/poets-lead-workshops-for-professionals-at-eight-n?ref=richardjnewman.com)," a collaboration between the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and [CavanKerry Press](https://www.cavankerrypress.org/cavankerry-behind-the-scenes/joan-cusack-handler-reflects-on-ckps-first-poetry-heals-workshop/?ref=richardjnewman.com), publisher of my first book, [*The Silence Of Men*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/the-silence-of-men/)*.* The workshop I led for Trinitas Regional Medical Center was written up in *TRMC World,* that hospital's newsletter. Click below to read the article. [Doctor, Meet Your MuseTRMC write up of the “Poetry Heals” workshop at Trinitas Regional Medical Centernewsletter write up of poetry heals workshop.pdf293 KBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2024/12/newsletter-write-up-of-poetry-heals-workshop.pdf "Download") If you or your organization is looking to run a poetry workshop in any of the four formats described above, [let's talk](https://www.richardjnewman.com/contact/). #### What Others Are Saying #### —Stephen Furlong ***"Richard Jeffrey Newman has long been a writer I've admired. The Silence of Men is one of the most-treasured books in my home library. After graduate school, I've poked and prodded at my thesis - a poetry manuscript that tracks trauma and recovery. Richard, whom I eventually met through shared social media circles, was one individual I knew I wanted to talk with about my poems. His attention to detail, his awareness of narrative and structure, and his support made me feel seen in a way that urged me to keep going and not "take the easy road" for cheapened rewards. Richard knows full-well that poetry (and healing) takes time, reflection, and precision of language. I am grateful for the time and effort he invested in my poems and, as I continue to work through the poems and my life, I know that I can rely on Richard to be an ally in my quest. To this day I know I can rely on him - that, to me, is a testament to his continued support."** #### —Dan Fleshler ***"Richard Jeffrey Newman provided invaluable assistance to me as a consultant when I hired him to help me prepare a manuscript for a poetry chapbook. He gave me wise editorial advice on specific poems and several options for organizing the poems into separate sections based on their topics. In addition, using his extensive knowledge of both literary journals and book publishers, he offered useful suggestions about where and how to submit individual poems as well the chapbook he was reviewing. I would highly recommend him."** ### Writing For Your Business URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/writing-for-your-business/ Last updated: 2025-02-20T02:54:30.000Z #### On this page **“When he came on board as union secretary, Richard transformed the scattershot nature of our messaging into a consistent, coherent, and effective communications strategy, both internal and external. Two highlights: the monthly “Frank Talk” column he ghostwrote for me and the way he used our blog to educate, unify, and (when necessary) mobilize our membership. His ability to think strategically when it came to communications definitely helped us be more effective as a union.”* ****—Frank Frisenda, former President of the Nassau Community College Federation of Teachers** ## My Business Writing Story Before I began working for my union as their communications coordinator, I had a consulting business on the side called Writing the Future of Your Business. I wrote and ghostwrote copy for businesses in a wide range of industries, including hospitality, travel, freight auditing, web marketing, healthcare, productivity/professional organizing, and accounting and finance. My tag line was “Because people will see, in the care you take with your words, the care you will take with the business they give you”—a little long, I know, but it's true. Words, especially in the digital age, are often all you have to make a first impression, whether those words are printed on paper, published on a digital device, or spoken in a promotional video. Most of the worked I was hired to do back then was business-to-business, but I had some business-to-consumer clients as well. I wrote direct mail postcards, pitch letters, brochure and/or website copy, and monthly columns in industry publications, among other documents. I even edited a medicare guide for an HMO. When I began to work for my union, and especially once I was elected secretary, I brought what I'd learned about business communication to bear on the union's lack of a coherent communications strategy, both internal and external. I overhauled the way we used our blog so it became a communications channel read by both our membership and the college administration; ghostwrote a monthly column for the union president both to keep our membership informed and to mobilize them when necessary; wrote the script for a Facebook and YouTube video introducing us to the surrounding community; and designed and implemented a "Know Your Contract" educational campaign. Most recently, I brought that same kind of strategic thinking to a monthly bulletin I’ve been hired to ghostwrite for a college president looking to overhaul how their administration communicates with the campus they are charged with running. If you’re looking for someone who understands, and knows how to implement, big-picture thinking when it comes to communication, while at the same time possessing the writing and editorial skills to make sure the texts you need to produce are compelling and pristine, take a look at the three case studies I’ve provided below. If you think I might be a good fit, [let’s talk](https://www.richardjnewman.com/contact/). ## Case Studies --- ### [Seriatim](https://www.seriatim.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com): Naming A Business [![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2024/12/seriatim-logo-1999-tagline-A-trans-updated.png)](https://www.seriatim.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) The principle embodied by my old business tag line—*Because people will see, in the care you take with your words, the care you will take with the business they give you*—applies most obviously to the different genres of business communication: emails, proposals, memos, texts, social media posts, and marketing literature. It also applies, though, to your company’s name. Whether you choose a one-word name, invent a word to be the name, or use a phrase, like the name I gave to my business, you want what you call your business to encapsulate the story you have to tell, allowing the value of what you have to offer to speak for itself. I met Sonya Weishappel, founder and CEO of [Seriatim](https://www.seriatim.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com), a professional organizer and inventory management business, in the late 1990s, when we were both members of a networking group called LeTip. Sonya was getting ready to launch her business, but had not yet named it. She hired me to help her do that, giving me these four straightforward guidelines: 1. The name should be a single word. 2. It should have nothing to do with her name. 3. It should describe a process. 4. It should have intellectual gravitas. At its most basic level, to organize is to bring order to disorder, but that definition says nothing about the organizing process itself. I’m a bit of a grammar nerd, so I thought immediately of looking for either an adjective or an adverb to name Sonya’s business, since those are the parts of speech that modify nouns (organizer, organization) and verbs (to organize) respectively. Search engines were not back then what they are today, so I sat at my desk taking notes as I paged through a pile of reference books, among them *The Compact Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary,* a volume called *The Disheveled Dictionary: A Curious Caper Through Our Sumptuous Lexicon,* and *The Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins.* The initial list of possibilities covered an entire page. As I whittled them down, though, the word *seriatim* stood out as the obvious choice, meeting of all of Sonya's criteria 1. It was a single word that had nothing to do with her name. 2. Its Latinate form had the intellectual gravitas she was looking for. 3. It can be used as either an adverb or an adjective, though the former is more common, to describe a process in which each item or subject is dealt with in order, one at a time—precisely the way you would want a professional organizer to work. 4. Plus, as an added bonus, *seriatim* flows easily and rhythmically off the tongue. Sonya launched [Seriatim](https://www.seriatim.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) in 1999, and the company is now in its twenty-sixth year of providing the highest quality service to its clients. That service, of course, is the beating heart of her company’s success, but the story that informs Seriatim’s *commitment* to service is rooted in no small measure in the company’s name and the care and precision with which Sonya insisted it be chosen. --- ### The Nassau Community College Federation of Teachers: Building A Communications Strategy ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2024/12/blue-orange.jpg) When I was elected secretary of my faculty union in 2016, the biggest challenge I faced was our lack of a communications strategy with clearly defined internal and external goals and objectives. Internally, we needed to communicate in ways that engendered solidarity and, when necessary, inspired mobilization. Externally, we needed to do two things: - Introduce ourselves to the community we served as a union of higher education professionals - Publicly hold the college administration to account when we disagreed with them and offer them support when that was the right thing for us to do To accomplish these goals, I instituted a three-pronged strategy to help us get the word out about who we were and why we mattered: - A monthly column from the union president on our blog - An internal, “Know Your Contract” education campaign - Community outreach on social media **§§§** #### Prong One: Frank Talk From The President’s Desk At least a decade before I was elected, our membership voted to discontinue the union’s hard copy, monthly newsletter in favor of a website and a blog. The goal was admirable, to save paper, but because no one had fully thought through what it would mean to move the newsletter's functions over to the blog, ending the newsletter also meant the end of the monthly column the union president had been publishing to that point. That column had been both his or her primary channel of communication with the membership and a kind of secondary channel to the administration, since we knew they "listened in" on our business by reading the newsletter. One of the first things I did as secretary, therefore, was persuade our president, whose name happened to be Frank that he should reintroduce the practice of speaking to the membership in this way. He agreed, and I ghostwrote “Frank Talk From The President’s Desk” for him from 2016 until he retired in 2020. We used Frank Talk in several different ways, ranging from a simple “Welcome Back” message at the beginning of each semester to far more serious matters, like communicating what the impact of the Supreme Court's [*Janus*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus%5Fv.%5FAFSCME?ref=richardjnewman.com) decision was likely to be and keeping the membership informed about COVID-related issues. - You can read the column about *Janus* [here](https://www.nccft.org/2017/11/09/frank-talk-from-the-presidents-desk-november-2017/?ref=richardjnewman.com). - You can read two examples of the COVID updates [here](https://www.nccft.org/2020/03/19/frank-talk-from-the-presidents-desk-covid-19-update-march-19-2020/?ref=richardjnewman.com) and [here](https://www.nccft.org/2020/04/02/frank-talk-from-the-presidents-desk-covid-19-update-april-2-2020/?ref=richardjnewman.com). “Frank Talk From The President’s Desk” became the hub around which much of the rest of what I posted on the blog was built. So, for example, following up on the *Janus* column I linked to above, I wrote a five piece series ([1](https://www.nccft.org/2018/01/25/preparing-for-janus-1/?ref=richardjnewman.com), [2](https://www.nccft.org/2018/03/08/preparing-for-janus-2-the-value-of-membership/?ref=richardjnewman.com), [3](https://www.nccft.org/2018/04/23/preparing-for-janus-3-what-were-up-against/?ref=richardjnewman.com), [4](https://www.nccft.org/2018/04/25/preparing-for-janus-4-keeping-the-union-busters-at-bay-in-new-york-state/?ref=richardjnewman.com), [5](https://www.nccft.org/2018/04/27/preparing-for-janus-5-why-nysut-matters/?ref=richardjnewman.com)) to educate our members on what the *Janus* case was about and why it was so important to maintain solidarity in the face of the danger it posed. I also instituted a regular “Asked & Answered” blog post, in which the executive committee responded to questions put to us by the membership. An example of this kind of post, responding to a question about a COVID-related ventilation study that our college administration commissioned, can be found [here](https://www.nccft.org/2021/08/19/asked-answered-what-was-the-result-of-your-meeting-regarding-nccs-ventilation-study/?ref=richardjnewman.com). **§§§** #### Prong Two: Know Your Contract The core mission of any union is to negotiate and protect the contract its members have with their employer. A contract, however, does far more than stipulate the salary and benefits with which union members are paid for their labor. In setting out the terms and conditions of that employment, a contract also defines an employee’s relationship with: - The job they’ve been hired to do - Their colleagues - Their employer - The life they live outside their identity as an employee One challenge faced by the executive committee on which I served was the prevailing sense of complacency we saw among our members when it came to the contract. Most, but especially our newer members, had not been around when the original contract was negotiated and so they had no idea how hard the union had fought for much that they took for granted. In response, I designed a “Know Your Contract” campaign. The campaign had two components: a series of six broadsides, each one addressing a different component of the contract, and a series of discussion-starting contractual scenarios—all based on real-life examples from the past—that we presented to our executive board, asking them to bring that discussion back to their departments, along with the broadsides. On one side of the broadside was a graphic I designed to illustrate just how complex and comprehensive the contract was: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2024/12/final.benefits.know-your-contract-copy--dragged--1.jpg) Perhaps the most nuanced component of any educational campaign like this, though, is figuring out how to meet your audience where they are, while also pushing them to move a little further in the direction you want them to go. In this case, that meant appealing to our members' self-interest, both individual and collective. On the other side of each broadside, therefore, was a brief narrative about one component of the contract, written to explain very clearly why it should matter to them. We began with the one called "Terms and Conditions of Employment." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2024/12/final.terms---conditions.know-your-contract-1.jpg) If you would like to read the other broadsides, I've collected them in this file: [Know Your ContractThis file contains all six Know Your Contract narratives, as well as the Know Your Contract graphic.know your contract.pdf1 MBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2024/12/know-your-contract.pdf "Download") **§§§** #### **Prong 3: Consider This An Invitation** As a union of higher education professionals, the Nassau Community College Federation of Teachers commits itself to serve the educational needs of our students and of their communities. That part of our identity, however, rarely got the kind of public attention it deserved. So we decided to take action on our own behalf, producing this video, the script for which I wrote, and promoting it on YouTube and Facebook. --- ### The Roslyn Bread Company ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/roslyn-bread-company-ad.png) When I met with the owner of the newly-opened The Roslyn Bread Company, she was looking for a way to promote her bakery-café rooted in the idea of the neighborhood “joint” that she wanted it to become. We hit on the idea of a series of coupons, each of which would also include a chapter in the unfolding narrative, told in the owner’s voice, of the people who became her customers. The plan was—in addition to whatever kind of local distribution the owner could arrange—to have the coupons spread around the establishment so that whether people came in to sit at a table or just pick something up at the counter, they would be able to read the next chapter in the story. The example you see above was a mock-up of the first coupon. We were in the process of deciding how the man, the woman, and the girl would be related; what their names were; what their purchases would be; and so on, when a fire in one of the ovens damaged the building severely enough that it put the bakery out of business. Thankfully, as I remember it, no one was hurt, and the owner, those whom she employed, and I moved on. I have always wondered, though, how the story we were preparing to tell would have unfolded and what impact it would have had on her business. ### Welcome To “It All Connects!” URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/welcome-to-it-all-connects/ Last updated: 2026-01-30T21:28:32.000Z ### Thank you for subscribing to my newsletter! Like you, I sit at the center of a Venn diagram of overlapping communities, interests, and concerns. I’ve chosen the name *It All Connects* for this newsletter project because it represents the vantage point from which I make the connections that are most meaningful to me. Indeed, if I had to boil down to a single sentence the reason I write *It All Connects*, it would be this: *It All Connects is for anyone who grapples with complexity—of identity, art-making, culture, and/or conscience—as a way of making a difference in their own life and, potentially, in the life of their community.* Generally speaking, publication follows this schedule: - **Long-form essays:** The first Friday of the month - **Learning to Love The Questions:** The second Friday of the month - **On My Desk Now:** The third Friday of the month - **Four By Four:** The fourth Friday of the month Regardless of which tier you’ve chosen, I hope you see each issue you receive as a catalyst for the increasingly important conversations about our place in the world that we need to be having. On the paid tier, you’ll receive the next installment of *It All Connects* this coming Friday. In the meantime, if you’d like to check out the archive, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/blog/). Free-tier subscribers will start with the next issue of either “Learning To Love The Questions” or “Four By Four,” depending on where we are in the month. If you’d like a peek at what paid subscribers get, you can check out one or all of these free preview essays: - [The Ethics of Bearing Witness in Poetry to Violence and Trauma](https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-ethics-of-bearing-witness-in-poetry-to-violence-and-trauma/) - [A Belated Gratitude](https://www.richardjnewman.com/a-belated-gratitude/) - [Maybe I Do](https://www.richardjnewman.com/maybe-i-do/) - [Israel & Palestine: Whose Side Are You On?](https://www.richardjnewman.com/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are-you-on/) I thank you for reading more than you know—and I look forward to deepening our ongoing connection in the years to come. With gratitude and in solidarity, Richard ## Posts ### One Who Came Back URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/one-who-came-back/ Last updated: 2026-09-06T02:05:23.000Z I am fascinated by this poem by David Young. ![One Who Came Back I can't be sure why we should want you among us you with your bruised clothes your fingers thickened by pity terror's night watchman, mopping blood where the books lie stitched with quiet who stood in the grass near the graves striking the match of darkness but I know we seem to need you the way we do bread or warmth so I'm out here in the moonlight pounding nails in your footprints as if that could make you stay.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/09/IMG_1049.jpeg) from **Field of Light and Shadow* ### In The Town That Taught Me How To Live Like Prey URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/in-the-town-that-taught-me-how-to-live-like-prey/ Last updated: 2026-09-04T11:37:03.000Z I have taken the title of this post from a line in one of the poems in my next book, *2020,* which will be published by Fernwood Press in fall 2027\. The poem’s title is “Thinking, At The Beginning of the Pandemic Shut-down, About Rabbi Wehl’s Tenth Grade Mussar Schmoozes.” These are the first two stanzas: > “Do not believe the goyim when they smile > or offer you their open, outstretched hands. > That small-nosed, blond-and-blue-eyed shiksah > I know you want will never truly love > the Jew she’ll try but fail to suck from you; > and when the Nazis come again, and come > they will, it will be too late.” Reb Wehl > slapped his palm hard on the desk. “Don’t forget! > Kol yisroel arevim zeh lazeh > is the only reason klal yisroel survives.” > > In the town that taught me how to live like prey, > it was impossible to call him wrong. > I learned early which streets were safe to walk > and which would almost every time become— > “Fuck you, ya cheap fuckin’ kike! Pick ‘em up!”— > a gauntlet of fists and rocks, bottles, and pennies > that hit their target even when they missed. While mussar is not technically sermonizing in the top-down moralizing sense of sermons-from-the-pulpit—it might be better described as a kind of spiritual pep talk, something designed to inspire personal introspection—Rabbi Wehl’s schmoozes often felt like sermons. He criticized us constantly for not being good-enough Jews, and he consistently held what he believed was the inevitability of a Nazi resurgence in the United States over our heads. According to him, our failure to be good Jews would make it that much easier for the new, American Nazis to wipe us out. In his mind, communal solidarity was the only appropriate response to that inevitability. *Kol yisroel arevim zeh lazeh* (כל ישראל ערבים זה לזה) is an expression meaning, essentially, that all Jews are responsible for and accountable to one another; and *klal yisroel* (כלל ישראל) refers to the Jews as a collective. In Reb Wehl’s estimation, interfaith dating would irreversibly dilute that solidarity, as would indulging the fantasy that your non-Jewish friends and neighbors were anything other than Jew-haters at their core who would betray you the moment the resurgent Nazis forced them to make a choice. As far as I know, Reb Wehl was not a Zionist. It’s important, therefore, to understand that the word *yisroel* in both the expressions he used had nothing to do with the State of Israel. It is, rather, a usage that long predates 1948 and is drawn from the moment in Genesis 32 where God changes Jacob’s name to Israel. The yeshiva high school in which Reb Wehl was my teacher, however, where I was a student from eighth through eleventh grade, was fervently and unapologetically Zionist in orientation. The Zionism I was taught during those years, however—or, perhaps more accurately, what I was taught to call Zionism during those years—had more to do with *kol yisroel arevim zeh lazeh* than with what I have long since understood to be the Zionism-in-practice that has now found its ultimate expression in the genocidal violence the current Israeli government is committing against the Palestinians. I did not come from a religious family, but I wanted very much to live a religiously observant life. Nonetheless, while I found Judaism’s ancient roots in the part of the world where the State of Israel now exists to be deeply meaningful, the idea that I should claim that place as my ancestral homeland, that I belonged there more than I belonged here, left me cold. It wasn’t till I experienced both the all-too-often violent antisemitism that for a good portion of my teenage years became a fact of my daily life and the precise indifference-at-best with which Reb Wehl had predicted my non-Jewish friends would respond that I began, that it was nearly impossible not, to idealize and romanticize the existence of a place where I would never have that experience, where I would not be a minority, and therefore where I would never have to explain or defend myself simply for being Jewish. I took pride in and drew strength from the story I’d been told about Israel’s founding, that it rose against all odds from the ashes of the Holocaust and that it had fought successfully and (of course) as humanely as possible for its existence in a “neighborhood” that on a much larger scale was at least as hostile to its Jewish being as the town I lived in was to mine. I still didn’t see Israel as my homeland, but the necessity of its presence in the world as a safe haven for the Jews seemed to me irrefutable. It took a long time for me to recognize the surrender inherent in that position, that it meant I had essentially ceded the rest of the world to, as Reb Wehl would have put it with a sneer in his voice, “the goyim.” [Last month](https://www.richardjnewman.com/like-domestic-violence-antisemitism-has-also-been-a-thread-running-through-my-life/), I gave you a glimpse of how growing up in that town under those circumstances resulted in that sense of surrender. This month, I’m going to continue that story into my teen years, not because my experience is unique—I know that’s not the case—but because I am consistently surprised at how many people are shocked to find out that it took place not in some Eastern European city or in the United States, say, in the 1930s or 40s, but in the late 1970s, in a suburb close enough to New York City to be part of the city itself. I also want to tell you my story because what I experienced back then continues to shape, viscerally, how I understand and respond to antisemitism in general and its current politicization on both the left and the right in responses, Jewish and otherwise, to the wars Israel is prosecuting in the Middle East, in particular its genocidal campaign against the Palestinians. **§§§** When it comes to Jewish holidays, mainstream American (read secular Christian) culture is familiar with just four: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Pesach (Passover), which gets the recognition it does because of its proximity to Easter, and Chanukah, which gained its recognition because its dates often coincide with the gift-giving Christmas holiday season. Other holidays are acknowledged at most by the fact that in places like New York City, where a lot of Jews live, alternate side of the street parking is suspended—a governmental concession to the fact that driving is prohibited on those days, as are many of the same activities that are prohibited on Shabbat, like earning money or writing or using electricity. Despite their obscurity, however, these holidays are religiously and spiritually far more important than Chanukah. One of them is [Sukkot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukkot?ref=richardjnewman.com), which begins five days after Yom Kippur. Sukkot lasts for a week, but only the first and last two days are considered full holidays when work and other related activities are forbidden. As I said earlier, my family was not observant, but I wanted to be, so when these other holidays fell on a weekday during the school year, I would stay home so I could go to shul. When I was in elementary school, a note from my mother explaining my absence was sufficient to demonstrate that I hadn’t been playing hooky. In seventh grade, however, my junior high school’s truant office called my home on the first day of Sukkot to find out why I was absent. I could hear the surprise in the voice of the woman on the other end of the line when she realized that I was the one who’d picked up the phone. “Why aren’t you in school?” she asked, her belief that she’d caught me red-handed palpable in her voice. I explained to her that it was a Jewish holiday and that I’d just gotten home from synagogue. She called me a liar. “There is no such holiday,” she said. “There are Jewish people working here in the office right now.” When I suggested to her that maybe the people in her office had come to work because they were not observant, she said, “You think you’re clever, don’t you?” Then she asked if my mother was home. I don’t remember if she was or not, but I do remember hearing the woman on the phone say to whomever was close enough to hear her, “They’re all alike, the Jews, aren’t they?” In the end, I didn’t get in trouble for missing those two days of school, which probably means my mother somehow documented that I’d had her permission to stay home. Nonetheless, the incident has stayed with me for all these years because it was the first time I experienced not just the kind of bias my sixth grade music teacher exhibited, which I told you about [last month](https://www.richardjnewman.com/like-domestic-violence-antisemitism-has-also-been-a-thread-running-through-my-life/), but an institutional authority informed by a willful ignorance about and indifference to Judaism and Jewish culture, not to mention the possibility that I could have suffered real harm as a consequence. Largely because I switched after seventh grade from that school to the yeshiva where Rabbi Wehl was my teacher, that kind of institutional antisemitism receded almost completely from my life. A version of that truant officer’s indifference, however, did define the context in which I experienced every other incident of antisemitism that was directed at me. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Four by Four #58 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-58/ Last updated: 2026-08-28T10:00:33.000Z #### Contents --- ## Four Things To Read Usually, I include in “Four Things To Read” quotes from/summaries of/responses to essays—and sometimes books—that I think will be of interest to you. This month, though, it’s been difficult to keep up with that because of other, volunteer obligations I’ve taken on that turned out to be, as these things usually are, more time consuming than I had anticipated. I don’t begrudge the hours I’ve spent on this other project, since it is of crucial importance to me and my neighbors, but it has meant that I haven’t been able to give my own work the attention it deserves and August’s “Four Things To Read” has suffered as a result. August, however, is also the month of [The Sealey Challenge](https://www.thesealeychallenge.com/history?ref=richardjnewman.com), which was started in 2017 by the poet [Nicole Sealey](https://www.nicolesealey.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) and has been presided over by the University of Arizona’s [Poetry Center](https://poetry.arizona.edu/about/about-poetry-center?ref=richardjnewman.com) since 2023\. The idea is simple, though this is my own way of saying it. Set yourself the aspirational goal of reading one book of poetry a day and then use that goal as motivation to read as much poetry during the month as you possibly can. I sometimes do and sometimes don’t take part in the challenge, but I decided I would this year because, in a conversation with my friend David, we hit on the idea of using the month to read through as many of the “collected” volumes on my shelf as I could—though I expanded the category to include “selected” volumes as well. These are books that I want on my shelf because the poet has been important to me in one way or another but, as is the way of things, I have rarely managed to read through any of them. While I have not been able to read a book a day by each of these poets—this volunteer work has truly taken up that much space in my head—I did manage to get through three whole volumes: *The Collected Poems of Ai, Relations: Selected Poems 1950-1985,* by Philip Booth*,* and *Rave: Poems 1975-1999,* by Olga Broumas. Instead of my usual semi-deep dive into specifics, though, I am just going to tell you about my general impressions. **§§§** [*The Collected Poems of Ai*](https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393074901?ref=richardjnewman.com)*:* It’s hard to overstate how captivated I was by Ai’s early work when I discovered it in the mid to late 1980s or how important it was to me as I figured out my own poetics. I learned more from her than from anyone else about how to incorporate explicit trauma into a poem by embedding it in the voice of a narrator not only unafraid of making their own vulnerability visible, regardless of whether they were witness, victim/survivor, or perpetrator, but also self-aware enough to know exactly what they were doing or saying and why. From a craft point of view, she accomplished this by “catching” her speakers right in the middle of the poem’s dramatic situation and by a carefully honed use of syntax and verbs. Her later poems, though, struck me as largely self-indulgent. I thought she lost much of the tension that made the early poems work, that elevated the telling of the trauma into art. Instead of crystalized moments of someone in extremis, these poems, as I read them, were more about externalizing everything that was left implicit in the early work, often in the service of some historical or political agenda that I agreed with but that I think would have been more interesting as an essay or a more honed and traditional dramatic monologue. There were moments where it sounded like she was going for a kind of spoken word prosody—prose-rhythmed lines with obvious end rhymes, internal rhymes that functioned a little bit like punctuation—but they never achieved the tension of the earlier work or, at least in my ear and memory, of the best spoken word deliveries I’ve heard. This doesn’t mean there weren’t moments of real interest in those later poems, but overall they felt to me overwritten and self-indulgent. **§§§** [*Relations: Selected Poems 1950-1985*](https://archive.org/details/relationsselecte0000boot)*,* by Philip Booth: I’ve written [elsewhere](https://majusculelit.com/i-was-a-creative-writing-program-dropout/?ref=richardjnewman.com) about how important Booth was to me as a teacher, but I’d forgotten how effective his carefully chiseled lines were, especially in his earlier work. They didn’t merely work in counterpoint to his syntax in ways that created a very interesting music; they were genuinely, organically, part of how the poem created meaning. Over time, though—at least this was my feeling reading across three decades of his work—it became a habit, a go-to strategy to force poetry and poetic depth from syntax that would otherwise have been entirely unremarkable. Not in every poem, of course, there are plenty of successful poems in his later work as well, but the habit became, for me, noticeable as a habit. Booth was also adept at turning abstractions into philosophical or ethical propositions with real depth, something that not many poets are able to do with his facility. I had also forgotten how thoroughly rooted his poems are in place, Maine in particular, but also in what I will call here nautical culture. I was constantly having to look up words connected to boats and sailing, not to mention the names of plants and other aspects of the natural world that were totally alien to me. While that very much interfered with my emotional experience of the poems, seeing how he rooted his work in a place was also instructive. **§§§** [*Rave: Poems 1975-1999*](https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/rave-poems-1975-1998-by-olga-broumas/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Olga Broumas: Reading this book, I found much of Broumas’ work bewildering, though slightly less than when I bought [*Pastoral Jazz*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0914742701?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback&ref=richardjnewman.com) shortly after it first came out. There are poems in *Rave*, that are as powerful as anything I’ve ever read, especially *Caritas,* which is a gorgeous lesbian erotic love poem from which anyone who wants to write erotic love poetry, regardless of sexuality or gender, could learn a lot; and there are individual poems that take on the politics of the time in ways that resonate powerfully with the politics of today, making the work newly relevant. Much of the Broumas’ project, though, feels to me like an attempt to treat words more like musical notes, the line like a measure on a staff, and syntax as being more about phrasing in the musical compositional or performance sense than as language the purpose of which is to communicate meaning. Intellectually, I find that to be a truly interesting idea, one worth exploring, but reading the poems often left me cold even after I was able to puzzle out what I think Broumas was trying to explore. In fact, the poems often feel like transcriptions of a jazz-like improvisation in language. There are moments of real power that emerge in the same way that happens in jazz improvisation, but, in the end, I was not emotionally persuaded by the poems themselves. Nonetheless, I think her work is worth engaging with. There is a good deal more to her practice than I have been able to capture here. --- ## Four Things To See These images are from [The Art Institute of Chicago](https://www.artic.edu/?ref=richardjnewman.com) and all text is adapted from the Institute’s website and/or Wikipedia. ### Basket of Plums, 1769 - Anne Vallayer-Coster (French, 1744–1818) [Anne Vallayer-Coster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne%5FVallayer-Coster?ref=richardjnewman.com) was a French painter best known for still lifes. She achieved fame and recognition very early in her career, being admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1770, at the age of twenty-six. Marie Antoinette took a particular interest in her paintings. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/08/1971.47_web.jpg) **§§§** ### Still Life with Birds and Fruit, c. 1650 - Giovanna Garzoni (Italian, 1600–1670) [Giovanna Garzoni](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanna%5FGarzoni?ref=richardjnewman.com) was one of the few women artists to achieve prominence in Italy during the 1600s, due to her naturalistic still lifes, which combined scientific accuracy with sensitive artistry. Her paintings attracted attention from aristocratic patrons like the Medici family, who acquired her drawings to decorate their villas. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/08/1955.140_web.jpg) **§§§** ### Convolvulus and Metamorphosis of the Convolvulus Hawk Moth, c. 1670–90 - Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) [Maria Sibylla Merian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria%5FSibylla%5FMerian?ref=richardjnewman.com) was a German-Dutch entomologist, naturalist, and scientific illustrator whose work established that insects have a life cycle and do not appear by spontaneous generation. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/08/2019.9_web-1.jpg) **§§§** ### Working Woman with Blue Shawl - 1903\. Käthe Kollwitz (German, 1867–1945) Käthe Kollwitz favored printmaking because she saw it as a democratic medium, affordable and capable of reaching all social classes. Kollwitz was the first woman not only to be elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts but also to receive honorary professor status. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/08/1932.320_web.jpg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### Alice Coltrane - The Sun **§§§** ### Briel - The Silk Road Ensemble **§§§** ### Crown Crescent Moon - Bison Rouge **§§§** ### **Simon Hayes - Morai** --- ## Four Things About Me I was speaking to a colleague in the hallway near the mailroom in my department, when I got a call from my wife. “Where are you?” she wanted to know. “I’m in Bradley Hall,” I said. “Are you sure?” She sounded like she really didn’t believe me. “Yes,” I responded. “I’m standing here speaking with—“ and I said the name of my colleague. She asked me one or two more times if I was sure I was speaking to her from Bradley Hall, and when she was finally satisfied that I was, she told me that she’d just gotten a call from a doctor at a psychiatric ward in the Bronx. He told her that I’d had a psychotic break the night before and that I was now ready for her to pick me up. He didn’t believe her, she said, when she told him that the man he was talking about couldn’t be me since she’d seen me leave for work that morning with her own eyes. “What kind of a wife are you?” she said he asked her at one point, refusing to accept that my wife was not the wife of the man who’d been hospitalized. It turned out that a man named Richard Newman who was indeed having a psychotic break had been brought the previous night to the hospital near where I live. I’d been to the emergency room there a few times, so when the person doing the intake typed *Richard Newman* into the hospital’s computer, along with that other Richard Newman’s birthday, which happened to be the same as mine, everyone just assumed they were admitting me. (That other Richard Newman did not have ID on him and they were unable to get from him the kind of information that would have differentiated us.) It took about two weeks to straighten everything out, including the fact that my insurance company had authorized and been billed for psychiatric services I neither needed nor received. This was one of the strangest episodes in my life. Someone once suggested I ought to turn it into a short story or a novel, but my imagination doesn’t run in that direction. At some point, though, I would like to write more about it. **§§§** It’s not uncommon, of course, for students to develop crushes on their teachers. The first time I had that experience was during the 1984-85 academic year, when I was a graduate teaching assistant. A young woman sitting in the front row of my class kept repeatedly puckering her lips at me. I was so taken aback that the thought of being circumspect or even ignoring her never crossed my mind. I looked right at her and asked, “Are you blowing kisses at me?” She was so mortified, she never came back to class. The strangest experience I ever had along these lines, though, was some years later when a student who asked to see me told me she’d read some graffiti about me in the library that she thought I should know about. As soon as she sat down in my office, she showed me the page in her notebook on which she said she’d copied down what that student wrote. I wish I could remember the exact wording, but it was basically a woman’s expression of love, admiration, and desire for me. I didn’t know what else to say, so I thanked the student for bringing it to my attention and pointed out that, since I had no idea which student wrote it, or even if she was in one of my classes that semester, there was really nothing to say or do about it. The student took her notebook back and, without looking at me, asked if I would ever consider being with someone who wrote something like that. When I said no, she asked me why. I gave her the answers you would expect—she was my student; she was too young; and so on—but she kept pushing back until it became clear to me, and she finally admitted, that the profession of love had been hers and that she’d concocted the story about finding it in the library because she was afraid I wouldn’t even speak to her if she’d declared her love outright. Some people to whom I’ve told this story have said I should have told her the conversation was inappropriate and asked her to leave my office, and I did consider doing that, but the student was so clearly vulnerable, and her vulnerability so clearly had nothing to do with me personally, that I did not have the heart to shut her down so coldly. As we continued talking, she told me her story. Her father had left her and her mother in the country she was from ostensibly to establish himself so he could eventually bring them here, and this was why she’d decided to come to the United States for college. When she got here, though, she discovered that her father had, without divorcing her mother, married another woman and had children with her. He was, in other words, a bigamist. To make matters worse, he expected her to treat his second wife as if she were her mother, including calling her “Mom.” As you can imagine, my student, who was not more than nineteen- or twenty-years-old, was heartbroken, angry, and confused. “I hate men,” she told me several times as we talked, until she eventually brought the conversation back around to her profession of love for me and her conviction that we could somehow “make it work.” Age was just a number, she said; she would find a way to get around her father’s curfew when we wanted to go out; and on and on, until I finally said to her, “You told me you hate men, right?” She nodded her head. I looked her straight in the eye. “I’m a man, remember?” I watched the realization dawn in her eyes. “That,” she smiled a little sadly, but also not without humor, “would be a problem.” Eventually, she went back to her country. We corresponded every once in a while and I think I still have somewhere the pictures she sent me of the man she married and their children. This wasn’t the last time a student developed a crush on me, but it was a memorable one. **§§§** In 1972, after the signing of the [Paris Peace Accords](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris%5FPeace%5FAccords?ref=richardjnewman.com) and the end of the Vietnam War, Congress ended the draft by allowing the president’s authority to induct men into the army under the [Selective Service Act of 1948](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%5FSelective%5FService%5FAct?ref=richardjnewman.com) to expire. I was ten years old. In 1980, the year I turned eighteen, in response to the [Soviet invasion of Afghanistan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan%5FWar?ref=richardjnewman.com), President Jimmy Carter reinstated Selective Service registration by signing [Presidential Proclamation 4771](https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/proclamations/04771.html?ref=richardjnewman.com). He wanted to make sure there would be a sufficiently large pool of available young men in case the United States had to respond to that invasion with a military action of its own. I became, in other words, old enough to vote and old enough to be sent to war in the same year. I’ve been thinking about this because I recently found a scan I made about ten years ago of the “Registration Change Acknowledgment” that the Selective Service System sent me in July of 1981\. Someone had told me—I don’t remember who—that if I didn’t fill in my social security number on the original form the system had sent me, they would not be able to find me in the event of a draft. That I listened to this person shows both how naïve I was—the government had my address after all—and how desperate I was not to register. The thought that, for reasons having very little to do with me, my government might decide not just to force me to learn how to kill other human beings, but actually to do that killing, made me sick. I remember talking to my grandfather about maybe finding some way not to register. “You are,” he said, “an American, and you are a man, but most importantly you are my grandson. Of course you will register. Do not embarrass this family by doing otherwise.” I did not know where else to turn for support, and the form asking me to provide the information threatened legal action and a possible prison sentence if I didn’t give them my social security number, so I filled the form out and sent it in. I felt nauseous walking to the post office because I knew that once I dropped that form into the mailbox there was no going back. I would be cannon fodder, and the only question was whether or not my government would choose to put me in the line of fire. I am more than thankful, of course, that neither Jimmy Carter nor any other president during the years I would have been eligible found it necessary to reinstate the draft, even as they authorized military actions for which a draft might otherwise have been appropriate. **§§§** When my wife and I got married, we designed our own wedding ceremony, combining elements of Persian and Jewish culture in a way that reflected who we were individually and how we thought at the time about what it meant to bring our identities together in marriage. In place of traditional wedding vows, we each read a poem to the other. I chose a poem by Hafez from [*Hafez: Dance of Life*](https://www.abebooks.com/9780934211130/Hafez-Dance-Life-Hafiz-0934211132/plp?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* which I’d bought some years earlier. I liked the content of the poem, but not the translation—or, to be more accurate, I did not think either the prose translation by Wilberforce Clarke or the verse translation by Michael Boylan fit the occasion of a wedding, and so I made my own version, as they say, “after Hafez.” It is definitely not a translation. The notes to the poem say it is written on Hafez’ tomb. This is my version. I think it holds up pretty well after all these years: > Call me, and I will come. Heaven's bird, > from between the bars > of earth's closed cage, > I will come. Accept me as your own, > and my place in this world, and the place > held for me in the next, are forfeit, > for I will come. > > Like rain for the earth, > bless me. Before the wind puts my dust > beyond the reach of your hand, touch me, > and I will come. > > When I am dead, > bring song > and a bottle of good wine > to my tomb, stand > to your full height, a cypress > among ferns, and let the breeze > move you. To the fragrance > of your presence, dancing, > I will rise, clapping > I will come to you > with the rhythm of joy. > > On the night of my old age, embrace me, > and in the morning, I will rise young. > > On the day that I die, visit > for the space of one breath, > and, like Hafez, once more desiring > this life and the world, > I will rise. I will come. --- ****A gentle reminder:** Four By Four is part of the free tier of **It All Connects.* If you are not currently a paid subscriber and would like to subscribe, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signup/65988db373946800080fe780/yearly). If you would like to make a one-time contribution to support my work on **It All Connects*, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/support). --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in* [*my work*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/) *or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* ### The Sealey Challenge Day 24 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-sealey-challenge-day-24/ Last updated: 2026-08-24T11:18:07.000Z ## The Sealey Challenge Day 24 > I like it when my friend has lovers, their happy moans, > unrestrained, fill the house with the glee of her prowess. —*from* “For Every Heart,”in *Perpetua,* by Olga Broumas #thesealeychallenge ### The Sealey Challenge Day 23 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-sealey-challenge-day-23/ Last updated: 2026-08-23T13:03:58.000Z ## The Sealey Challenge Day 23 > ...and the globe > might shake us off its flank like quarry dust > and start again with something less > free, less > wrecked by greed but it suffers us > on its blue cetacean patience > like festered barnacles. —*from* “The Massacre,”in *Perpetua,* by Olga Broumas #thesealeychallenge ### Rereading Alicia Ostriker’s Stealing The Language URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/rereading-alicia-ostrikers-stealing-the-language/ Last updated: 2026-08-22T03:13:58.000Z I stopped teaching a little over a year ago, in May 2025, but my retirement did not become official—and, to be honest, I did not truly *feel* retired—until that September, when the fact of not having to go back to campus for the start of the new academic year became reality. This September first, in other words, just a couple of weeks away, my retirement will be exactly one year old, which doesn’t sound like much of a milestone, but I’ve been thinking a lot as the day approaches about what has changed during the past twelve months and how those changes will shape this next stage of my life. One thing I’ve noticed is how much more integrated I feel as a writer, by which I mean that I have been making connections between and among ideas that have been circling my brain for a very long time. I’m excited by this, and I’d like this month to tell you about one example. When I read Alicia Ostriker’s [*Stealing the Language*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing%5Fthe%5FLanguage:%5FThe%5FEmergence%5Fof%5FWomen%27s%5FPoetry%5Fin%5FAmerica?ref=richardjnewman.com) in the late 1980s—I was not yet thirty years old—I was just beginning to figure out who I was as a poet, who I was as a survivor of childhood sexual violence, and what the relationship between those two identities might mean for the kind of writing I wanted to do. I’ve written [elsewhere](https://solsticelitmag.org/content/the-first-time-i-told-someone/?ref=richardjnewman.com) about how I first recognized myself as a survivor through the lens of the feminist critique of men’s sexual violence against women, and also about the silence in which experiences like mine were shrouded. In that context, *Stealing The Language* was a revelation. I could not have articulated it this way back then, but I felt straitjacketed by much of the male poetic tradition in which I was being educated and in which I understood I would be expected to write, especially when it came to writing about the body, about my body in particular, and about what the men who violated me did to me. I’m not going to try to cite specific examples, since I have no clear memory of which male poets I was reading, but even in the erotic poems I read by men, even when those poems were explicit in their eroticism, I sensed a line the poets would not allow themselves to cross in writing about what it felt like to inhabit the vulnerabilities, sexual and otherwise, of a male body. I did not think of this as willful dissimulation, but I remember the shock of discovering just how heteronormative the range of my reading was when I picked up [*The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse*](https://archive.org/details/penguinbookofhom0000unse/mode/2up)*,* and I remember as well feeling envious that, being straight, I did not have access within myself to what seemed to me at the time the effortlessness with which those poets brought their bodies into their poems. I wanted to make my language do that. To the degree I have succeeded, if I have succeeded at all, it is because of what I learned from reading *Stealing The Language.* _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### The Sealey Challenge Day 20 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-sealey-challenge-day-20/ Last updated: 2026-08-20T21:09:31.000Z ## The Sealey Challenge Day 20 > By day, I ask of those who come to me for answers, > what would you say, asked by a poet > whose tongue and nails have been removed, whose nipples > are cratered with ash, to account for your freedom? —*from* “Evensong,” *i*n *Perpetua,* by Olga Broumas #thesealeychallenge ### The Sealey Challenge Day 18 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-sealey-challenge-day-18/ Last updated: 2026-08-19T01:36:21.000Z ## The Sealey Challenge Day 18 > I cut it off myself > both times I married, veiled > the attentive temples, the long spine. > To spite, to tease, to be and not be his > look-alike, his twin. I hid the woman in his heart > so long I had forgotten. Face > I’m forever about to know. —*from* “Body,” *i*n *Pastoral Jazz,* Olga Broumas’ third book #thesealeychallenge ### The Sealey Challenge Day 17 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-sealey-challenge-day-17/ Last updated: 2026-08-18T02:15:47.000Z ## The Sealey Challenge Day 17 > To love > the body to love its work > to love the hand that praises both to praise > the body and to love the soul > that dreams and wakes us back alive > against the slothful odds... —*from* “Sweeping the Garden,”from *Soie Sauvage,* Olga Broumas’ second book #thesealeychallenge ### The Sealey Challenge Day 16 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-sealey-challenge-day-16/ Last updated: 2026-08-17T01:21:45.000Z ## The Sealey Challenge Day 16 > In the gazebo-like café, you gave > me food from your plate, alert > to my blood-sweet hungers > double-edged > in the glare of the sun’s > and our own > twin heat. “Amazon Twins,” *from Beginning With O,* Olga Broumas’ first book #thesealeychallenge ### The Sealey Challenge Day 15 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-sealey-challenge-day-15/ Last updated: 2026-08-16T16:35:40.000Z ## The Sealey Challenge Day 15 > Now I know less, > and better. I’ve grown less lean, > less easily pleased: I’m tenderer, > harder, angry at all I’ve > not become; I’m more worn, > more generous, more strengely > myself. And more horny. “Snapshot,” *from Selected New Poems* #thesealeychallenge ### Learning To Love The Questions: To Write Is To Sit In Confrontation With Yourself URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/to-write-is-to-sit-in-confrontation-with-yourself/ Last updated: 2026-09-05T09:34:25.000Z For her third question, the Iranian poet quoted something I wrote in our correspondence that was not part of my answer to either of her two previous questions: > What I’ve been thinking is that no one I know who is not an academic fully understands the degree to which grading essays is emotional labor. Even among those who are academics, I don’t know many who fully recognize that this emotional labor \[meaning the teaching of writing\] is different from the emotional labor involved in teaching a content. This was the question she asked: > Can you explain more about what you mean by “emotional labor” exactly? And considering that this is your last year of teaching and you will be retiring, can you say what impact teaching has had on your literary career? One of the great Iranian poets, Ismail Khoei, admitted after being banned from teaching that the deprivation of contact with students damaged his creative mind. To write, I responded, is to sit in confrontation with yourself. It doesn’t matter what you’re writing—a letter to a friend, a poem, a scholarly article—what you’re trying to do is wrestle language into a coherent and accessible expression of what you have to say, which is an intellectual, emotional, and psychological process. Wrestling with yourself like that, if you’re honest about it, is to court what can be a very frightening vulnerability, because it means by definition having the audacity to lay claim to a readership’s attention—to believe, in other words, that your work matters enough that it is worth someone else’s time and, if you’re writing for publication, money. Every element of the writer’s craft that I can think of is a tool for giving your language a form that you hope will earn that attention. To teach writing, then, is to mentor students through this encounter with themselves; it is to enter with them into their own vulnerability, their own uncertainty about whether what they have to say matters—and the younger the student, the greater and potentially more threatening that uncertainty is likely to be. Part of your goal as a writing teacher, perhaps your most important goal—and if this isn’t your goal, perhaps you shouldn’t be teaching writing—is to help your students see that what they have to say does matter and that it is worth learning how to say it in a way that others will take seriously. To hold that space for students, whether in the classroom or in the process of grading their papers, is emotional work that rarely gets recognized as such. Holding that kind of space is not unique to the teaching of writing—all good teachers hold space for their students’ vulnerabilities in one way or another—but I am trying to describe what I meant when I said that the emotional labor of teaching writing is different from that involved in teaching content. As to your question about the impact that teaching has had on my literary career, I’m not sure Mr. Khoei’s experience is the best point of comparison. I do not know the specifics of his story, but I assume that he was banned from teaching because the politics he expressed in his writing and/or that he brought into the classroom clashed in some subversive way with the government that was in power at the time. He also lived the last part of his life in exile. Being cut off from students, in other words, was one component of a much larger dynamic of forcible silencing. I have no idea—I have no prior experience, no possible frame of reference, with which to gauge—how it would impact my creative life if my government silenced me in a similar way. That said, though, teaching was not something that fed my creative endeavors in the way Mr. Khoei’s statement implies that it fed his. This is not a criticism of or complaint about my students or my job. I have enjoyed my time in the classroom immensely and I have found tremendous fulfillment in the teaching I have done, but the reality is that most of what I have taught over the years has had little or nothing to do with what I write, and so the two endeavors have been largely separate in my imagination. The space between them has not been impermeable, but substantive crossover has, for me, been very rare. ### The Sealey Challenge Day 14 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-sealey-challenge-day-14/ Last updated: 2026-08-14T12:30:52.000Z ## The Sealey Challenge Day 14 > Beyond naming names, > nothing can help. > I learn my limits, > I write what I can: > I didn’t become > a poet for nothing. *from Before Sleep,* Philip Booth’s sixth book. #thesealeychallenge ### The Sealey Challenge Day 12 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-sealey-challenge-day-12/ Last updated: 2026-08-13T09:49:02.000Z ## The Sealey Challenge Day 12 > It is being offshore: nothing that’s not horizon. > It is, beyond beacons, sailing alone. > Nothing, beyond one’s compass, to point or warn. *from* “It Is Being,” in A*vailable Light,* Booth’s fifth book. #thesealeychallenge ### The Sealey Challenge Day 11 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-sealey-challenge-day-11/ Last updated: 2026-08-12T03:13:39.000Z ## The Sealey Challenge Day 11 > ...we grope, > for clothes and coffee, our selves > woken by waking beside > > each other: who climb back down > from separate sleep > and are, by morning, married. *from* “Native to Valleys,” in *Margins,* Booth’s fourth book. #thesealeychallenge ### The Sealey Challenge Day 10 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-sealey-challenge-day-10/ Last updated: 2026-08-11T10:25:46.000Z ## The Sealey Challenge Day 10 > ...the poem, > the poem that must > map the bottom > of here, would be > some sort of base > to start out from. *from* “Heart of Darkness,” in *Weathers and Edges,* Booth’s third book. #thesealeychallenge ### The Sealey Challenge Day 9 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-sealey-challenge-day-9/ Last updated: 2026-08-10T02:11:27.000Z ## The Sealey Challenge Day 9 > I love you by the terms/I make to give you. *from* “Adam,” in L*etter from a Distant Land,* Booth’s first book. #thesealeychallenge ### The Sealey Challenge Day 8 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-sealey-challenge-day-8/ Last updated: 2026-08-09T02:33:09.000Z ## The Sealey Challenge Day 8 > She never knew what to expect from her furtive trysts with death > And much to her amazement, > She realized that had made her husk of a life worth living. *from* “The Cancer Chronicles,” in *No Surrender,* Ai’s eighth book. #thesealeychallenge ### The Sealey Challenge Day 7 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-sealey-challenge-day-7/ Last updated: 2026-08-08T02:17:32.000Z ## The Sealey Challenge Day 7 > A woman is not a horse you can trade, sell or shoot > when you get tired of her. > I realize now that it’s too late > a man can learn from his mistakes. > A few good women is all it takes. *from* “The Saga of Charlie Smith,” in *Dread,* Ai’s seventh book. #thesealeychallenge ### Like Domestic Violence, Antisemitism Has Also Been A Thread Running Through My Life URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/like-domestic-violence-antisemitism-has-also-been-a-thread-running-through-my-life/ Last updated: 2026-08-08T10:57:44.000Z “Whatsamatta, kike?! You’re Jewish dick’s not big enough? Hit me ya’ fucking Hebrew pussy!” There were four of them and one of me, and the one screaming in my face was swinging a chain he would have loved to hit me with, but I had a hunch they wouldn’t lay a hand on me unless they could say that I had provoked them. I was neither foolish nor angry enough to take them all on at once, though, so I stood with my back flat against the wall of the brick building across from the elementary school I went to from third through sixth grade and made sure my hands stayed loose and open at my sides. “We’re building an oven in my basement,” the ringleader smiled. (I remember his name. I remember all their names, though I won’t name them here.) Then he folded the chain into the pocket of his coat. “When it’s finished, remember, we know where you live,” he stage-whisper-hissed at me with one last thrust of his face up towards mine—he was a lot shorter than I was—and then he and companions walked off in the opposite direction from where I lived. Despite the fact that what I really wanted to do was run as fast as I could, I forced myself to walk as well. I tried not to keep looking over my shoulder, but I couldn’t help myself. This was not the first time they’d cornered me like that and I suspected they would have no qualms about attacking me from behind if something changed their minds about letting me go. The year was 1977\. I was fifteen years old. **§§§** Before third grade, I didn’t know what antisemitism was. That year, I was the new kid in the neighborhood, and, as kids do, a classmate asked me one day in the schoolyard during recess what my religion was. I told him. I don’t remember what if anything he said in return, but the next day, as the boys gathered for a pickup game of dodgeball, he stopped me from joining in. “You can’t play,” he said. “My father told me I’m not allowed to play with Jews.” I don’t know if the next thing I remember actually took place after he said that, but it follows in my memory as if his words had been a signal to the rest of the boys to push me—and I know I was pushed—into the center of the ritual circle of boyhood schoolyard violence. John, the boy who was known as the toughest kid in the class, was waiting there to fight me. I don’t recall if he and I said anything to each other, but I know the other boys started urging him on, telling him to punch me in my Jewish nose, and I know I tried to leave the circle and that the other boys shoved me back towards the middle. I can’t tell you who swung first, or if he landed a punch before I did, but since I knew that the only way out of the circle was either to allow myself to be hit or to hit him before he hit me, I chose the latter. I can still hear the crack that rang out the moment my fist collided with his jaw, and I can still see the blood that began to flow down his chin. We ran, all of us, but I have no clear memory of what happened next, except that I was relieved when I found out I hadn’t actually damaged him, that the blood was from a scab I’d broken on the side of his face. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### The Sealey Challenge Day 6 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-sealey-challenge-day-6/ Last updated: 2026-08-07T02:12:49.000Z ## The Sealey Challenge Day 6 > I don’t want the truth, > I want the lies, > so look this way, > say something nasty. > Don’t be shy. *from* “The Paparazzi,” in *Vice,* Ai’s sixth book. #thesealeychallenge ### The Sealey Challenge Day 5 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-sealey-challenge-day-5/ Last updated: 2026-08-06T10:25:48.000Z ## The Sealey Challenge Day 5 > When the police come, > I’m sitting at the table, > the cup of coffee > that I am unable to drink > as cold as you body. > I shot him, I say, he beat me. > I do not tell them how the emancipation from pain > leaves nothing in its place. *from* “Finished,” in G*reed,* Ai’s fifth book. #thesealeychallenge ### The Sealey Challenge Day 4 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-sealey-challenge-day-4/ Last updated: 2026-08-05T00:38:43.000Z ## The Sealey Challenge Day 4 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/08/IMG_0938-2.jpg) #### from “Capture” in **Fate,* Ai's fourth book “You tricked me,” he gasped as he poured himself into my glass and I drank him like **grappa* made from grapes I'd picked with my own hands. #thesealeychallenge ### The Sealey Challenge Day 3 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-sealey-challenge-day-3/ Last updated: 2026-08-03T23:50:59.000Z ## The Sealey Challenge Day 3 > Manhood, a dream, an illusion, I think, > as I lay down the photograph > and stand still in the anemic glow > of the darkroom lights, > my body giving off the formaldehyde smell > of the unknown. *from* “The Journalist,” in *Sin,* Ai’s third book. #thesealeychallenge ### The Sealey Challenge Day 2 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-sealey-challenge-day-2/ Last updated: 2026-08-02T19:15:50.000Z > God. The boot heel an inch above your head is mine. > God, say your prayers. —from [*Killing Floor*](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Killing%5FFloor/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* Ai’s second book ### The Sealey Challenge Day 1 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-sealey-challenge-day-1/ Last updated: 2026-08-01T20:50:48.000Z For this year’s Sealey challenge, I'm reading the collected volumes on my shelf, starting with Ai’s. I first learned from her about immersing yourself fully in a poem’s voice. Her first book was *Cruelty. #sealeychallenge* ### Four by Four #57 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-57/ Last updated: 2026-07-25T12:34:04.000Z #### Contents --- ## Four Things To Read [*Dividing Rivers*](https://finishinglinepress.com/product/dividing-rivers-by-ivy-schweitzer/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Ivy Schweitzer: > When I vow *never to watch the play again* > where loving to death is the only resistance,\* > they turn their backs, > mount their seats and > ride off—together. The play in question in this poem, “Death in Stratford,” is Shakespeare’s *Othello,* which I haven’t read in many, many years. The poem’s occasion is a meeting between Schweitzer’s speaker and the actors who play Othello and Desdemona in a production that the speaker just saw. The speaker tells us she’d forgotten that Othello actually kills Desdemona twice, once by smothering, when he “swear\[s\] he will love her/‘after,” and the second time by strangling her “with her own sheets,/forgiveness staining her lips.” When the speaker asks the actors how they “act it over and over”—Schweitzer relies on the verb “croak” to render how the question is asked, allowing us to decide precisely what emotion is behind it—the woman who plays Desdemona, whom we know is white because we know the play and not because the poem mentions race at all, explains that they get their motivation from the need to make sure that the audience “get\[s\] it:” > “\[T\]hey are both victims of white patriarchy > but resist it > by loving, dying, Othello killing her and them himself out of a world > they cannot survive in—“ That statement elicits the vow I quoted above which also how the poem ends, but the tension between what the vow implies—that the speaker is committing herself to a search for a form of resistance rooted in a life-affirming love—and the way in which the actors turn their backs on that implication is in many ways the tension that animates *Dividing Rivers* as a whole. The book begins with poems that confront the antisemitism Schweitzer has experienced, allowing that confrontation to allude to the history of Jewish oppression, and then moves into poems that explore the relationship between Jewishness and the whiteness into which Jews who can pass as white have been allowed. The poems that dominate in the third of the book’s three sections explore Schweitzer’s not-always-successful but always contingent attempts to move back and forth across the “dividing river” that gives the book its title. That crossing, the willingness to attempt it, to take responsibility for the attempt, and to be held accountable for it is where this book locates its moral center, the life-affirming resistance I wrote about above. (In the event you are interested, I wrote an epistolary essay about racism and antisemitism ten years ago called “The Lines That Antisemitism and Racism Draw.” It was published by [Unlikely Stories](https://unlikelystories.org/u5/content/the-lines-that-antisemitism-and-racism-draw?ref=richardjnewman.com).) **§§§** [We Liked Remote Work. Then We Looked at the Data](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/remote-work-depression.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.uVA.WeMj.klTUZcw9bce2&smid=nytcore-ios-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Emma Harrington and Natalia Emanuel: > Our estimates,[published in Science](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec7671?ref=richardjnewman.com) this month with our collaborator Amanda Pallais, indicate that remote work explains a third of the deterioration in mental health between 2011 and 2024\. Our research doesn’t suggest that work can occur only in the office. But it does mean that employees and companies should make a greater effort to prioritize face-to-face time with colleagues. I remember when my campus pivoted during the pandemic not just to online instruction, but to online everything. The Zoom screen felt at first like a lifeline out of the shutdown-imposed isolation. Eventually, though, the students for whom Zoom was not working began to make their voices heard. Sometimes the reasons were practical and logistical, having more to do with socioeconomics than anything else: inadequate technology, living arrangements that made it impossible for them to have the time and space to do schoolwork, the need to take on as much work as possible to make up for lost family income. Sometimes, though, they had to with the ways in which Zoom was an inadequate way of delivering the services students needed. This was especially true for students whose learning disability made working through a screen difficult if not impossible. I remember one student going on a rant in which she accused me, the school, the school’s center for student with disabilities, and anyone else she could think to name of being both ableist and racist, since she was not going to be able to pass her classes without the services she was legally entitled to and that none of us were providing her because Zoom made it impossible. (This may not longer be the case, but it was back then.) When she finished speaking, she logged off and, though I did try to contact her by email, I never heard from her again. It was heartbreaking to listen to her and guilt-inducing, even though there was no reason for me personally to feel guilty. It’s a bit of a leap from that story to the statistic about remote work and mental health that I quoted above, but that’s the leap I made, though in the opposite direction, when I read this essay. Working remotely takes things from us. I think it’s important to phrase it that way, as opposed to saying we lose things when we work remotely, because it’s not as if workers are the ones truly in control of what remote work means. After all, remote work opens up possibilities of and justifications for increased worker surveillance that we would resist in an office, and the pressures and anxieties imposed by that kind of surveillance, on top the isolation imposed by working from homee, can’t be good for anyone. **§§§** [*Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories*](https://www.versobooks.com/products/3345-men-in-the-sun?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Ghassan Kanafani, translated by Hilary Kilpatrick: > “No, my friend, I won’t come to Sacramento, and I’ve no regrets. No, and nor will I finish what we began together in childhood. This obscure feeling that you had as you left Gaza, this small feeling must grow into a giant deep within you. It must expand you must seek it in order to find yourself, here among the ugly debris of defeat. > > I won’t come to you. But you, return to us! Come back, to learn from Nadia’s leg, amputated from the top of the thigh, what life is and what existence is worth. This quote is from the epistolary story called “Letter from Gaza,” which [Kanafani](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghassan%5FKanafani?ref=richardjnewman.com) wrote in 1956\. The letter-writer is a Palestinian man who’d planned for most of this young life, along with the friend to whom the letter is addressed, to escape Palestine and the Israeli occupation and live the life of luxury and freedom he imagined would be his in the United States. He changes his mind when he visits his niece Nadia who “lost her leg when she threw herself on top of her little brother and sisters to protect them from the bombs and flames” of an Israeli attack. What rescues that ending from sentimentality is the writer’s honest assessment of the kind of self-hatred that defeat can inculcate in a person—without once naming it as self-hatred. [Kanafani](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghassan%5FKanafani?ref=richardjnewman.com), one of the most important writers of his generation, has been translated into more than seventeen languages. He was also the spokesperson for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He was [assassinated](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghassan%5FKanafani?ref=richardjnewman.com#Assassination) in Beirut by Mossad in July 1972\. His niece, who was in the car with him, was also killed. As art, the stories in this collection, written between 1956 and 1969, are important in their own right; as art that emerges from the history of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, they ought to be required reading. **§§§** [Listening to Cassandra: Misogyny, Classical and Modern](https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/listening-to-cassandra-misogyny-classical-and-modern/?ref=meditations-in-an-emergency-newsletter), by Rebecca Solnit: > Sometimes it feels that there is nowhere I can turn without running into violence against women. This essay demonstrates the truth of that statement with devastating clarity, starting with the arrest of the Tate brothers and weaving in current events, classicist Mary Beard’s essay “[The Public Voice of Women](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n06/mary-beard/the-public-voice-of-women?ref=richardjnewman.com)” (which I now have to read), Jean Rhys’ [*Wide Sargasso Sea*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide%5FSargasso%5FSea?ref=richardjnewman.com) (which I read decades ago and is probably worth rereading), gender and translation practices, Graham Platner, and more. The essay defies easy summary. You should just go and read it. --- ## Four Things To See These images are from [The Art Institute of Chicago](https://www.artic.edu/?ref=richardjnewman.com) and all text is adapted from the Institute’s website. ### Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons) - 1913, by Vasily Kandinsky In his 1912 book *Concerning the Spiritual in Art,* [Vasily Kandinsky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassily%5FKandinsky?ref=richardjnewman.com) made an analogy between music and painting as two means of abstraction, a radical mode of artmaking that freed color and line from their traditionally representational functions. Between 1910 and 1914 he produced “improvisations,” works he described as unconscious, spontaneous expressions. Kandinsky commented on Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons) in a letter to Arthur Jerome Eddy, a friend and collector from Chicago: “The cannons … could probably be explained by the constant war talk going on through the year \[but\] the true contents are what the spectator experiences while under the effect of the forms and color combinations of the picture.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/07/1931.511---Improvisation-No.-30--Cannons-.jpg) **§§§** ### Judith - circa 1540, by Jan Sanders van Hemessen [Jan Sanders van Hemessen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan%5FSanders%5Fvan%5FHemessen?ref=richardjnewman.com) portrayed the Jewish heroine Judith as a muscular nude to be both admired and feared. When the Assyrian army threatened Judith’s people, the handsome widow saved them from slaughter by infiltrating the tent of the enemy general, Holofernes, to win his confidence and then behead him. Van Hemessen’s life-size interpretation reflects contemporary male ambivalence toward female agency. It celebrates Judith’s physical and moral strength but also foregrounds the sexuality that enabled her triumph, reproducing for viewers the aggressive beauty that caused her adversary’s demise. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/07/1956.1109---Judith-1.jpg) **§§§** ### **A**utumn Maples with Poem Slips - circa 1675, Tosa Mitsuoki In the seventeenth century Japanese aristocrats often composed and recited classical poetry while viewing foliage at appointed times of the year. During festivities, poems would be carefully written on patterned slips of paper (tanzaku) and tied to the branches of trees. In this screen, the premier court painter [Tosa Mitsuoki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tosa%5FMitsuoki?ref=richardjnewman.com) described the inevitable transience of beauty by imagining the melancholy hours after the departure of the reveling courtiers, who had created poems with quotations of appropriate seasonal poetry from twelfth- and thirteenth-century anthologies inscribed on the narrow strips. The slips flutter in the gentle breeze, fastened to a maple bursting with red leaves in autumn. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/07/1977.157---Autumn-Maples-with-Poem-Slips.jpg) **§§§** ### Movement - 1913, Marsden Hartley Unlike many other American artists, [Marsden Hartley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsden%5FHartley?ref=richardjnewman.com) was more drawn to German Expressionism than to French modernism, and executed this painting in Berlin. Made on the eve of World War I, Movement possesses a turbulent energy that sparks associations with both the vibrancy of modern Berlin and movements of music. Like the Russian Expressionist painter Vasily Kandinsky, Hartley sought to make his work more like music, which he admired for its nonnarrative nature and its potential to be purely spiritual or separate from material reality. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/07/1949.544---Movement.jpg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### Sleep Token - Caramel **§§§** ### a-ha - Take On Me **§§§** ### Bailaor (Seguiriya Cabal) - Dave Holland **§§§** ### **Hwang Byung Ki - The Silk Road** --- ## Four Things About Me It’s been a very hectic, busy month for me, and I have not had the time to write “things about me” the way I usually do. So, for July, I share with you four photographs taken by me, with brief commentary. ### *Rosa* 'Sexy Rexy' I took this picture last month somewhere in my neighborhood. There are a lot of really lovely gardens in Jackson Heights. I wish I could get into the habit of noting on the block and garden in which I find the ones I take pictures of. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/07/IMG_0694.jpeg) **§§§** ### **My Latest Poetry Project** Two or so years ago, I began to write one poem in each of the traditional forms Miller Williams collected in this encyclopedia, which, as you can tell from the condition of the book, I’ve had on my shelf since the 1990s, when I bought it new. I finished this project, which I called “Finger Exercises,” earlier this month when I completed a poem using Anglo-Saxon meter, the 74th traditional form in the book. I chose that title because I thought of writing the poems as akin to the scales musicians might play to warm up before a performance, or that students need to practice in the process of learning their instrument. I don’t know what I will do with these poems yet—I tried to follow each form as strictly as possible—but it was a fun and in some ways liberating experience to write them for no other purpose than to see what I could learn from writing them. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/07/IMG_0787.jpeg) **§§§** ### A Juvenile European Starling (*Sturnus vulgaris*) I would have called this a kind of sparrow, but Google tells me it’s a juvenile European starling. My wife and I were walking through Central Park and it hopped up to where we were standing and just stood there like this, as if it were “ready for its closeup.” ### ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/07/IMG_0673.jpeg) **§§§** ### **The Genesee Falls** Last year, my wife, my son, and I took a trip to Letchworth State Park. This is a picture I took of one of the waterfalls that I then put through a bunch of filters until, at least to me, it looked like a painting I kind of wish I could have painted. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/07/IMG_0321.jpeg) ****A gentle reminder:** Four By Four is part of the free tier of **It All Connects.* If you are not currently a paid subscriber and would like to subscribe, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signup/65988db373946800080fe780/yearly). If you would like to make a one-time contribution to support my work on **It All Connects*, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/support). --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in* [*my work*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/) *or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* ### On My Desk Now: I Still Miss The Friend I Wrote This Poem For URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/i-still-miss-the-friend-i-wrote-this-poem-for/ Last updated: 2026-07-25T14:41:35.000Z I spent a couple of days at my mother’s house earlier this month. She has on the shelf in her office some of my very first publications, among them volume VIII, issue 1 of *The Piedmont Literary Review* from 1983\. In it is an untitled poem of mine with an epigraph written by a woman named Adrienne, whom I thought of back then as my best friend: > The refreshing, stimulating happenings of today > Are the bittersweet memories of tomorrow > But somehow, knowing that we shared them, > Takes away the pain that they will never come again. Adrienne composed those lines for her page in *Horizons,* our 11th grade year book. (In the yeshiva high school we went to, we graduated a year early.) On the inside cover, as part of her graduation message to me, she wrote this: > That’s the key to it all—you know what I mean and vice versa…We almost have to say nothing and know what the other is thinking…We can talk, talk of real things that happen, openly, and of the things that may never happen except in our imaginations… _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Learning To Love The Questions: What Would Literature Be Missing Without You? URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/what-would-literature-be-missing-without-you/ Last updated: 2026-09-05T09:34:04.000Z Last month, in a post called [The Source of War](https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-source-of-war/), I shared with you the second question asked by the Iranian poet who was interviewing me last year. This month, I want to share with you the first question she asked, which I will confess threw me for quite a loop when I read it: *What would literature be missing without you, and what would you be missing without literature?* This was my answer: The second part of your question is much easier to answer than the first because it is not an exaggeration to say that literature saved my life, though whether I mean that literally or metaphorically is not always clear to me. I was both victim of and witness to an awful lot of violence during my childhood. I don’t remember ever being truly suicidal, but I know that my experience, especially the sexual violence that I survived, left me feeling empty and ashamed, filled with self-loathing and not sure that there was a worthwhile purpose to my living. Religion filled that void for a while. When I was a teenager, I even thought I might one day study for the rabbinate, but it was ultimately reading—and I read everything I could get my hands on: poetry, science fiction, horror, literary novels, fantasy, Victorian pornography, you name it—that helped me imagine what a meaningful life might be like and gave me hope that I could exist in the world with purpose and have a life that mattered. Writing, and at first I wrote only poetry, was how I claimed the voice in which I could begin to articulate that purpose—or perhaps it is more accurate to say that writing was how I reclaimed for myself the voice that those who did violence to me tried to silence. At first, the poems I wrote served as proof to myself that my voice was real, and that was enough. Over time, though, I came to understand that what I had to say in that voice was not just about myself and for myself, and through that understanding I discovered the audacity to believe that what I had to say was something to which other people ought to pay attention. This is what makes the first part of your question more difficult for me to answer. On the one hand, if I had never written, if not a single word of mine had ever been published, literature would not be missing a thing. It would be whatever its collective of voices had made it. On the other hand, though, if I didn’t believe that my voice, solitary as it is, mattered in some small way *to* literature, there would be no reason to go through the frustrating and all-too-often discouraging process of publishing, of daring to add my voice and my work to the literary tradition of which it is inescapably a part. Even though, in other words, I am very well aware that I have absolutely no control over my work’s impact on that tradition, it would nonetheless be a lie to say that I don’t *want* my work to be thought significant enough that people who imagined the possibility of my never having written would call it a loss. What I do know is that there are people to whom my work has mattered a great deal, on whom its impact has been substantial, and I know this because they have told me so. More to the point, I am also aware that each person who tells me represents a small handful of others, even if it’s only one or two, who, for whatever reason, don’t. Knowing my poems matter in this way to other human beings means more to me than any measure of literary importance or fame that my ego might desire. So, if you were to push me to give a clear answer to the first part of your question—*What would literature be missing without you?*—I would say, as a simple matter of fact, that it would be missing my voice. Whether or not that silence would be of any real consequence, and for whom, and why, is a question I would not dare presume to answer. ### Towards a Discussion of Male Self-Hatred URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/towards-a-discussion-of-male-self-hatred/ Last updated: 2026-07-04T13:34:36.000Z In a recent article in *Psychology Today* called “[Why Some Dads Are More Protective of Their Daughters](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evolutionary-social-cognition/202506/why-some-dads-are-more-protective-of-their-daughters?ref=richardjnewman.com),” Farid Pazhoohi wrote the following: > In evolutionary terms, daughters \[who are more attractive and who therefore have\] higher perceived mate value may attract more male attention, thereby increasing the risk of early or risky sexual behavior. Fathers may respond to this—consciously or not—by increasing their involvement, offering guidance, and providing a protective buffer. Tentatively phrased though it may be, the way this statement implicitly blames women for men’s inability to control themselves in the presence of female beauty suggests that the [study](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40750-025-00261-w?ref=richardjnewman.com) Pazhoohi’s article summarized, of which he was a co-author, was at least implicitly informed by the patriarchal value that locates a man’s honor—his manhood and masculinity—in his ability to protect the women of his family from the sexual predations of other men. In its most extreme form, of course, this is the value system that legitimizes so-called “[honor killings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor%5Fkilling?ref=richardjnewman.com).” We like to think we are “more evolved” than those cultures in which honor killings are at best tolerated and, at worst, fully legitimized, but that same value system is at work here in the States as well. The “[purity balls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity%5Fball?ref=richardjnewman.com)” that had their heyday in conservative Christian circles in the 1990s and early 2000s are nothing more than a less overtly violent manifestation of that system. When I read the passage I quoted from Pazhoohi’s article, I thought immediately of a conversation I had fifteen or so years ago with an Introduction to Literature class. One of my students was telling us about a TV sit com they’d seen in which a young couple who’d been making out in the girl’s bedroom had to figure out where the boy could hide so her father, who’d come home earlier than expected, wouldn’t find him there. The boy hid in the girl’s closet and, after the father miraculously didn’t find him there, snuck safely out the window. I don’t remember what my student’s point was, but I couldn’t resist chiming in with my own real-life experience of a very similar scenario. I was home from college during my senior year. One of my sisters—she’s six years younger than I am—had stayed home from school because, she said, she wasn’t feeling well. I’d gone out for some reason, and when I came back, I knocked on my sister’s door to see how she was feeling. She didn’t answer, so I opened the door a bit just in case she didn’t hear me and saw her *in flagrante delicto* with her boyfriend, Michael. I immediately closed the door and asked them to get dressed and come out into the living room. I waited a couple of minutes, but nothing happened, so I knocked again, receiving this time a muffled reply from my sister, who was clearly trying to sound as if she were sick in bed. I opened the door and there she was, alone, with the blanket pulled up around her neck. “Where is he?” I asked. “Where is who?” “Michael. I saw him.” “Michael? No. No one else is here.” Her voice cracked as if she had a horrible sore throat. “Come on. Don’t bullshit me. I know what I saw.” I started to look around the room and eventually opened her closet, where I found Michael trying desperately to hide behind the clothes that were hanging there. It was hard not to laugh at him, but I didn’t. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Four by Four #56 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-56/ Last updated: 2026-06-26T15:58:51.000Z #### Contents ## Upcoming Events On Saturday, June 27 at 2 PM, I will be reading online with [Hassanal Abdullah](https://mailchi.mp/cb52e34d42d0/first-tuesdays-presents-hassanal-abdullah-june-5-2018?e=[UNIQID]&ref=richardjnewman.com) and [Indran Amirthanayagam](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/indran-amirthanayagam?ref=richardjnewman.com) in the Brownstone Poetry Series. There’s a $5 admission fee. These are the instructions for attending: - **Step 1:** Make your $5 contribution [here](https://bit.ly/3bkqFmO?ref=richardjnewman.com). [(We also accept Zelle or Credit/Debit (Note that your contribution is not refundable.)](https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F3bkqFmO%3Ffbclid%3DIwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAYnJpZBExYmF4QnUydW91ZE5UYkY0bnNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR7ARadTbHRneZi7x81pvmi9acoU9Mn1jwQMp4b-W70nqgNRQ5ehrFALy3RWQg%5Faem%5F1NtFjZS6URVDWFbGbg1DXg&h=AUA9v2qeKmI7sWkEcZliqLp2n4g6JqVZU3KIj010W8sQbdfxUoiG0t3HJnr1rNOZk-PmlFYQyyPaSfRYAeO1qsc1Gmy86WR-aePJ17TQ7FYi6OV3Q8XVRjyVbivwpvxY-g3DK9ZOEd9u9y2vqX2Qd9220SbFmOQDyWfuyQ&%5F%5Ftn%5F%5F=-UK-R&c[0]=AUCoxHmwXCnk8RSOaiDY0-xM-DnfAyU0QNEOVJpZd2za1sg09GEjELQ9arMHsZFSLYZ3Mvb6GvUXnZhQmyqDbxP7FZYq5SREY4aWjIWRw43LGhRKTrEmTO5H3wfAsBmPjE2lZqhM4kBcOfsI2wOvwn3amZ949Rn3JXyJodSZeyt1SruNAjL5BlWoULDal4qoRMa5mnrVxxOQFIdH9Yl2xw&ref=richardjnewman.com) - **Step 2:** Register in advance for this meeting [here](https://bit.ly/3hnpy8D?ref=richardjnewman.com). - **Step 3:** After making your contribution and completing your registration, you will receive a confidential confirmation email containing your unique link to join the event. If you can make it, that would be lovely! --- ## Four Things To Read [**Toward Nakba as A Legal Concept**](https://columbialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/May-2024-1-Eghbariah.pdf?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by Rabea Eghbariah: > The breakdown of Nakba into foundation, structure, and purpose provides an analytical roadmap for the various legal questions at play. The foundational element allows us to consider the crimes committed during the 1948 Nakba and the unresolved legal questions stemming from the establishment of the State of Israel over Palestinian ruins. The structural element allows us to examine the various forms of domination practiced by the Israeli regime that emerged from that violence. The discussion about apartheid is thus located within the structural element of the Nakba. The purpose—denying Palestinians the right to self determination—allows us to reconsider the legal questions pertaining to the denial of territorial integrity and ability to exercise self-determination as a group. Taken together, these elements form a legal anatomy of the ongoing Nakba. I wrote back in [Four by Four #40](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-40/#four-things-to-read) about the difficulties Eghbariah had trying to get this article published, and I would recommend reading his [interview](https://jewishcurrents.org/the-law-cannot-let-itself-see-the-nakba?ref=richardjnewman.com) with Joshua Abramson Cohen as an introduction before diving into this long, deeply researched, historically informed, and meticulously argued legal essay. (I’ve read through the article once. It will take several more fully to process it.) Essentially, Eghbariah argues that while each of the three axes along which Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians have typically been understood accurately describe some aspects of that treatment—settler-colonialism, apartheid, and genocide—they are ultimately inadequate because they tend to isolate discrete aspects of what Israel does in ways that prevent understanding it as a system. There is no doubt that the historical analysis out of which Eghbariah’s argument emerges is a contested one, but not to wrestle honestly with that analysis and with the question of why it is contested in the ways that it is—especially if you call yourself a Zionist—is, in my estimation anyway, to be intellectually dishonest at best. Regardless of which side of this issue you find yourself on, if you care about accounting for its full complexity, I think you owe it to yourself to read this piece. **§§§** [**To Phrase a Prayer for Peace**](https://wildhousepublishing.com/to-phrase-a-prayer-for-peace/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by Donna Spruijt-Metz: > *from* **Day 63** > I walk > through my unbombed neighborhood— > I sit in my white > studio to write to YOU— More than any poem in this very moving book, which at its core is a diary Spruijt-Metz kept during the first 120 or so days of Israel’s war on Gaza, these four lines capture the essence of the struggle—spiritual, ethical, moral—that I think any American Jew of good conscience faced in coming to terms with the brutal reality of Hamas’ attack, on the one hand, and, on the other, the far more brutal reality of Israel’s response. While the poems gesture at times towards the contested historical context(s) through which all sides to that conflict give it meaning, Spruijt-Metz is more concerned with trying to reconcile the “unbombed” comfort in which she lives with both the inevitable concerns Hamas’ attack raised about Jewish safety and the concerns about Jewish identity and community raised by Israel’s response. Spruijt-Metz holds herself accountable for the privilege of her position by weaving the mundane details of her life through the book like a recurring motif in a piece of music, constantly reminding herself and her reader that part of the reason she has the luxury of wrestling with these questions in this form is that she is not in any immediate, mortal danger. In the end, *To Phrase a Prayer for Peace* is a book-length wrestling with the transcendent presence she addresses as YOU, an attempt to find a Jewish answer to a question that is not the obvious one of how this YOU could allow things like the Hamas attack and Israel’s response to happen, but rather of how it is possible through whatever it is that this YOU represents to find a path into a different way of being in the world. Given how much more brutal and complex the war in the Middle East has become—and it is in so many ways just one war, isn’t it?—it may seem odd to return to a book written in the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023, but precisely because of that increased brutality and complexity, the questions Spruijt-Metz wrestles with are more relevant than ever. **§§§** [**The Landlord's Game: Lizzie Magie and Monopoly's Anti-Capitalist Origins (1903)**](https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-landlords-game/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by Sasha Archibald: > There are few cases of creative and intellectual theft more egregious than the origins of the billion-dollar grossing Monopoly. The short version: a brilliant woman economist invented an anti-capitalist board game that was stolen by a lying, opportunistic man and repackaged as capitalist family fun. Originally called the Landlord’s Game by its inventor Lizzie Magie, the game that became Monopoly originally had two sets of rules. In one set, the goal was for players to produce equity through a single land tax. Success was defined as the even distribution of wealth and winning the game was defined as a collective achievement. The other set or rules pit players against each other as they tried to build monopolies and fleece their opponents. Archibald traces the origins of the game, how it was stolen, and the nature of Parker Brothers collusion in that theft, but I especially appreciated the irony in how the theft was discovered. In 1973, a Berkeley economist named Ralph Anspach began marketing a game called Anti-Monopoly. He decided to fight the suit Parker Brothers brought against him and, in the process of his research, discovered the true origins of the game they were trying to protect. That discovery didn’t change anything, of course, except making visible the fact that, as Archibald puts it, “a homemade, anti-capitalist game created by a woman \[became\] a mass-produced uber-capitalist game that profit\[ed\] a man,” which is not a new story at all. [**§§§**](https://www.poetryinreview.com/reviews/dialogue%5Fon%5Fpolitical%5Fpoetry.html?ref=richardjnewman.com) [**The Political Cage: Marjane Satrapi and the Burden of the Non-Western Memoir**](https://minakhanlarzadeh.substack.com/p/the-political-cage-marjane-satrapi)**,** by Mina Khanlarzadeh: > The double standard is clear. A Western memoirist is allowed to offer memory as literature: partial, emotional, shaped by rumor, fear, and childhood perception. A non-Western memoirist is asked for historical documentation instead, as if her memories were only legitimate once purged of uncertainty. I taught the first volume of [*Persepolis*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-complete-persepolis-20th-anniversary-edition-marjane-satrapi/85fc00d7ef804f95?ean=9780375714832&next=t&ref=richardjnewman.com)—which was back in the news after the death of [Marjan Satrapi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjane%5FSatrapi?ref=richardjnewman.com) earlier this month—shortly after it was first published in 2003\. It was an interesting, challenging, and in some ways disappointing experience. While my students found the story heartbreaking, and while they were reasonably and righteously angered by the oppressive nature of the Islamic Republic, they did not have—and, to be honest, I had not done the necessary work to provide them with—the historical perspective and cultural context that would have allowed them to appreciate the full complexity of the story they were reading. In this essay, Khanlarzadeh takes on the critique of *Persepolis* which finds fault with the fact that it does not portray that complexity from the inside, and she does so from a perspective that insists on the integrity of memoir as a genre rooted in the life that the memoirist actually lived, not in their obligation to “do the work of collective representation.” Khanlarzadeh locates the motivation for this critique in the not entirely unreasonable concern “that depictions of state violence in Iran, or in any Muslim-majority country, will be absorbed by Western governments as justification of intervention, or folded into racist stereotypes about Muslim societies.” Khanlarzadeh concludes, however, that critiquing *Persepolis* for not including some version of a life that Satrapi didn’t actually live…place\[s\] the book in “a political cage \[which has been\] built by critics who believe they are protecting Iranians from the West’s use of their stories.” Her essay, which is worth reading, is an attempt to undo the double standard named in the passage I quoted above. --- ## Four Things To See ### The Wright Brothers Patent for a Flying Machine (1903) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/06/wright-brothers-flying-machine-patent.jpg) **§§§** ### Launch of The Wright Brothers’ Third Test Glider - Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina on October 10, 1902 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/06/wright-brothers-glider-test.jpg) **§§§** ### **T**he First Heavier-Than-Air Controlled Flight In History The Wright brothers accomplished this feat on December 17, 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. This first flight lasted 12 seconds and covered a distance of 120 feet. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/06/wright-brothers-first-heavier-than-air-flight-1.jpg) **§§§** ### The Wright Flyer demonstration at Fort Meyer (1908) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/06/wright-brothers-test-flight-at-fort-meyer.jpg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### Alice Coltrane - The Sun **§§§** ### Yo-Yo Ma & The Silk Road Ensemble - Briel **§§§** ### Bison Rouge - Crown Crescent Moon **§§§** ### **Simon Hayes - Topic** --- ## Four Things About Me I taught English in Seoul from the summer of 1988 through the summer of 1989\. Especially around the beginning of my stay, large and sometimes violent anti-American protests occurred, though it’s important to note that this violence was mostly directed at property, police, or symbolic American targets, like an embassy, rather than at people. Broadly speaking, the protestors opposed what they perceived, not without reason, as American support for the authoritarian and repressive rule of [Chun Doo-Hwan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chun%5FDoo-hwan?ref=richardjnewman.com), which in their minds included America’s choice not to intervene in the massacre that followed the [Gwangju Uprising](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwangju%5FUprising?ref=richardjnewman.com#:~:text=The%20Gwangju%20Uprising%2C%20also%20known,hwan%20that%20strengthened%20his%20power). These protests were covered in the American media, and I remember my grandmother calling me and urging me not to go out into the city lest I find myself the target of the protestors anger. I was aware of the protests, of course, but I assured her that they tended to take place in parts of the city far from where I lived and worked. Then, one day while I was out in the [Myeong-Dong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myeong-dong?ref=richardjnewman.com) area of Seoul, I suddenly found myself in the middle of a huge protest. I was walking down the street in the opposite direction from where the protesters were headed, and I remember standing still as a massive throng of chanting people surged around me. Some stared, but most, except to make sure they did not walk into me, paid no attention to me at all. It was a surreal experience and I wish I’d had a camera. I did not tell my family about it. **§§§** I wrote this in my journal in 1988: > A literature, a poetic, grounded in the belief that language has no reference to anything outside itself—which does not *at the same time* acknowledge and exploit our capability to give it such reference—will be a poetic devoid of humanity, not better than a technology, a computer, the mirror of a self-reflective world in the process of, frozen in, perpetual implosion. In that same entry, I also wrote this: > Too much contemporary poetry is tired narrative of one form or another. Some is new. Martín Espada, for instance, writes rather plain narratives, at least in form, but because what he names, the lives of Hispanics, Latinos, is new, it makes the form new as well. And so, to write a poetry of male feminism requires a new form because the “maleness” of the content will \[otherwise\] pull the narratives in the same old directions. And both of those excerpts were prefaced by this, which I wrote in response to passages in Hugh Kenner’s “Magic and Spells:” > This is what bothers me about some language poetry and much traditional free verse lyric and narrative: there is no naming, or the names are always the same. The problem with writing concerned \[only\] with the process of its own making…is its tendency to lose sight of the naming function of language. A name is not a fact; it is something arrived at and it changes as our perceptions of/perspective on the named thing changes. Setting aside first the way I confused the arbitrariness of the sign with the act of consciously, proactively choosing to name something and, second, the kind of sweeping generalizations about poetry that I hope I no longer make, what struck me when I read this was how immediately I recognized it as the root of many of my preoccupations as a poet today, almost forty years later. **§§§** A couple of weeks ago, on one of the rare occasions that I was scrolling through Facebook, one of my sisters—I have two and we are estranged, as they are long-estranged from each other—appeared in my “People You May Know” stream. I was surprised to see her there, though I think the algorithm probably surfaced her because of a thread of mutual connections that we have on the platform that goes back to people we had in common nearly forty years ago. Anyway, I was curious, so I went to her profile page to see what I could see, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that she has begun making and selling some truly beautiful art. “Pleasantly surprised” is actually not quite accurate. I was happy for her. I remembered a conversation I had long forgotten when I tried to convince our grandmother to buy her as a graduation gift a truly high quality set of artist’s tools: paints, brushes, colored pencils, whatever. My sister had talent and she had talked to me at the time about wanting to develop it. My grandmother, however, demurred. “She’ll never be able to make a living doing that,” she said. I don’t remember what gift she bought instead, but as far as I know my sister stopped drawing after high school. So it made me happy to see her making art and also sad, since—and you will have to take my word for this—my happiness for her is not sufficient reason to reach across the chasm of our estrangement. **§§§** When I was teaching ESL, I always made sure to spend at least one class, and often two, teaching obscenities and slang expressions. I told my students they needed to know these words because they were going to encounter them, either in conversation or in media, and so it was important to know what they meant. I also encouraged them to bring to class any words or expressions they heard that they didn’t understand. It made for some very interesting conversations, as you might imagine. Try explaining why it’s an insult to call someone a “douche bag,” especially when douche in their language simply means shower, not to mention try to make sense for them, if they do not find it obvious, of the misogyny inherent in the insult. I taught this lesson for two reasons. I’ll tell you one story this issue and save the other one for a later one. This one isn’t actually mine. A colleague told me that one of her students came into her office and said, “Professor, what does fuck you mean?” When my colleague asked why she wanted to know, the student explained that she’d been on a bus in Manhattan and trying to explain to the driver that she needed a transfer ticket—which tells you how long ago this story took place. Since she couldn’t remember that phrase “transfer ticket” in the moment, she was using sign language to get her point across. She could tell the bus driver was getting frustrated, but when he told her *Fuck you! Go sit down!*, since she didn’t know what that expression meant, she simply bowed slightly—she was from an East Asian country, but I don’t remember which one—said, “Thank you very much,” and took her seat. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand the man’s tone, but she’d had no idea he’d used an obscenity to express himself. I started teaching the lesson that semester. ****A gentle reminder:** Four By Four is part of the free tier of **It All Connects.* If you are not currently a paid subscriber and would like to subscribe, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signup/65988db373946800080fe780/yearly). If you would like to make a one-time contribution to support my work on **It All Connects*, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/support). --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in* [*my work*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/) *or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* ### On My Desk Now - “Finger Exercises” and The Question of Received Forms in Poetry URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/on-my-desk-now-finger-exercises-and-the-question-of-received-forms-in-poetry/ Last updated: 2026-06-19T10:00:38.000Z [E]ven to think about publishing these poems, much less to consider making a book out of them, is by definition to place them in the context of the [formal and political] traditions of which they are a part. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Upcoming Reading: I‘m a Brownstone Poet! URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/events/upcoming-reading-im-a-brownstone-poet/ Last updated: 2026-06-15T18:09:52.000Z Dear Friends, I am looking forward to this reading! [Hassanal Abdullah](https://mailchi.mp/cb52e34d42d0/first-tuesdays-presents-hassanal-abdullah-june-5-2018?e=[UNIQID]&ref=richardjnewman.com) has read for my series, [First Tuesdays](https://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com), and [Indran Amirthanayagam](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/indran-amirthanayagam?ref=richardjnewman.com) will read for us in November. Brownstone Poets is an important reading series. I hope you’ll come by and support it! Richard --- **Date:** June 27, 2026 **Time:** Starts at 2:00 PM **Where:** Online, DM @patriciacarragon or @herbf533 on Instagram for tickets **Admission:** $5 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/06/flyer-for-june-27-1.jpg) ### Learning To Love The Questions: The Source of War URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-source-of-war/ Last updated: 2026-09-05T09:33:44.000Z From April through September of last year, I was corresponding with a poet from Iran who’d asked to interview me. Given the current situation and the fact that I know nothing about the poet’s situation, not even whether or not they are still alive, I am not going to name them here, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the questions they asked me since the beginning of the US-Israeli war against their country, since very few of them had any direct relationship to my work as a poet or to poetry in general. Still, they were all thought provoking, often leading me to articulate things I’d never really thought about before and that I think are worth sharing. Rather than work those answers into new essays, though, and out of respect for the poet who interviewed me, I’m going to preserve the Q&A format and publish my answers as I originally wrote them. You’ll understand immediately why I’ve decided to start with the second question in the series. Looking back, it seems especially prescient. **Q: “I strongly agree with Kafka’s statement that ‘war, in its first phase, emerges out of \[a\] total lack of…imagination.’ How do you view the main source of war?”** I’m not sure how to begin to answer this question. Since I have never—and I am grateful for this—had to live through a war, I have never been forced to confront face-to-face what it would mean for there to be people in the world who have defined me as an enemy who does not deserve to live. Even as I write that, though, I realize I have begun to formulate an answer. As my use of the word “defined” suggests, I believe lethal violence is rooted in a quintessentially imaginative act: the proactive imagining of another human being or group of human beings as nonhuman and therefore “killable” with impunity. I have never believed that the default human stance towards others is to see them as so fundamentally, essentially different from ourselves that we also see their lives as inherently less worthy than ours; and I guess I do believe, therefore, that rendering someone “killable” requires willful, proactive effort. Even killing in self-defense requires this imaginative act. If someone is trying to kill you and killing them is the only way to save your life, you have to believe on some level that your potential murderer is no longer as fully human as you are and therefore no longer has the same right to live as you do. I have never been through military training, but I remember walking to the post office in 1980 to register for Selective Service. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan and the possibility existed that then-President Jimmy Carter was going to reinstitute the military draft in response. He activated Selective Service registration in preparation for that possibility. I was eighteen years old. As I walked, I tried to imagine what it would be like to be trained to kill people I had never met and had no reason to hate. I couldn’t do it, but I knew that, if I ever were drafted, that’s what I would be trained to do, and the thought of what that would do to my humanity terrified me. I would never have been able to articulate it this way back then, but I was struggling with the question of whether and how I could resist the militarization of my imagination. Implicit in what I think you and Kafka mean by “a total lack of imagination” is the optimistic belief that the imagination is an inherently good and humanizing thing. That’s the way those of who are artists tend to think of the imaginative capacity out of which our art emerges, but I think we miss something crucial if we define as an absence a world view that is so diametrically opposed to our existence that the people who hold it are willing to go to war with us. I also think that defining their world view as an absence of imagination merely inverts the hierarchy that organizes how they see the world, placing ourselves on top instead of them. If someone is indeed trying to kill you, though, if someone insists on prosecuting a war of aggression against you, you may very well have to kill them first in order to survive. I just think it’s important to remember that they’re not trying to kill you because they lack imagination, or because imagination has failed them. Rather, they are trying to kill you because of what they have imagined you to be, and they may very well give you no choice but to accept that nothing you can do will change their minds about that. ****A gentle reminder:** This post is part of the series called “Learning To Love The Questions,” which is part of the free tier of **It All Connects.* If you are not currently a paid subscriber and would like to subscribe, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signup/65988db373946800080fe780/yearly). If you would like to make a one-time contribution to support my work on **It All Connects*, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/support). ### Domestic Violence Has Been A Thread Running Through My Life URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/domestic-violence-has-been-a-thread-running-through-my-life/ Last updated: 2026-06-05T10:40:19.000Z **1** Not too long ago, I received a message through the contact form on my website from a woman named Elena. “I work,” she wrote, “in digital safety for vulnerable populations and recently assisted on a project with ExpressVPN that created a guide for survivors of domestic violence…focus\[ing\] on how to secure devices, communications, and personal data when technology becomes part of the abuse.” Most of the messages I get through my contact form are either obvious spam or cleverly designed AI scams, so I was immediately suspicious when she asked if I’d be willing to include a link to the guide in a post I wrote [about being a survivor of sexual violence](https://www.richardjnewman.com/being-able-to-say-this-out-loud/). As it turned out, though—and I will admit to being pleasantly surprised by this—not only is [ExpressVPN](https://www.expressvpn.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) a legitimate digital privacy and cybersecurity company, but the guide, “[Tech safety for survivors of domestic violence](https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/tech-safety-for-survivors-of-domestic-violence/?ref=richardjnewman.com),” is well-written, thorough, and, in my inexpert opinion, deserving of serious attention. Linking to it—which I will do again [here](https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/tech-safety-for-survivors-of-domestic-violence/?ref=richardjnewman.com) and also later on in this post—seems the least I can do. I’ve written a great deal about how coming to terms with the childhood sexual violence I experienced has shaped my life, as a writer and as a man, but while I have written in an episodic way about my encounters with domestic violence, I have not yet tried to corral into a similar coherence the way it has been a thread—or perhaps it’s more accurate to call it a motif—running through my life. The closest I’ve come to attempting that kind of synthesis was in a poem called “Coitus Interruptus,” which appeared in [*The Silence of Men*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/the-silence-of-men/)*.* > **Coitus Interruptus** > > **1.** > > Naked at the window, my wife calls me > as if someone is dying, and someone > almost is, pinned to the concrete face down > beneath the fists and feet and knees of three > > policemen. I’m still hard from before she > jumped out of bed to answer the question > I was willing not to ask when the siren > stopped on our block, but now I’m here, and I see > > the man is Black, and how can I not > bear witness? They’ve cuffed him, > but the uniforms continue to crowd our street, > and the blue-and-whites keep coming, > > as if called to war, as if the lives > in all these darkened homes > were truly at stake, and that’s the thing— > who can tell from up here?—maybe > > we’re watching our salvation > without knowing it. Above our heads, > a voice calls out *Fucking pigs!* > but the ones who didn’t drag the man > > into a waiting car and drive off > refuse the bait. They talk quietly, > gathered beneath the streetlamp > in the pale circle of light > > the man was beaten in, and then > a word we cannot hear is given > and the cops wave each other back > to their vehicles, the flash and sparkle > > of their driving off > > throwing onto the wall of our room > a shadow of the embrace > my wife and I have been clinging to. > > When I was sixteen, Tommy > brought to my room before he left > the Simon and Garfunkel tape > I’d put the previous night > > back among his things. He placed it > on the bookshelf near the door > he’d slammed shut two days earlier > when he was holding a butcher’s cleaver > > to my mother’s life. I wanted > to run after him and smash it at his feet; > I wanted to grab him by the scruff of the neck > and crush it in his face, to dangle him > > over the side of our building with one > ankle in my left hand and the *Greatest Hits* > in my right and ask him > which I should let drop. > > But I didn’t, couldn’t really: > he was much too big, > and I was not a fighter, > and one of my best friends right now > > lives with her son in the house > where her husband has already hit her > with a cast iron frying pan, > and so there is no reason to believe > > she is not at this moment cringing > bruised and bleeding in a corner > of their bedroom, or that she is not, > with her boy and nothing else in her arms, > > running the way my mother > didn’t have a chance to run, > and there’s nothing I can do > but look at the clock—Sunday, > > 11:11 PM—and remind myself > it’s too late to call, that my calls > have caused trouble for her already. > When they pushed Tommy in handcuffs > > out the front door, past where my mother sat, > quiet, unmoving, and I did not know > from where inside my own rage and terror > to pull the comfort I should have offered her, > > the officer making sure Tommy > didn’t trip or run winked at me, smiling > as if what had happened were suddenly > a secret between us, and this our signal > > that everything was okay. I wondered > if his had been the voice, calm > and deep with male authority—*Son,* > *are you sure your mother’s in there* > > *against her will?*—that when I called > forced me to find the more-than-yes > I can’t remember the words to > that convinced the cops they had to come. > > **2.** > > Sophomore year, walking the road > girdling the campus. Up ahead, a woman’s voice > pleading with a man’s shouting to stop. > A car door slamming, engine revving, > > and then wheels digging hard into driveway dirt > that when I got there was a dust cloud > obscuring the blue vehicle’s rear plate. > The woman sprawled on the asphalt, > > her black dress spread around her > like an open portal her upper body > emerged from. She pulled > the cloth away from her feet, > > which were bleeding, and I drove > to where her spaghetti strap sandals > lay torn and twisted beyond repair. > She left them there. Then to her home, > > two rooms in a neighborhood house, > and I helped her onto the bed > that was her only furniture, and filled > a warm-water basin to soak her feet, > > and he had not hit her, so there was nothing > to report, but she said she was afraid > and would I sit with her a while. > We talked about her home in Seoul, > > the man her parents picked for her > that she ran to America to avoid marrying, > and here she laughed—first trickle > > of spring water down a winter mountain— > > *So instead I take from Egypt! I so stupid!* > Then: *What you think? Can man and woman* > *sleep same bed without sex?* I said yes. > > *So, please, tonight, you stay here? Maybe he coming back.* > > *He fear white American like you.* I was not a fighter, > but I stayed, and in the morning when I left, > she said *kamsahamnida*—thank you— > and she bowed low, and she did not > > ask my name, nor I hers, and though > I sometimes looked for her on campus, > I never saw her again. Just like Tommy, > whom I forgot to say before was white. > > Just like the Black woman who lived downstairs > before I got married, whose cries—*Help!* > *Please! He’s killing me!*—and the dead thud > of him, also Black, throwing her > > against the wall, and his screaming— > *Shut up, bitch! Fucking whore!*—filled the space > till I was drowning. The desk sergeant > didn’t ask if I knew beyond a doubt > > that she was being beaten, > but when she opened her front door > to the two men he sent, she shrieked > the way women shriek > > in bad horror movies > when they know they’re going to die, > and I almost felt sorry for calling. > A few weeks later, > > a voice on the phone: *You know* > *what’s going on below you, right?* > *Please, tape a message to the door: “Mr. Peters* > *has been trying to reach you.” Nothing else.* > > *And whatever you do, don’t sign it.* > For a month all was quiet. Then, > coming home early from work > I walked upstairs past people moving furniture > > out of her apartment. *No one ever* > *wants to get involved, right?* a thin white man > in shorts and a t-shirt whispered bitter > behind me. I kept walking > > the way Tommy did when he saw me > trying to catch his eye: head down, > gaze nailed to the floor, and then he was gone, > and the questions I wanted to ask him > > never became words. That tape > was all I had, till one day, > cleaning house, my mother > held it up: > > *Do you still want this?* > > *I never play it.* > > *Throw it out then.* > > So I did. **§§§** A poem, though, does not make the kind of sense an essay does. The experience a poem invites a reader into—even the experience it leads me through as I write it—is an emotional one; its logic is associative, not discursive. It creates what [Susanne Langer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susanne%5FLanger?ref=richardjnewman.com) calls in [*Feeling and Form*](https://archive.org/details/feelingform00susa)*,* a “virtual experience,” by which she means that a poem, despite being made from discursive language—syntax, after all, is linear—presents the experience it contains as a whole to be encountered as irreducible to the sum of its parts. “Coitus Interruptus,” in other words, is not a report *about* my experience with domestic violence. Rather, it offers the reader an opportunity to feel what it was like for domestic violence to have been such an intimate part of my life. Creating this experience necessarily meant leaving out some details of what actually happened, not because they were unimportant, but because they existed outside the emotional web of that intimacy. For example, not too long after “Mr. Peters” asked me to tape that note to my neighbor’s door, I was telling a friend about everything that had preceded my doing so as we sat talking in my living room after dinner. Suddenly, a male voice came up through the grate covering the space in the wall where my radiator was located. “So you’re the motherfucker who called the cops! You better not let me run into you. You won’t like what happens then.” I am sure that every man reading this recognizes the ethic out of which that threat emerges. Not only had I violated another man’s “territory;” I had done so in a way that explicitly questioned his sovereignty within those boundaries. Similarly, I am sure that every man reading this, if he’s honest with himself, has experienced a moment when he either felt the need to defend his own version of that territory—a defense that I am going to assume was nonviolent, since I am also going to assume that no one reading this has committed an act of domestic violence—or that he has had to weigh the consequences of crossing uninvited into the territory of another man, whether a woman was involved or not. I say this without judgment. The boundary men establish to define that territory—whether we are asserting it, crossing it, or defending it—is one of the currencies through which manhood is negotiated in a patriarchal culture. Even if you reject the very notion of that boundary, however, even if you have fashioned your life to be perfectly congruent with that rejection, if you were raised as a man in this culture, you know viscerally what the boundary means within the system that gives it form and substance—which means you understand as well the fear I felt when the man who was beating up the woman who lived downstairs from me threatened to re-establish his boundary on my body with who-knows-what level of violence. I never did run into him, and I am grateful for that, but I also have no idea what happened either to him or to the woman he was beating. I don’t know if the people I saw cleaning out her apartment were doing so because he killed her or because she was able to disappear into one of the underground networks that existed, that still exist, to rescue women in her situation. I know what I hope—that he was held accountable; that she was able to escape and reclaim her life—but it’s also true that not knowing provides me with an oddly and ironically comforting distance. Like [Schrödinger’s cat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s%5Fcat?ref=richardjnewman.com), which is simultaneously alive and dead, both what I want and what I don’t want for those two people are true and not true at the same time. More to the point, I can choose which truth I want to claim as mine. Sometimes, though, the distance making that choice possible doesn’t exist. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### From Saadi’s Bustan: A Ghūrid Tyrant Reformed by A Courageous Peasant URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/from-saadis-bustan-a-ghurid-tyrant-reformed-by-a-courageous-peasant/ Last updated: 2026-05-29T19:37:08.000Z Dear Friends, I have been posting these translations—revised versions of those included in my **Selections from Saadi’s Bustan—*as a way of making Iran’s culture and literary history visible at a time when that visibility seems more important than ever. This is the last poem that I translated from the first chapter of **Bustan,* and I am going to take a break from this project for a little while because I have other projects that need my attention. I will eventually return to it, though. I have deliberately not put these translations behind a paywall, but if you’d like to support this work, you can do by becoming a paid subscriber [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signup/65988db373946800080fe780/yearly) or by making a one time contribution [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/support). Whether you contribute or not, I am happy to have you as a reader, and I hope these poems from so many centuries ago have brought you pleasure and perhaps given you food for thought. **§§§** I’ve heard it said about a king of Ghūr who’d seize his subjects pack mules for his own that he weighed them down and worked them without food until the wretched beasts would die, two each day. When fortune favors ignoble men like that, it bends the backs of the tight-hearted poor. From his high roof, that self-important man will dump his piss and shit on the roofs below. I’ve heard that once, when he went out to hunt, that unjust ruler took off at a gallop, chasing his prey till night overtook him and he lost all contact with his retinue. On his own, he did not know the way, but then, though he never asked for help, night cast him like a wave at the edge of a village, where, at that moment, a wise old man was saying to his son, “My blessed child, do not take your mule to town this morning. That undeserving man whom fortune made our morally corrupt, tight-fisted king— for whom a coffin will soon replace his throne— has armed himself to honor the demon’s will. The cries of those beneath his tyranny rise as one to fill the dome of heaven. No one in his kingdom lives at ease, and no one ever will, not till this man, so tainted and corrupt he can’t know peace, carries to hell the curses we call down.” The son replied, “The road is long and hard. I cannot go on foot. What should I do? Your thinking’s always clearer than my own.” The father said, “If you want my advice, find yourself a large and heavy stone and strike this beast that works so hard for you until you wound its head and legs and flanks. I have no doubt that worthless miscreant will have no use for a mule he can’t load up. Do like the prophet Khidr, who wrecked a boat to keep it from the cruel tyrant’s hands, the king who in a year gained many ships, but a tarnished name for all the years to come. A curse upon the empire he rules! May disgrace stain his name till Judgment Day.” Once he heard his father’s words, the son did not hesitate to do as he was told, beating the mule with a stone over and over until the wounded beast could barely walk. Then his father told him to make his way as best he could. The son obeyed, cursing as he led the lame beast behind the caravan. The father faced the door and bowed in prayer: “For the sake, dear God, of the prayers the righteous offer, let my life be long enough to see the ruin that must be this despot’s fate. For if I do not witness his destruction, I will not sleep in the grave’s eternal night. Better a woman should bear a still-born fetus than a boy should become a man who’s a devil; better a woman than a man who hurts others; better a dog than a tyrant or abuser. A boy who gives himself to the use of men may do injustice to himself, but still outshines those who do evil to others.” The king said nothing when he heard all this. He tethered his horse and, head on his saddle-cloth, lay awake all night and counted stars, worry and dejection keeping him from sleep, but once he heard the rooster’s morning cries, he thought no more of the night’s long misery. Having galloped hard throughout the night, his knights, at sunrise, recognized his horse’s trail. They saw him in a clearing on that steed and ran as one to bow prostrate before him. (They surged like a sea covering the earth.) One from among his oldest friends—at night, his chamberlain; by day, his constant companion— asked, “What did your subjects provide you while we rested neither our eyes nor our ears?” The king could not bear to let himself repeat the foul invective he’d been forced to hear so instead he leaned his head in close and whispered low and soft in his friend’s ear, “Nothing, not even a single drumstick, and pack mules trampled me from dusk till dawn!” They sat themselves right there, those noblemen, and called for food and drink to celebrate. As the laughter and the shouting filled his thoughts, the king remembered what that old man said, and ordered him brought there, tightly bound. They threw him to the ground at the king’s feet and that black-hearted monarch drew his sword. Seeing no escape, that helpless man raised his head and, emptied of all hope, spoke. “In death’s shadow, silence serves no purpose. I’m not the only one who says your fate is sealed, though I’m perhaps the first you’ve caught. Why take out your wrath on me alone when all your subjects also say the same! You can’t expect to rule by unjust decree then hear your name be praised throughout the realm; and if you find it hard to hear this now stop bearing down so hard on those you rule! You have the means to choose another way; the innocents you kill have no defense. Take from me my few remaining days, then take a couple more from my sweet life! Death will take the tyrant too, in his time, but time won’t blunt the curses on his name. This wisdom is for you if you accept it. You *will* live to regret it if you don’t. How can a king count himself as praised by those who praise him when he’s holding court? What use to him is that entire court’s applause, when he’s reviled by a woman spinning wool?” He spoke despite the sword above his head, holding his soul like a shield against his fate. Have you seen a pen with a knife at *its* head? What flows from its tongue flows that much more smoothly. The sovereign grew solemn, shamed by all he’d done, as if an angel whispered in his ear: “Put down your sword. The retribution you seek only adds one more to your account.” The king turned and drew his robes around him; then turning back, he cast his sleeves wide. With his own hand he undid the old man’s bonds, kissing his head, embracing him warmly, bestowing upon him authority and power. This was the fruit borne by that man’s hope Now this tale’s been told for all to hear: the fortunate will choose the honest as their guide. The praise of learned men will teach you less than ignorant critique of your character. Those who pay you homage do not help; your friends are those who blame you for your faults. Let your enemy tell you who you are; your confidants say what you want to hear. Giving sweets does harm to one who suffers if bitter medicine is what he needs. The stern-faced man who tells you painful truths will aid you more than kind and pleasant comrades. No one gives as good advice as this: if you’re smart, a hint is all you need to take it. ### Four by Four #55 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-55/ Last updated: 2026-05-22T10:00:08.000Z #### Contents ## Publication News A poem from *2020,* “[The Only Lit Storefront on The Block](https://glimpsepoetrymagazine.com/current-issue/?ref=richardjnewman.com#richard-jeffrey-newman),” appears in the most recent issue of [*Glimpse*](https://glimpsepoetrymagazine.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*.* ## Four Things To Read [**A Brief History of Israeli Denialism**](https://clenchner.substack.com/p/a-brief-history-of-israeli-denialism)**, by Charles Lenchner:** Fair warning, this is a graphic quote: > *I’m Jewish. I grew up in Israel. I was in the IDF (and later went to prison as a refusenik). \[I\]’m...not at all surprised by...the bizarre nature of the denialism \[concerning Kristoff's article\]: open discussion of whether and how dogs could be trained to rape a man. It boggles the mind that those would be the straws being clutched. For all we know, the dogs didn’t insert their dog penises into the rectums of Palestinian prisoners. Maybe they only humped the men while they were bent over, naked. Maybe they lunged at the men’s genitals. Maybe a prison guard smeared peanut butter on someone’s ass and laughed as a dog licked it all up. Do you see now why this entire line is insane? The minute you have naked prisoners and dogs interacting AT ALL you’ve lost.* The Kristoff article Lenchner is referring to, if you haven’t read it is [here](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/opinion/israel-palestinians-sexual-violence.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.iVA.5XpN.XOqMac9OMJYp&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com). I linked to a related piece from Al Jazeera in my [Of Note from May 11](https://www.richardjnewman.com/of-note-may-11-2026/). I remember reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s [essay](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-may-16-op-ehrenreich16-story.html?ref=richardjnewman.com) about coming to terms with women soldiers taking part in the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. She wrote about—this is my paraphrase—a certain kind of feminist naïveté died that day with the realization (which, in all honesty, should not have been a realization for anyone who did not otherwise believe biology is destiny) that a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience. The corollary here should be obvious. Those of us, Jewish or not, who had an analogous kind of naïveté about Jews and Israel drummed into us from a young age have had ample opportunities to be disabused of that innocence over the years. This is yet another one. Please read this essay. **§§§** [**Letters from an American: January 31, 2026**](https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-31-2026?utm%5Fcampaign=post&triedRedirect=true)**, by Heather Cox Richardson:** > History is doing that rhyming thing again. I know this “Letter” is now several months old, but it is still very much worth reading, since the rhyming to which Cox refers is still very much going on. To take one example, she connects Stephen Miller’s recent call “for a ‘labor class’ excluded from citizenship and a voice in government” to the words of South Carolina Democratic Senator James Henry Hammond, who argued in 1858 that in “all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life.” Hammond, of course, was arguing in favor of slavery, but as Richardson shows, his argument also pulled away the veil that obscures the connection between the exploitation of the enslaved and the exploitation of the working class. I don’t mean, of course, and neither does Richardson, not even my implication, that to be working class is equivalent to being enslaved, just that the statuses “rhyme” at the bottom end of the same, capitalist, socioeconomic continuum. Richardson goes on to make a number of other connections along the same lines, keeping her prose laser-focused on what the Trump administration has been doing and the small signs of hope and resistance that are sprouting up. The piece is very much worth reading. **§§§** [***The Strangers***](https://www.blacksquareeditions.org/books/p/the-strangers?ref=richardjnewman.com)***,* by Eugene Lim:** > “You’re much more devolved than the people you see as dupes or even those you see as self-justifying puppet masters. Because your mind cannot fathom the complex plot, the infinitely varying story, the total story which you can never, will necessarily never, completely understand—in response you fake it. You make up grand narratives that reduce the world to heroes and villains, to victims and thieves. You’re a child.” Two books that kept coming to mind while I was reading *The Strangers* were [*The Waves*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FWaves?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Virginia Woolf and [*Stand on Zanzibar*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand%5Fon%5FZanzibar?ref=richardjnewman.com) by John Brunner. These associations are entirely intuitive, since I read both those books long enough ago—in particular *Stand on Zanzibar*—that I remember neither of them clearly. If I try to make sense of thee connections, I would say, in the case of *The Waves,* it has to do with the way Lim has his characters externalize their inner consciousness in their speech and how, especially in the final chapter, he weaves, or at least gestures towards the weaving of, more than one consciousness together. *The Strangers* is very different from *The Waves,* but this is a connection I felt. In the case of *Stand on Zanzibar,* I think the connection I felt had to do with how the disparate narratives in *The Strangers*, and the way they ultimately come together through discrete points of connection, in terms both of plot and of language, create a world that is globally dystopian. I won’t say more than that because I don’t remember *Stand on Zanzibar* well enough to know if I am at all on target. My favorite part of *The Strangers* is the one in which a man who has been marked for death by his totalitarian government escapes. The story told by the first person who helps him—in a structure reminiscent but also deconstructing of *The Canterbury Tales* or *The Decameron* are masterly set pieces that expose and satirize what totalitarianism does to the minds of the people who live under it. [**§§§**](https://www.poetryinreview.com/reviews/dialogue%5Fon%5Fpolitical%5Fpoetry.html?ref=richardjnewman.com) [**The Hit Erotica Writers Outwitting Nigeria’s Religious Censors**](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/world/africa/nigeria-erotica-writers-censors.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.ilA.-b24.dZy-4W0DOqmd&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com)**, by Ruth Maclean and Ismail Auwal:** > For decades, northern Nigeria has been home to a booming industry of romance novels, written in Hausa by and for women. But in a region that operates under a dual legal system, where Shariah law exists alongside secular courts to strictly regulate public morality, steamier stories are deemed immoral. Some books have been publicly burned by zealous officials. Now, a new generation of writers is publishing far more explicit content — and serializing it on WhatsApp, where it is out of reach of religious and government censors who are still focused on paper books. This article focuses on one of those writers, Fauziyya Tasiu Umar, who goes by the pen name Oum Hairan. The authors refer to her throughout the article as Mrs. Umar, which is no doubt a nod both to the fact that she is able to speak openly about her work because she is married to a man who supports what she does and to the way she characterized her work when she was called in by the [Hisbah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano%5FState%5FHisbah%5FCorps?ref=richardjnewman.com), the religious police: “Her books,” this is the authors paraphrasing her, “were targeted at married women…and the point was to convey messages about society…Indeed, in a kind of foreword to each book \[she\] forbids young, unmarried women from reading them.” The Hisbah let her go. It’s tempting to see this simply as a variation of the strategy pornographers in this country once used to justify their work by demonstrating that it had redeeming social value, but that surface similarity obscures the fact that, as the authors point out, “Hausa women have long had varied erotic lives even as they navigate strict public moral codes, cultural commentators say. A 1954 anthropological biography, ‘[Baba of Karo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba%5Fof%5FKaro?ref=richardjnewman.com),’ details how Hausa women often had 10 or 20 secret lovers.” This essay, “[The Hidden Life of a Kiss](https://elnathanjohn.substack.com/p/the-hidden-life-of-a-kiss),” has screenshots of the relevant passages from that book. I have not commented here on the fact that the women producing these works also profit from them—one woman says she earns more from her erotic novels than from her regular job—or that the women are able to evade the religious censors because they write, and their readers read and pay, entirely on their phones. --- ## Four Things To See ### The Division of the Light from the Darkness - [Paul Nash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul%5FNash%5F%28artist%29?ref=richardjnewman.com) (1924) I found this image in [*The Public Domain Review*](https://publicdomainreview.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* which is a wonderful resource. This engraving is from Nash’s book *Genesis*,which was published in 1924 by [Nonesuch Press](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonesuch%5FPress?ref=richardjnewman.com), which the [*Review* described as](https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/paul-nash-genesis/?ref=richardjnewman.com) an independent press “founded in the early 1920s by socialists and bisexuals in a basement in London’s Soho \[with the goal of making\] beautifully designed books less precious and more available; they typically used a commercial printer, but mimicked the handpress aesthetic.” The *Review’s* write up also includes a short, useful biography of Nash. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/05/the-division-of-light-from-dark.webp) **§§§** ### 1936 - Lauren Marx (2025) I found this image in [an article in *Orion* magazine](https://orionmagazine.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) about [Lauren Marx’s work](https://www.laurenmarx.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com). This is *Orion’s* description of 1936, the subject of which is a [Tasmanian tiger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacine?ref=richardjnewman.com): > As a [cryptid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List%5Fof%5Fcryptids?ref=richardjnewman.com), the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) is treated as a mysterious, possibly surviving predator long after its official extinction in 1936\. Resembling a large dog with stripes along its back, the thylacine was a marsupial carnivore native to Tasmania, Australia, and New Guinea. Sightings and tracks reported over decades fuel cryptid lore, with enthusiasts speculating that small populations might still roam remote forests. Its cryptid status blends fact and legend: a real, recently extinct species that continues to haunt the imagination of those fascinated by elusive, hidden wildlife. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/05/A-painting-of-a-Tasmanian-tiger-with-a-snare-wrapped-around-its-leg.-.jpg) **§§§** ### **Ry**ū **Sh**ō**ten (Dragon Rising) -** [Ogata Gekkō](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogata%5FGekk%C5%8D?ref=richardjnewman.com) (1897) Gekko was a Japanese artist best known as a painter and a designer of [ukiyo-e](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukiyo-e?ref=richardjnewman.com) woodblock prints. He was self-taught in art, won numerous national and international prizes, and was one of the earliest Japanese artists to win an international audience. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/05/dragon-rising.jpg) **§§§** ### Abstraction **\-** Abraham Walkowitz **(1906)** [Walkowitz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham%5FWalkowitz?ref=richardjnewman.com) was a Russian–American painter who, while not having attained the same level of fame as his contemporaries, nonetheless worked at the center of the modernist movement. He is also known for having made over 5,000 drawings of Isadora Duncan. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/05/HMSG-66.5456-000001.jpg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### Kandace Springs - Angel Eyes **§§§** ### Monaco Slim - Ain’t No Good **§§§** ### Do Yeon Kim - The Beat of Distant Thunder **§§§** ### **Neil Cowley Trio - Built on Bach “Scurry”** --- ## Four Things About Me When I decided in the mid-1980s to get my MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages ([TESOL](https://www.tesol.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com))—notice it is not teaching English as a *second* language—I did so because I perceived the field to be politically progressive, both in form and content. I understood the job of ESOL teachers here in the States as fostering a kind of equity and inclusivity that was sorely needed. In fact, one of the reasons I decided not to pursue a PhD in Applied Linguistics, even though I was fascinated by the study of syntax and semantics, was that those fields seemed very far removed from anything that might have a real and lasting impact on the lives of ordinary people. I remember reading articles in [TESOL Quarterly](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15457249?ref=richardjnewman.com) and elsewhere about the politics of using English as a language of instruction in pre- and post-apartheid South Africa, about the concept of what I think they called at the time and maybe still call “language rights,” the idea that communities had a right to their native language(s) regardless of what the dominant language in a country might be; and I remember being blown away by the concept of language maintenance, the idea that students for whom English was an additional language ought to be given the opportunity to maintain grade-level competence in their home language. (I’m pretty sure that was the term used at the time.) I intuited immediately that these issues should not be put in a silo where they applied only to immigrants—who were, at the time, the population I was most interested in working with—that the questions raised by those positions impinged on language politics as a whole in ways that mattered to native speakers of English too. Once I began teaching, however, and especially once I became the English as a Second Language Coordinator in my department, I had less and less time to worry about those larger issues. Instead, I found myself dealing far too often with the ignorance of professors who knew next to nothing about my field. Sometimes that ignorance was “honest,” in the sense that the professor knew they knew very little about the issues ESL students brought to their classrooms and they were willing to learn. Other times, and at its most extreme, this ignorance was willfully and proactively racist. I remember one instance, where a professor brought me two diagnostic exams written by, he said, “Spanish speakers” who had been misplaced in his class. “And you know how Spanish speakers are,” he told me. “They constantly drop verb endings and they don’t understand subject-verb agreement…” He handed me the essays and went off into the rest of his day. It turned out that these two Spanish speakers were from Haiti and Jamaica respectively. More than that, the Hatian student’s writing was near-native in fluency. She had made one error in the [future perfect progressive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uses%5Fof%5FEnglish%5Fverb%5Fforms?ref=richardjnewman.com#Future%5Fperfect%5Fprogressive). The Jamaican student’s writing, on the other hand, bore all the markers one would expect from a student who spoke a dialect other than so-called standard English and who, for whatever reason, had not acquired enough competence in the standard dialect to write at a college level. Clearly, these “Spanish-speaking” students did not belong in that professor’s class, and I was able to move them into classes with instructors whom I knew did not have the kinds of preconceptions that could do those students harm. I will never forget what the Haitian student told me when I met with her. She said she recognized the professor’s racism immediately, but racism had been till that moment an abstraction to her. She came from a country where almost everyone was Black, she said, and she’d been at a complete loss as to how to respond to him when he said he was referring her to me. I have no idea how prevalent that kind of ignorance is now among teaching faculty at any level of instruction, but I have never forgotten that experience as an object lesson in how important it is for educators, and perhaps especially teachers of writing, to know something about other-than-first-language (or dialect) acquisition. **§§§** Starting about five or six years before I retired, I participated in a volunteer initiative on my campus called Conversation Partners. Started by the ESL Program, Conversation Partners paired native English speaking faculty with ESL students so the students would have a chance to practice conversational English. One year, I was paired with a student from the People’s Republic of China whose name I don’t remember. She’d come to the States to study English and a subject I also don’t recall but that she had chosen so she could join her father’s very successful business when she returned home. Her father was a very rich, very powerful executive, with government connections. Towards the end of the semester, we had the one conversation that I remember clearly. It was about the [Tiananmen Square massacre](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-48445934?ref=richardjnewman.com), which she said never happened. It was an awkward moment to say the least. I wish I could reconstruct how the subject came up, because I had been very careful to keep politics out of our conversation, and I think she had been as well, not wanting the obvious ideological differences we might encounter to get in the way of why we were meeting: so she could practice her English. Nonetheless, I could not let the moment pass and so I called up on my computer one of the videos that had circulated at the time. She watched it in silence, as did I, and she said not a word when the video was finished. I don’t remember if we met after that, though I’m assuming we did because at the end of the semester she gave me this as a gift: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/05/IMG_0668-1.jpg) I have no idea if she intended the gift to have a symbolic significance and I have nothing else to say about my encounter with her, except to acknowledge that, writ large, the silence in which we sat after viewing that video is a silence that people across the world try far too often to hide, and to hide from, than to fill with anything meaningful. It is worthwhile, I think, to name it for what it was. **§§§** There is an essay I will probably never write about a book I was going to write, but won’t. It concerns a group of people I know well, who have a story that I once thought it would be important to tell. I went to each person whose life this book would have touched upon and asked if they thought the book project was worth pursuing and they said they did. Based on that, I submitted a query letter to an editor at one of the major publishing houses. She expressed some interest in the project and I began work on the proposal. Very soon after that, though, I heard that one of the people I’d spoken to was saying that the only reason I wanted to write the book was to make money off of their story. I stopped work on the project immediately, though I kept that fact to myself, preferring not to cause the kind of drama that confronting them would have caused. This was almost twenty years ago, and I have said not a word about the book since. Every so often, though, I hear things that indicate they are still thinking about it. Once, through the grapevine, I heard that one of them threatened to sue me if I ever tried to write it. He even said outright to someone who asked me whether I was still working on the project, “Richard knows better than that. He’s been warned.” Whatever window of opportunity there might have been for the story I thought we’d all agreed was worth telling is long past, so, frankly, even if they suddenly wanted me to pursue the project I would not now do so; and, if I’m being honest, if I thought writing it was worth the fallout, the essay is more interesting to me now anyway. It’s not worth it though, which is why I’ve written about it here, just to get it out of my head. **§§§** A couple of weeks ago, on one of the rare occasions that I was scrolling through Facebook, one of my sisters—I have two and we are estranged, as they are long-estranged from each other—appeared in my “People You May Know” stream. I was surprised to see her there, though I think the algorithm probably surfaced her because of a thread of mutual connections that we have on the platform that go back nearly forty years. Anyway, I was curious, so I went to her profile page to see what I could see, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that she has begun making and selling some truly beautiful art. “Pleasantly surprised” is actually not quite accurate. I was happy for her. I remembered a conversation I had long forgotten when I tried to convince our our grandmother to buy her as a graduation gift a truly high quality “artist set”—paints, brushes, colored pencils, whatever. My sister had talent and she had talked to me about wanting to develop it. My grandmother, however, demurred. “She’ll never be able to make a living doing that,” she said. I don’t remember what gift she bought instead, but as far as I know my sister stopped drawing after high school. So it made me happy to see her making art and also sad, since—and you will have to take my word for this—my happiness for her is not sufficient reason to reach across the chasm of our estrangement. ****A gentle reminder:** Four By Four is part of the free tier of **It All Connects.* If you are not currently a paid subscriber and would like to subscribe, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signup/65988db373946800080fe780/yearly). If you would like to make a one-time contribution to support my work on **It All Connects*, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/support). --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in* [*my work*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/) *or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* ### From Saadi’s Bustan: The Selfish Man and the Baghdad Fire URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/from-saadis-bustan-the-selfish-man-and-the-baghdad-fire/ Last updated: 2026-05-20T10:00:57.000Z Dear Friends, I am posting these translations—revised versions of those included in my **Selections from Saadi’s Bustan—*as a way of making Iran’s culture and literary history visible at a time when that visibility seems more important than ever. One night, a fire broke out in Baghdad. I’ve heard that most of the city burned to the ground. One man stood amidst the dust and smoke, giving thanks his shop remained intact. A man of wisdom called him out, “You fool! Are you the only one you care about, untroubled by this total devastation because your livelihood remains unburnt?” None but the stone-hearted turn to stone watching others bind stones to their bellies.\[1\] How can a rich man eat the food he’s served when he sees a poor man swallowing blood? Do not call whole one who seems at ease if sorrow twists his innards into knots of grief. Even though his friends have reached the inn, the tender-hearted man still loses sleep for those who weren’t able to keep up. When a king sees an ass weighed down by thorns, his heart becomes weighed down by that beast’s load. If you are someone predisposed towards good, a single line by Saadi will suffice. This one’s right for you if you will hear it: If you plant thorns, don’t expect jasmine! --- 1. This image is rooted in a practice of the time that was intended to distract people from hunger pangs and/or to help them feel full by placing weight against the outside of their stomachs. ↩︎ ### On My Desk Now: Some Tentative Thoughts on Confronting Antisemitism in America URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/on-my-desk-now-some-tentative-thoughts-on-confronting-antisemitism-in-america/ Last updated: 2026-05-15T10:00:27.000Z Last week, I attended an anti-antisemitism training workshop in my neighborhood cosponsored by [Malkhut](https://www.malkhutqueens.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) and [Jews for Racial and Economic Justice](https://www.jfrej.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) (JFREJ). Broadly speaking, the training is part of JFREJ’s larger agenda of building solidarity with other marginalized communities who, as they put it on their website, share “a mutual interest in fighting white supremacist ideology.” More specifically, as one of the presenters described it to me, the goal of this particular training—the audience of which would be primarily Jewish—was to help Jews think about how to respond to antisemitism on the left in ways designed to build understanding, trust, and solidarity, rather than by writing off the people or organizations that expressed the antisemitism as irredeemable antisemites by definition. I’m glad I went. It was good to sit in a room with other Jews and talk about legitimate concerns for Jewish safety without framing antisemitism as something transcendent and eternal, and I appreciated the way the group did not shy away from acknowledging the differences between antisemitism and other forms of hatred while at the same time rejecting the notion of a hierarchy of oppressions. We obviously did not solve anything during the couple of hours we spent together, but the discussion was thought-provoking in important ways, at least for me, and I thought I would share with you some of what I’ve been mulling over these past few days. One of my ongoing frustrations with discussions of antisemitism in the United States, both within the Jewish community and in society at large, is that they are overwhelmingly framed by one of two contexts: the Holocaust or the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Either Hitler’s Final Solution is held up as the ultimate expression of antisemitism or antisemitism is defined as the *real* reason that anti-Zionists are anti-Zionist. These two contexts, of course, are not parallel. The Nazis were antisemitic by definition, while anti-Zionists are not. As lenses of analysis, however, they share a kind of historical blindness in that they each elide the history of institutionalized antisemitism in the United States. The JFREJ training did not share that blindness per se. We barely mentioned the Holocaust, and the presenters addressed the question of whether anti-Zionism is by definition antisemitism in a way that made clear it is not, without denying that some antisemites use anti-Zionism as a kind of camouflage. Nonetheless, I found myself wondering if a framing that more explicitly invoked the history of antisemitism in this country could help strengthen even further the kinds of solidarity JFREJ’s trainings are intended to build. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### From Saadi’s Bustan: A Noble Man Suffers With The Victims of a Famine URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/from-saadis-bustan-a-noble-man-suffers-with-the-victims-of-a-famine/ Last updated: 2026-05-13T10:00:41.000Z Dear Friends, I am posting these translations—revised versions of those included in my **Selections from Saadi’s Bustan—*as a way of making Iran’s culture and literary history visible at a time when that visibility seems more important than ever. The famine in Damascus fell so hard that year that friends forgot what affection felt like. The sky above them grew so tight-fisted that neither crops nor date palms drank a drop. The ancient springs ran dry, and orphans’ tears was the only water anyone could find. If plumes of smoke rose from a household’s vent, it was nothing but a widow’s sigh of grief. I saw the once well-muscled trees unleaved, each one poor and weak as the poorest darvish. The orchard and the mountain, both were bare: locusts had eaten the gardens; people the locusts! In the midst of this, a friend came to see me, a man of wealth and status now so thin that only skin remained to clothe his bones. “Tell me,” I said, “what misery is this?” “Have you no common sense?” he answered me. It’s wrong to ask what you already know. Our distress has reached its final limit! ‘No rain falls; no smoke rises to heaven.’” “But I don’t understand why *you’re* concerned. Poison only kills if there’s no antidote! Someone else might die from deprivation, but not you. Why would a duck fear a tempest?” That learned man grew even more enraged, eyed me like a sage eyes an idiot. “My dear friend,” he said, “a man safe on shore will never sit at ease while his friends drown. It’s true I’ve not grown gaunt because I’m poor; watching poor men suffer has made me so. No prudent man would ever want to witness his own or someone else’s ragged wounds. You’re right: I have enough to not be wounded, but the wounds of others send shivers through my flesh. May anyone like me who has enough be deprived of ease if he stands idly by. Each time I see a darvish going hungry, my own food turns to poison in my mouth. If a man’s friends are languishing in prison, how can he take pleasure in a garden?” ### Of Note: May 11, 2026 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/of-note-may-11-2026/ Last updated: 2026-05-11T20:05:58.000Z Dear Friends, This week’s collection of articles is shorter than usual. I’ve been busy with other necessary things. I will keep sending these free posts out as long as it makes sense for me to do so. If you’d like to support the work that goes into making them and also have access to the paid tier of *It All Connects,* please consider [becoming a paid subscriber](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signup). --- ## Iran [**Anti-imperialist Left or the “Axis of Resistance” Left?**](https://truethings.naghmehs.com/p/anti-imperialist-left-or-the-axis?ref=richardjnewman.com)**, by Naghmeh Soharbi:** *“It is possible to occupy an anti-imperialist/progressive/whatever you want to call it position that holds the humanity of all these people in the region in its purview and that does not celebrate the Islamic Republic in order to condemn imperialism. We know it is possible because so many people already do that. But the challenge is in articulating that position.”* That is part of Sohrabi’s introduction to Dr. Mohammad Maljoo’s articulation of that position. He writes: “From a methodological perspective, the difference between the Axis-of-Resistance left and other anti-imperialist lefts begins at the point where one important reality, namely, imperialist pressure, gradually becomes their sole lens of analysis…It is here that the first slippage…occurs. Internal issues such as poverty, inequality, repression, and the crisis of representation are no longer regarded as problems arising from within society itself; rather, they are often attributed to the direct or indirect role of imperialism. The real lived experience of the people is not seen as it is, but is instead poured into a ready-made explanatory mold.” [**Vijay Prashad's Iran**](https://farahazadimokh.substack.com/p/vijay-prashads-iran)**, by Farah Mokhtareizadeh: “**[The document](https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/04/10/six-non-negotiable-terms-from-international-scholars-and-former-officials-from-30-countries-to-end-the-u-s-war-on-iran-amid-trumps-threat-of-war-crimes/?ref=richardjnewman.com)…describes former **Ayatollah Khamenei** as ‘recognised globally as a voice against arrogance and terrorism,’ calls for the ‘prosecution and extradition of operatives in anti-Iranian media’, meaning the exiled journalists through whom Iranian workers, feminists, and political prisoners communicate with the outside world \[and\] actually proposes handing those journalists back to a government that, according to Amnesty International and Iran Human Rights, executed at least 1,639 people in 2025 and killed more per capita than any country for which reliable data exists. \[The document\] end by declaring that ‘if Iran falls, the hope of a better, enlightened future for the world dies with it.’” The document in question, published in CounterPunch with over 170 signatories, is called “[Six Non-Negotiable Terms from International Scholars and Former Officials from 30 Countries to End the U.S. War on Iran](https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/04/10/six-non-negotiable-terms-from-international-scholars-and-former-officials-from-30-countries-to-end-the-u-s-war-on-iran-amid-trumps-threat-of-war-crimes/?ref=richardjnewman.com).” Mokhtareizadeh begins by pointing out that the signatories to the document make very strange bedfellows, including people on the left and on the right who would otherwise be on opposite sides of just about any other political issue. She asks why this should be the case and then goes on to show how conventional left wing analyses don’t work all that well when applied to the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is a very long, detailed, closely argued piece of writing that is worth reading next to Dr. Maljoo’s piece above. I have now read through it twice and I will probably need to read it two more times times in order fully to understand depth and the breadth of its analysis. It’s well worth reading because I think it has implications beyond the situation in Iran. [](https://gothamist.com/news/abortion-meds-still-available-through-telehealth-ny-after-court-restricts-mifepristone?ref=richardjnewman.com) ## Gaza & Lebanon [**Palestinians expose torture and sexual violence in Israeli detention**](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/7/palestinians-expose-torture-and-sexual-violence-in-israeli-detention?ref=richardjnewman.com)**, Al Jazeera Staff:** “*I was confined in a very small space, and then eight female soldiers appeared fully naked and started to touch sensitive organs in my body. They filmed us and forced us to repeat degrading sexual words.”* Those are the words of one of the men quoted in this article. If you balk at the idea that women would do such things, I remind you that this was many people’s response when they first about Lynndie England’s participation at [Abu Ghraib](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu%5FGhraib%5Ftorture%5Fand%5Fprisoner%5Fabuse?ref=richardjnewman.com). The reports quoted in the article document systemic torture and sexual violence against both male and female Palestinian prisoners. It’s the sort of thing it’s easy to look away from because it’s so disturbing to think about. We shouldn’t look away. [](https://theintercept.com/2026/04/24/palantir-irs-contract-data/?ref=richardjnewman.com) ## Israel [**The Israeli left is speaking only to itself,**](https://www.972mag.com/israeli-left-peace-conference-palestinians/?ref=richardjnewman.com) by Samah Watad: “The closest the conference came to discussing practical solutions was through repeated invocations of the two-state solution — the last familiar political framework many activists in Israel’s “peace camp” still cling to, despite the fact that the territorial and political foundations of such a solution [have largely disappeared](https://www.972mag.com/palestinian-state-israel-e1-plan-west-bank/?ref=richardjnewman.com).” Watad, a Palestinian journalist, writes about the complex feelings surrounding his disillusionment with the third annual “[People’s Peace Summit](https://www.timeisnow.co.il/english?ref=richardjnewman.com)” that was held in Tel Aviv. It’s a thought provoking article, and it made me think about the left in this country and how effective/ineffective it is. [**Something is shifting in Israel’s peace camp**](https://www.972mag.com/peoples-peace-summit-2026/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by Meron Rapoport: “This represents a shift in how the Israeli “peace camp” perceives itself. It is now a camp of resistance. This resistance is directed not only against “settler terror,” but also the army leadership and the soldiers who stand aside — and, in many cases, actively assist — as settler militias attack Palestinian communities.” Rapoport was at the same conference and came away with an impression very different from Watad’s. It’s not a case of one being true and the other false, or one realistic and the other idealistic. They focus on different things, and where one sees the seeds of something that’s beginning, the other wonders if those seeds will ever grow into anything meaningful. ## The United States [**AOC Just Lost the Far Left by Making the Single Greatest Mistake**](https://henmazzig.substack.com/p/aoc-just-lost-the-far-left-by-making)**, by Hen Mazzig: *“* *Marjorie Taylor Greene has spent her career on Jewish space laser theories, “globalist” rhetoric, Holocaust comparisons that desecrate the camps, and conspiracy material you would find on a 1930s pamphlet table. Her own colleagues kicked her off committees for it. She went anti-Israel, and the record was wiped. Tucker Carlson spent years as the most loathed figure on the American left, until he started platforming anti-Israel voices, and segments of the progressive online world began linking him approvingly. Megyn Kelly was untouchable until she became useful. Ana Kasparian was dismissed by the Hasan Piker wing as a sellout, and is now celebrated for declaring on Piers Morgan that the Jewish lobby controls the United States. Piers Morgan himself is anti-trans, anti-woke, contemptuous of every progressive cultural priority of the last decade, and his clips are passed around by activists who would have boycotted him a year ago, because he platforms anti-Israel guests.”*** I don’t always agree with Mazzig, though I think he is thought-provoking in important ways, but in this piece he makes an good point. Andrea Ocasio Cortez caught hell for calling out Greene as an antisemite, and the people she caught hell from were on the left, who seemed willing—as the the quote I’ve pulled asserts—to forgive her antisemitism because she’s taken an anti-Israel position. That is a phenomenon on the left that needs to be interrogated. [**Insane Pre-Crime Strategy Unveiled for Leftist “Extremists**](https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/insane-pre-crime-strategy-unveiled?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,” by Ken Klippenstein:** \[T\]he White House’s newly released National Counterterrorism Strategy…identifies the ‘left-wing,’ ‘anti-Fascists,’ ‘Anarchists’ and ‘radically pro-transgender’ ideologies as threats equivalent to jihadi groups like al Qaeda and ISIS, or narco-traffickers.” This is truly frightening. As Klippenstein explains, counterterrorism here is really a pre-crime strategy, a quasi-analog version of the movie [*Minority Report*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority%5FReport%5F%28film%29?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* in which the goal is to identify those who are going to commit acts of terror before they do anything—based on what they say, in other words, rather than what they do. Klippenstein’s final sentence is apt: “The war on terror has come home.” [**Prominent Christian Zionist Group Is Lobbying U.S. Lawmakers on Israel—Without Revealing It's Funded by Israel**](https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/christian-zionist-eagles-wings-lobbying-congress-israel-government-funding?utm%5Fcampaign=post-expanded-share&triedRedirect=true&ref=richardjnewman.com)**, by Nick Cleveland-Stout:** “Eagles’ Wings, which has about 30 employees, is not a registered foreign agent. Craig Holman, an ethics expert and government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, told Drop Site that Eagles’ Wings’ lobbying campaign raises serious questions about the organization’s compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), the U.S.’ preeminent law for regulating foreign influence.” People rightly criticize AIPAC for its role in influencing American elections and some direct a similar kind of criticism at that organization, ie, that it lobbies and influences the US government on behalf of a foreign entity. Not enough attention is paid, though, to the role Christian Zionists play—and to the extent that the Israeli government has aligned itself with them—especially given the fact that, as I just learned the other day, there are more Christian Zionists than there are Jews in the world. ### Learning To Love The Questions: Sometimes Resisting Means Recommitting Yourself To What You’re Already Doing URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/sometimes-resisting-means-recommitting-yourself-to-something-youre-already-doing/ Last updated: 2026-09-05T09:33:22.000Z Not too long after I began hosting First Tuesdays, an open mic/featured reader literary series that had been running in my neighborhood since 2007, I attended [Enough Is Enough](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2014/11/enough-is-enough-nyc-poetry-community-meeting-on-thursday/?ref=richardjnewman.com), a meeting organized by a group of women poets who were “fed up with the reality of sexual violence, intimidation, and misogyny that continues to exist in our poetry circles.” As a new host, I thought it was important to hear what those women had to say. If First Tuesdays was going to be part of New York City’s larger literary community, then I needed to make that community’s issues my own. Sadly, and not surprisingly, the stories women told at that meeting were all too familiar, ranging from what might broadly be categorized as “male-hosts-behaving-badly” to institutional-level problems, like the fact that poets who were known serial harassers or worse seemed to suffer no consequences, employment-related or otherwise, even when that behavior was reported. The discussion that followed these stories also covered familiar territory: the importance of listening to and believing women; the need to hold men, and especially for men to hold each other, accountable; strategies for implementing the kinds of systemic change that would make that accountability truly institutional; but when it came to what reading-series hosts like me could do to make our spaces safe, the discussion stalled. We were, after all—and there were more than a few series represented—overwhelmingly volunteers with no real authority over the venues where our series take place, making it hard to think of specific, concrete measures that we would have enough leverage to make stick. Then one of the women who organized the gathering wondered aloud how it would change things if every reading series in New York included somewhere in its web presence, or at its venue if that were possible, a written commitment to what we now call diversity, equity, and inclusion, incorporating specifically a zero tolerance statement about sexual victimization of any kind. I thought this was a brilliant idea. Such a statement would allow me at the very least to establish publicly both a set of expectations and a standard of accountability for my series’ content, management, and audience. It would serve as a resource I or anyone else involved with First Tuesdays could refer people to when telling them about the series, as well as a publicly accessible code of conduct should it ever become necessary to call someone to account for their behavior, including me. I wrote a statement, circulated it on the series mailing list to get buy-in from as many regulars as possible, and posted it to the [First Tuesdays website](https://firsttuesdays.net/what-is-first-tuesdays?ref=richardjnewman.com), where it has lived now for more than ten years. I did not feel the need to incorporate it into our regular meetings, though, until we began once again to meet in person after the pandemic shutdown and I actually had to ban a fellow poet from our open mic. He’d read an egregiously sexist and implicitly racist poem for which he refused to take any responsibility despite the ample room I gave him to do so, first during the break between the open mic and our featured reader and then in an email exchange over the course of the next week or so. In that exchange, he criticized me for calling him out publicly, immediately after he read the poem. He felt blind-sided, he said, which struck me as a point worth considering, not because I thought I shouldn’t have called him out like that, but because if he’d never read what I’d begun to call the First Tuesdays vision statement, there was no reason for him not to assume our open mic was, like so many open mics are, more of a public square where anything goes than a curated literary space. That’s when I decided to start reading the statement out loud at the beginning of every meeting: > First Tuesdays is an open mic/featured reader literary gathering where writers who wrestle with the issues of our day—from racism and sexual violence to climate change and economic inequality—can find an audience willing to embrace the risk and discomfort that come with sharing politically engaged, satirical, or otherwise edgy material; where those writers can coexist, in an atmosphere of mutual respect and camaraderie, with writers whose work is more traditional and conservative; where anyone who comes only to listen, even if they just happen to walk in off the street, can sit down with a cup of tea or glass of wine and feel not just welcomed, but challenged, engaged, comforted, seen, maybe even inspired. > At the heart of First Tuesdays, in other words, is an ongoing, proactive commitment to diversity and inclusivity, in both the kinds of literary work we welcome into our community and the people who come to share it. Nothing will erode that sense of community more surely, however, than the mistrust and hatred borne of sexism, racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, or any of the other far-too-many ways that human beings have learned to target each other for who they or what they believe. So I will state this plainly. Neither work nor behavior that bespeaks any of those “isms” or “phobias” is welcome at First Tuesdays, and I will, as host, confront and hold accountable anyone who brings either into our midst. When I first started this practice, I explained it by talking about my exchange with that banned poet. Over the last four years, though, and especially since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, it has become something more important: an affirmation that gathering as we do every month, as we have been doing for the thirteen years that I’ve been running the series—and by “we” I mean everyone: the regulars, the newcomers, the featured readers, the people who just happen to be in the café when the reading starts—that gathering as we do to share the literature we make is in and of itself a form of resistance that we should not take for granted. When I think about the impact that reading this statement aloud has had on the First Tuesdays community, I think about the people who nod along as I read, even those who’ve heard it month after month since I started, and about the applause the statement sometimes gets, and the softly spoken—and sometimes not so softly spoken—expressions of support I hear when I’m done reading. Listening as I read the statement out loud, in other words, matters to them, just as reading it matters to me. Because even if it feels like all we’ve done on the first Tuesday of the month is walk a block or two to the café to hang out with friends and listen to and talk about literature, we should not forget that there are an awful lot of powerful people in this country who would very much like to undo not just the community that we have formed, but also the capacity inherent in literature to build that kind of community in the first place. ### From Saadi’s Bustan: The Hermit Theophilus and the Tyrant URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/from-saadis-bustan-the-hermit-theophilus-and-the-tyrant/ Last updated: 2026-05-06T10:00:33.000Z Dear Friends, I am posting these translations—revised versions of those included in my **Selections from Saadi’s Bustan—*as a way of making Iran’s culture and literary history visible at a time when that visibility seems more important than ever. A wise man in Outer Syria claimed for his home the corner of a cave. The path of self-restraint in that dark place placed beneath his feet contentment’s treasure. I’ve heard his name was Theophile, in form human; in thought and action, like an angel. Like the mystic who surrenders guarantees, he’d gone begging to rid himself of greed; since his soul commanded him always to give, he’d gone from place to place, humbled, and gave; and now he sought no favor at another’s door, so great men came to bow their heads at his. The nobleman appointed by the king to guard the border where this wise man lived preyed on the helpless everywhere he found them, digging in his claws for all he could take. Pitiless, he razed cities, killed for the sake of it; his bitter presence curdled the world’s face. Those who left his tyranny behind carried his evil name throughout the land; those who stayed lived lacerated lives, cursing his name when only they could hear. (When a despot’s reach grows long enough, you won’t see wide smiles on men’s faces.) On occasion, the tyrant came to see the sage, but Theophile wouldn’t deign to look at him. “Auspicious one!” the despot once called out, “Do not turn away from me in loathing! I’m here to offer you my friendship. From where does the hate you feel for me come? Imagine my appointment stripped from me; would my honor, then, be less than a darvish? No! And more than that I don’t expect. Treat me as you do all other men.” These words incensed that wise and pious man. “Have you no common sense?” he asked. “The fact of your existence brings distress to all; and their distress distresses me. You’re my friend’s enemy; you’re mine as well. God, too, sees an enemy in you! So why should I, in vain, call you my friend? Do not kiss my hand as if we’re close. Seek instead the friendship of my friends. I’ll never befriend my friend’s enemy. If I did, my friends would have my hide. How can the stone-hearted sleep at night when the world sleeps tight-hearted on their account?” ### Of Note: May 3, 2026 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/of-note-may-3-2026/ Last updated: 2026-05-05T02:02:43.000Z Dear Friends, I originally started sending these posts out to share with you sources about the war in Iran that you might not otherwise see. Important as seeking out alternative perspectives is—and thank you to those of you who have let me know how much you value—it’s also important not to lose sight of the fact that what the United States and Israel are doing in Iran, Gaza, and Lebanon is part of the same rightwing strategy as the Trump administration’s deportation campaign, the battle over abortion, the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, attacks on higher education, and more. For that reason, I am going to start including links to articles about those issues as well, not because I think you are unaware of them—if you’re one of my readers, you almost certainly are—but because I think it’s useful (and for me it is motivating) to gather together in one place as many different aspects of the whole picture as possible. I will keep sending these free posts out as long as it makes sense for me to do so. If you’d like to support the work that goes into making them and also have access to the paid tier of *It All Connects,* please consider [becoming a paid subscriber](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signup). --- ## Iran [**Why Iran’s Oil Infrastructure Is Not Exploding Like Trump Said It Would**](https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/trump-iran-oil-infrastructure-explode?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Murtaza Hussain: *“But numerous experts inside and outside of Iran strongly disputed the claim that causing a production shutdown on Iranian oil wells would trigger serious harm to the country’s infrastructure, with one expert calling the claim reported in the Times ‘egregiously false.’”* I did not know Trump had predicted that Iran’s oil infrastructure would explode and be permanently damaged as a result of the of its blockade of Iranian ports or that the three-day timeline he asserted would pass without incident. This article reveals yet another example of the US underestimating Iran’s strategic acumen. [**How Iranian monarchists have targeted anti-war activists**](https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/how-iranian-monarchists-have-targeted-anti-war-activists?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by Amara Sophia Elahi: *“‘We’re going to find you, we’re going to rape you, we’re going to kill you.’ This is just one of hundreds of messages that Arjang Alidai, an Iranian-British engineer based in the UK, has received from monarchist compatriots in recent months. Alidai first became a target after he voted in the 2024 Iranian presidential election, which many anti-government Iranians boycotted. They viewed voters as complicit with the Islamic Republic, and many now see Iranians who oppose the US-Israeli war on Iran in the same light.”* If you have not paid any attention to Reza Pahlavi, the son of the pre-Islamic-Revolution Shah of Iran, and the movement to restore Iran’s monarchy by bringing him back to power, it’s worth getting to know a little bit about them. [**Why the Iranian Regime Owns the Streets**](https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/online-exclusive/why-the-iranian-regime-owns-the-streets/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by Mohammad Ali Kadivar: *“On the thirtieth night of the war, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Parliament, issued a formal message to the Iranian people placing street presence on precisely the same footing as military performance: ’Just as the soldiers are not abandoning the missiles and the Strait of Hormuz, you should not abandon the streets either.’ Missiles, the Strait, and the street — named together as the three fronts of Iran’s resistance.”* This is a fascinating analysis of an overlooked aspect of the Islamic Republic’s organizational acumen: the deliberate cultivation of pro-government rallies and protests as infrastructure. [**Music and Survival in Wartime Tehran**](https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/music-and-survival-in-wartime-tehran/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by Fateme Karimkhan: *“As the devastation from the U.S.-Israeli air campaign became normalized, the political situation inside Iran, as well as in the large Iranian diaspora, only grew more tense and bitter...In such conditions, long dominated by division and suffering, a unifying voice for Iranians emerged from music.”* I wish this article included links to some of the music that Kamrikhan talks about. Still, it’s worth reading to get a sense of how Iranians are coping on the ground not only with the devastation that the war has wrought, but with the political tensions that have arisen because of it. [**Sentenced to Survive A voice from Tehran**](https://minakhanlarzadeh.substack.com/p/sentenced-to-survive-a-voice-from), by Mina Khanlarzadeh: *“In recent months, state-produced videos, including rap performances presented as signs of resistance, have circulated widely. But those videos should not drown out the voices of young rappers inside Iran who have been punished, silenced, or destroyed.”* If you haven’t seen the Iranian-propaganda rap videos, [here is an example](https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=bdFrCrnsasg&si=%5F8UkmfJvEod1w9VD&ref=richardjnewman.com). Khanlarzadeh’s post includes a video of the rapper Saam, along with the lyrics in Persian and English. [**On Anti-Forgiveness**](https://truethings.naghmehs.com/p/on-anti-forgiveness?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by Naghmeh Sohrabi: *“I’ve had so many conversations these past two months with Iranian friends and colleagues in the US about how heartbreaking the absence of an anti-war movement has felt...So many of us have noted, experienced, and even grieved the ways in which colleagues, people we have worked with for years, have not reached out to say “hey, you ok?” either out of discomfort or some other reason I can’t be bothered to fathom.”* Sohrabi is painfully honest in this piece about her struggle to come to terms with what she calls the “axis of alienation” on which she says the war has left her. [](https://gothamist.com/news/abortion-meds-still-available-through-telehealth-ny-after-court-restricts-mifepristone?ref=richardjnewman.com) ## Gaza & Lebanon [**What exactly is white phosphorus and why is it controversial?**](https://www.middleeasteye.net/explainers/what-white-phosphorus-controversial-israel-lebanon?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by Daniel Tester: *“White phosphorus causes serious bodily harm, including suffocation, in closed spaces such as tunnels. Prolonged exposure to the airways can result in nausea, burning, fluid buildup in the lungs and extreme thirst. White phosphorus is also sticky, clinging to skin and clothes, generating temperatures of up to 2,500C and burning through flesh to the bone, causing excruciating injuries. Sometimes wounds will smoke or phosphoric acid will appear. White phosphorus can also poison organs if it gets into the bloodstream, causing death.”* Israel has been using white phosphorus weapons in Gaza and Lebanon in violation of international law. [**The dark side of Gaza’s new fancy cafes and restaurants**](https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/5/2/the-dark-side-of-gazas-new-fancy-cafes-and-restaurants?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** Eman Abu Zayed: *“The war made some people in Gaza rich, especially those who engaged in illicit activities like smuggling, looting, and hoarding during acute shortages. This wealth is now coming out in various forms, including luxury cafes and restaurants.”* An on-the-ground opinion piece about a little-reported aspect of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This article, [Rise in caesarean section births in Gaza brings danger and infection risks](https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/4/30/rise-in-caesarean-section-births-in-gaza-brings-danger-and-infection-risks?traffic%5Fsource=rss&ref=richardjnewman.com), offers a look at another little-noted consequence of the war. [**London police refuse to investigate British nationals accused of war crimes in Gaza**](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/london-police-refuse-investigate-british-nationals-accused-war-crimes-gaza?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by MEE staff: *“\[T\]he report detailed the alleged involvement of the 10 British nationals, including dual citizens, in the “targeted killings of civilians and aid workers, indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas, attacks on hospitals and protected sites, and the forced transfer and displacement of civilians.” The police said they would not pursue the matter further because, according to them, there is “no realistic prospect of conviction and that an effective investigation could not be conducted.”* A bit of context: An office charged with tracking possible violations of international law by Israel in Lebanon and Gaza has been closed because its funds were cut, while at the same time officials are considering banning upcoming pro-Palestinian marches because two Jewish men were [stabbed](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-starmer-condemns-antisemitic-attack-after-two-jewish-men-stabbed-london?ref=richardjnewman.com) in northwest London. [**Lebanon’s Beekeepers Are at Breaking Point**](https://newlinesmag.com/spotlight/lebanons-beekeepers-are-at-breaking-point/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by Amelia Dhuga: *“‘Bees are responsible for most of the pollination of wild plants and fruited trees,’ says Mohamed Ibrahim Moneim, one of ByBee’s founders. This makes them central to sustaining local food systems and biodiversity.”* Another little-noted consequence of war: Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon has exasperated a problem rooted first in climate change and other environmental factors. [](https://theintercept.com/2026/04/24/palantir-irs-contract-data/?ref=richardjnewman.com) ## Israel [**The Treason of the Rabbis**](https://avrumburg.substack.com/p/the-treason-of-the-rabbis?r=1gwysa&utm%5Fmedium=ios&triedRedirect=true)**,** by Avrum Berg: *“The rabbinate as an institution has become the handmaid of the government. Dependent on its funds, on the machinations of politicians who manipulate its institutions, and on family dynasties that have nothing whatsoever to do with greatness. And the result is not only silence. It is a Torah-sanctioned worship of power and admiration of violence.”* This full-throated condemnation of the Israeli rabbinate by a former Speaker of the Knesset is a welcome example of speaking truth to power. [Here’s](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israels-top-jewish-religious-body-refuses-condemn-smashing-jesus-statue?ref=richardjnewman.com) an example of what he’s talking about. **“**[**Kippah and Punishment,” sans Dostoevsky**](https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/kippah-and-punishment-sans-dostoevsky)**,** by Daniel Gordis: *“Yes, the story is fairly disgusting (to put matters mildly), but even in the midst of the sadness about what we’re in danger of becoming, there are rays of light that might not reach beyond the Hebrew-speaking world.”* The story Gordis is talking about, which was covered [here](https://www.timesofisrael.com/man-whose-coexistence-kippa-was-carved-up-by-israel-police-asks-what-is-in-store-for-us/?ref=richardjnewman.com) in *The Times of Israel,* concerns a man who was detained by Israeli police for wearing, as a personal symbol of peace, a yarmulke with both the Israeli and Palestinian flags on it. The police returned the yarmulke to him after they had cut out the portion that contained the Palestinian flag. The ray of hope Gordis is talking about, which you have to scroll down in his post to read, is a social media post by an Israeli attorney who thinks that man with the yarmulke is “living in a fantasy,” but who nonetheless sees the police who arrested him as agents of “suppression.” It’s good to be reminded that Israeli society is not as monolithic as the country’s critics can sometimes make it seem. There’s also more coverage of this incident [here](https://www.972mag.com/israel-crackdown-palestinian-flag-surreal/?ref=richardjnewman.com). ## The United States [**Letters From An American, April 29, 2026**](https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-29-2026)**,** by Heather Cox Richardson: *“I want to make sure that yesterday’s speeches by President Donald J. Trump and King Charles III of the United Kingdom don’t get lost in the tidal wave of news. They presented a very clear picture of what is at stake in the United States today.”* Richardson lays out in very stark terms the difference between the two speeches. Trump “redefined the United States from a nation based on the principles of the Enlightenment, as it has historically been understood, to one based in the white nationalist ideas of blood and soil,” while King Charles focused his speech, broadly speaking, on democratic values and the importance of diversity. This is an analysis worth reading. [**Pentagon announces deal with seven AI companies for classified systems**](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/1/pentagon-announces-deal-with-seven-ai-companies-for-classified-systems?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by Joseph Stepansky: *“\[The announcement\] comes amid wider scrutiny over involvement by companies with the US military, which has gained renewed attention amid a public fallout with the AI company Anthropic and questions over how AI has been used in the* [*US-Israeli war with Iran*](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/17/iran-wars-big-winners-wall-street-weapons-firms-ai-and-green-energy?ref=richardjnewman.com)*.”* As I read this, I could not help but think about [Person of Interest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person%5Fof%5FInterest%5F%28TV%5Fseries%29?ref=richardjnewman.com), a TV series in which two super-AI’s, one good and one evil, do battle. The evil AI, called Samaritan (note the ironic absence of *good* as a modifier), is in pursuit of a society in which government surveillance is total and complete. The good AI, called The Machine, wants not just to stop Samaritan, but to make itself invisible so that humans are no longer tempted to use it. We are, of course, nowhere near that kind of scenario, and we may never be, but this article made me queasy nonetheless about how the military use of AI will shape our future. [**Abortion meds still available through telehealth in NY after court restricts mifepristone**](https://gothamist.com/news/abortion-meds-still-available-through-telehealth-ny-after-court-restricts-mifepristone?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by Ryan Kost: *“A federal appeals court ruling that prohibits mailing the most common abortion pill nationwide will not immediately disrupt medication abortion access in New York City, providers say.”* If you haven’t been keeping up with the ongoing battle over abortion, this article points in a direction you should be paying attention to. [**Palantir Is Helping Trump’s IRS Conduct “Massive-Scale” Data Mining**](https://theintercept.com/2026/04/24/palantir-irs-contract-data/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by Sam Biddle: *“The IRS use of the software, launched under Trump’s first term and expanded under Biden, is now in the hands of an IRS Criminal Investigations office that has drastically scaled back its pursuit of tax cheats and pivoted, under Trump’s direction, toward investigating ‘left-leaning groups,’ the Wall Street Journal* [*reported*](https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-irs-investigations-left-leaning-groups-democratic-donors-612a095e?mod=hp%5Flead%5Fpos1&ref=richardjnewman.com) *in October.”* I think that sentence speaks for itself. This is an issue well worth following. [**“We Knew They Were Paying Informants:” SPLC Donors Reject Trump DOJ Fraud Claims**](https://theintercept.com/2026/04/24/splc-donors-fraud-doj-kash-patel/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by Noah Horowitz: *“The Trump administration is taking aim at SPLC’s image by accusing the group of lying to its donor base and propping up the very groups it claims to fight in order to stay in business.”* If you know anything about the Southern Poverty Law Center, you know this is bullshit, but it is a frightening example of how the Trump administration is using very 1984-ish logic to go after organizations on the left. [**Justice Dept. Targets Hundreds of Citizens in New Push for Denaturalization**](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/us/politics/justice-dept-citizens-denaturalization.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.fVA.pSzc.7taZ%5FryDniKS&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** Ernesto Londoño and Hamed Aleaziz: *“The message it sends is that naturalized citizens don’t have the same rights and stability as native-born citizens,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia. “The government has used this power in the past to target people it views as political opponents.”* [**Ghana ‘rejects’ US health deal over data concerns**](https://www.semafor.com/article/04/29/2026/ghana-rejects-us-health-deal-over-data-concerns?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by Alexis Akwagyiram: *“Washington’s pursuit of deals comes after last year’s shuttering of the US Agency for International Development, which had disbursed $40 billion a year across 130 countries.”* The Trump administration closed USAID and now wants to use aid as leverage to get personal data on people in Africa, or at least African governments are concerned that the condition set by the US for that aid—that it receive in return information about potential epidemic-causing pathogens—could result in serious privacy violations. Given the concerns that have been raised here about the Trump administration’s data collection and privacy, those African governments are probably right to be concerned. ### On The Trail of a Tale - Part Four: How I Came to Play a Very Small Role in Saadi’s Travels Through the World URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/on-the-trail-of-a-tale-part-four-how-i-came-to-play-a-very-small-role-in-saadis-travels-through-the-world/ Last updated: 2026-05-26T17:26:13.000Z What persuaded me to accept ISIC’s commission, however, was thinking about the generations of Iranian Americans, like my son, who did not read Persian. They deserved, I thought, access to a version of that heritage that would “sing” in their dominant tongue the way the original “sang” in Persian. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### From Saadi’s Bustan: The Emperor of Rum Enjoined to Endure His Burdens URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/from-saadis-bustan-the-emperor-of-rum-enjoined-to-endure-his-burdens/ Last updated: 2026-04-29T10:00:13.000Z Dear Friends, I am posting these translations—revised versions of those included in my **Selections from Saadi’s Bustan—*as a way of making Iran’s culture and literary history visible at a time when that visibility seems more important than ever. I’ve heard that Rum’s ruler spoke these words, crying before a learned, pious man: “My enemy has stripped me of my worth, all except this city and this fort. Long and hard I worked to make my son the people’s captain after me, but now this evil race’s army threatens that, twisting my manhood like a wrist behind my back. I need a plan to recover what I’ve lost. Obsessing over this corrodes my soul.” The wise one answered, “Be troubled for yourself! Most of your life, with its best parts, has passed. The dignity that’s yours right now is yours; once you’re gone, the world is someone else’s. If he’s wise, he is; if he’s not, he’s not. Don’t assume his burdens; he’ll bear them on his own. To hold what you have taken by the sword only to let it go is wasted effort. Don’t find comfort in this five-day-dwelling; give careful thought to how you’ll take your leave. Name for me a single Persian ruler, from Fereidoun back to Zahhak and Jamshid, who managed to escape his rule’s decline. The throne of God alone remains forever. Who can still have hope they’ll never leave, when everyone who leaves here leaves for good? A man’s accumulated wealth is his. After he’s gone, it’s always someone else’s, but the good deeds that live on after him have earned eternal mercy for his spirit. When a great man’s good name remains, you can say with men of heart *‘He* remains!’ Cultivate largesse within yourself if you would one day eat the fruit it bears. Practice generosity. Tomorrow, in God’s court, you’ll be judged by what you gave. The one whose effort showed along the way will earn the higher rank in the Court of Truth. The one who lagged behind, furtive, ashamed, will fear what he has earned for work not done. Leave him to bite hard on the back of his hand; he baked no bread despite the oven’s heat. You’ll understand full well at harvest time: only sluggards leave these seeds unsown. ### Of Note: April 26, 2026 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/of-note-april-26-2026/ Last updated: 2026-05-05T02:03:18.000Z Dear Friends, I missed sending this email out last week because I was busy finishing up my newsletter series called “On The Trail of a Tale,” which traces the path by which a poem by the 13th century Persian poet Saadi became Benjamin Franklin’s *Parable Against Persecution.* Part 4 of that series will post on May 1\. You can read the first three parts here: [Part 1](https://www.richardjnewman.com/on-the-trail-of-a-tale-part-one-benjamin-franklins-persian-parable/), [Part 2](https://www.richardjnewman.com/on-the-trail-of-a-tale-part-2-the-sources-of-franklins-parable-in-17th-century-christian-arguments-for-religious-tolerance/), [Part 3](https://www.richardjnewman.com/on-the-trail-of-a-tail-part-three-crossing-the-border-from-iran-to-europe/). I think the series is particularly relevant given the US-Israeli war on Iran for two reasons. Most immediately, it serves as a reminder of Iranian culture’s influence on the West, which the demonizing rhetoric about Iran makes it’s easy to lost sight of; and, more broadly, it demonstrates the power of translation, of being open to other cultures as a matter of principle and practice, and of the potential for change that lies inherent in that openness. In that light, it is very telling that only 3% of the books published in the United States are literary translations. Ours is not a culture that is open to others in that way. Now, on to the links: ## The Links - [Letter from an American - April 21, 2026](https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-21-2026): “There is the unmistakable feeling that the wheels are coming off the MAGA bus.” If you don’t know Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter, you should. She manages to pack a whole lot of information into a single missive. Sometimes, like this one, it’s a take on one aspect of current events. ([This one](https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-20-2026?r=1gwysa&utm%5Fmedium=ios&triedRedirect=true) is also worth reading in that regard.) Other times, like [this one](https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-19-2026), it’s a take on history that is relevant to the state of the world today. - [Which Iran Is America Dealing With?](https://truethings.naghmehs.com/p/which-iran-is-america-dealing-with?r=1gwysa&utm%5Fmedium=ios&triedRedirect=true&ref=richardjnewman.com): Naghmen Sohrabi traces the consistency and continuity in the way pundits in the west have prognosticated about Iran since the 1990s and points out what may not be immediately obvious unless you're paying close attention: “The issue is not, in any shape or form, whether there is disagreement in Iranian decision-making...\[T\]he Iranian political system \[does\] not try to hide its political differences \[but the pundits insist on talking\] about infighting and factionalism amongst Iran’s political elite \[with the goal of being able\] to assign or predict blame for a possible failure to reach a deal and the restart of the war...\[T\]his framework allows us to ignore the realpolitik of how this war was started, why this war was started, and the ways in which the nature of this war has limited the possibilities of negotiating a new deal, a deal that the US did away with in 2018, by focusing on a familiar punditry bogeyman: Iranian infighting and factionalism.” - [The Counterterrorism Czar Without a Counterterrorism Plan](https://www.propublica.org/article/sebastian-gorka-trump-counterterrorism-czar-iran-terrorism?ref=richardjnewman.com): “To current and former national security officials, these were omens, signs of the dangers they predicted last year when President Donald Trump began redirecting counterterrorism resources toward his mass deportation campaign.” This piece by ProPublica delves into the fact that Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s counterterrorism adviser, has yet to come up with a national counterterrorism strategy. - [A history of Israel’s invasions of Lebanon](https://www.middleeasteye.net/explainers/history-israel-invasions-lebanon?ref=richardjnewman.com): From [Middle East Eye](https://www.middleeasteye.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com), this piece is worth reading for the history you probably, like me, did not know. For example, did you know that Israel has been occupying southern Lebanon on and off since October 1948? I did not. I am sure the question of whether or not Israel’s actions were justified will be deeply contested, so my goal in sharing this is less to take a side—though I think the side I’m on is pretty obvious—than to offer an example of just how much of the history of that region has been elided in what we learn about it here in the States. - [As Iran crisis drags on, fears of global food catastrophe grow](https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/4/21/as-iran-crisis-drags-on-fears-of-global-food-crisis-grow?ref=richardjnewman.com), by John Powers: “‘Food prices will definitely rise in the coming months, making it more difficult for many people around the world to afford adequate and healthy diets,’ Matin Qaim, executive director of the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn in Germany, told Al Jazeera. ‘Poor people in Africa and Asia will be hurt the most because they have to spend a high share of their income on food anyway,’ Qaim said.” - [Life Under Israeli Occupation in Syria’s Quneitra](https://newlinesmag.com/spotlight/life-under-israeli-occupation-in-syrias-quneitra/?ref=richardjnewman.com), from [New Lines](http://newlinesmag.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com): “*New Lines* visited the southern province to get a sense of life under the Israeli occupation and speak to residents of the area. Many of them live in fear of the unknown, with Israel carrying out raids and arrests at will. Most feel like their soldiers’ presence is an unwelcome imposition that they have no choice but to live with.” I did not know that Israel was also occupying part of Syria. - [Hungary will abide by ICC over Netanyahu, says incoming PM](https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/hungary-will-abide-icc-over-netanyahu-says-incoming-pm?ref=richardjnewman.com): Hungary’s new prime minister, Peter Magyar, has essentially said that he would have Benjamin Netanyahu arrested so that the International Criminal Court can try him for crimes against humanity. - [These Middle Eastern News Sites Are Actually U.S. Government Propaganda Operations](https://theintercept.com/2026/04/20/pentagon-middle-eastern-news-propaganda-iran/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Sam Biddle: “[Al-Fassel](https://alfasselnews.com/?locale=en%5FGB&ref=richardjnewman.com) and [Pishtaz News](https://pishtaznews.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) are, in fact, part of network of websites and social media accounts purporting to be legitimate Middle Eastern news outlets that are in fact propaganda mills funded by the United States government...” Just something worth knowing. - [Senior UAE scholar says US bases are “a burden and not a strategic asset](https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/senior-uae-scholar-says-us-bases-are-burden-and-not-strategic-asset?ref=richardjnewman.com),” by Bilge Kotan: According to Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a prominent academic with connections to the kingdom’s leadership, “What the UAE needs is to acquire only the best and latest weapons that America has. Therefore, it is time to think about closing the American bases, as they are a burden and not a strategic asset.” It’s a crack in the facade worth paying attention to. - [Remembering Iran’s National Ballet Company, Disbanded in 1979](https://kayhanlife.com/culture/stage/interview-remembering-irans-national-ballet-company-disbanded-in-1979/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Katayoon Halajan: This is an interview with Gita Ostovani, one of the founding members of the dance troupe and a teacher at the National Ballet Conservatory of Iran—because I think it’s important to remember that the Islamic Republic is still the Islamic Republic. - [As barbed wire blocks kids from class, Palestinians stage “Freedom School:”](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/20/as-barbed-wire-blocks-kids-from-class-palestinians-stage-freedom-school?traffic%5Fsource=rss&ref=richardjnewman.com) “For more than 40 days during the US-Israeli war on Iran, Palestinian schools were closed in the area. But last week when a ceasefire allowed Palestinian schools in the West Bank to reopen – even if for [only three days a week](https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/2/13/israel-deprives-palestinians-proper-education-witholding-revenues?ref=richardjnewman.com) – the children in Umm al-Khair arrived to find the fence blocking the path to their school a kilometre (0.6 miles) away. When the children tried to go around the fence, soldiers launched tear gas and sound grenades at children as young as five years old...Security camera footage recorded by community members showed settlers coming during the night to erect the barbed wire fence. Despite being erected without legal authorisation, soldiers have refused to take down the barrier...” - [The Problem With Hasan Piker’s Einstein Story](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/hasan-piker-einstein-democrats/686855/?gift=9L5E0%5F00dQA8ldt%5F3rAKn1r5UnxruG4rBjmP4I%5FH3CM&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share), by Yair Rosenberg: “\[Einstein\] was also a deeply reluctant nationalist. Before Israel was founded, Einstein advocated for a shared state for Jews and Arabs, [writing](https://www.shapell.org/manuscript/einstein-zionist-views-in-1946/?ref=richardjnewman.com) in 1946 that ‘what we can and should ask’ is for ‘secured bi-national status in Palestine with free immigration.’ But once Israel was established, Einstein strongly supported its continued existence, while insisting that its ultimate success depended on the pursuit of peace and fair treatment of the land’s Arab inhabitants.” Rosenberg offers a useful correction to the portrait of Einstein as an ardent anti-Zionist that is often deployed by critics of Israel. - [Hopelessness and Love in an Israeli Prison](https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/hopelessness-and-love-in-an-israeli-prison/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Toby Lichtig: This review of Nasser Abu Srour’s prison memoir [*The Tale of A Wall*](https://otherpress.com/product/the-tale-of-a-wall-9781635423877/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* which also includes a profile of the author is well worth reading. I am planning to buy the book. ### Four by Four #54 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-54/ Last updated: 2026-04-24T11:48:31.000Z #### Contents ## Publication News May 2026, next month, marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of my first book of poems, [*The Silence of Men*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/the-silence-of-men/)*,* which I think is worth celebrating because it is—and this is a testament to [CavanKerry Press](https://cavankerrypress.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com)’ commitment to its authors—still in print and, somewhat remarkably (to me at least), still selling. I just received my 2025 royalty check for $4.83\. It’s easy to laugh at that amount, and we’ve all heard the jokes about how poets are only in it for the money (right?), but I have always believed that poetry does its work in the world very slowly. I don’t know how many copies of the book that check represents, or how many people will ultimately read those copies, but it makes me happy and not a little bit humbled to think that poems I wrote more than two decades ago are still doing their work somewhere. In other news, [*Bryant Literary Review*](https://digitalcommons.bryant.edu/blr/?ref=richardjnewman.com) has published “[Faith](https://digitalcommons.bryant.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2049&context=blr&ref=richardjnewman.com),” a poem from my next book of poems, *2020,* for which I just signed a contract, again, with [Fernwood Press](http://www.fernwoodpress.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com). The book is tentatively scheduled to come out in Spring 2027. ## Four Things To Read [Dawn](https://archipelagobooks.org/book/dawn/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Sevgi Soysal, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely: > The oppressors…know exactly what they’re doing, and what they’re out to prevent. They need their scapegoats. Why else did the kings and emperors of old put so much faith in cruelty? The spectacle of cruelty most of all. They used it to change the past to suit their story. And to prevent what might become. Did they throw their slaves to the lions just for fun? Oppressors need a constant stream of victims to survive. First published in Turkey in 1975, as Maureen Freely says in her introduction, the story this novel tells “could just as easily have happened yesterday,” though if she were writing that introduction now, she would probably replace *yesterday* with *today.* [Soysal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevgi%5FSoysal?ref=richardjnewman.com), who had a distinguished career as a writer and translator, was imprisoned for spreading communist propaganda and obscenity by the Turkish government after the military seized control of the country in 1971\. *Dawn,* the plot of which takes place over twelve hours, recounts the story of a group of friends and acquaintances whose evening meal is interrupted by a police raid. They spend the night in police headquarters, where at least one of them is interrogated quite brutally, and they are released the following morning. What makes the novel so compelling is the way Soysal captures—by moving almost seamlessly between and among the perspectives of both primary and secondary characters—the ordinariness of everyone involved, leaving the contrast between that ordinariness and the political stakes mostly implicit. Oya’s brief meditation on the nature of oppression, in fact—she is the protagonist—is one of the few places in the novel where its politics are explicitly invoked. The parallels to the current state of affairs in this country were hard to miss. I kept having to remind myself that I was reading a novel written more than fifty years ago in a very different country. **§§§** [How To Write A Political Poem During These Unprecedented Times](https://solsticelitmag.org/content/how-to-write-a-political-poem-during-these-unprecedented-times/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Adrian S. Potter: > Perhaps we sink too much energy into pretending to be unoffended when we really should feel insulted. As part of his unapologetic reign of bluster, one of our so-called leaders keeps teaching a master class on how to parlay hot takes and brash rhetoric into votes and profit. Meanwhile, I’m busy trying to write a poem that will finally put an end to bigotry, and yes, even within the false mythology of a post-racial society, bigotry still exists. The tension in this piece is between the self-important navel-gazing that characterizes the way some writers live “the literary life” and the implicit call to action with which Potter ends the piece: “But when I try to write about \[these unprecedented times\]…my hand instinctively tightens into a fist hoisted high above my head.” The essay was published in 2004, and I imagine that, in light of what’s been happening in the United States and the Middle East, it lands with even more urgency than it did back then. I found myself thinking of Louise Glück’s essay “The Idea of Courage,” in which she critiqued the use of the term courage to described what it took for a poet to write poems that revealed aspects of their life they might not otherwise have revealed. Specifically, I found myself remembering Glück’s point that this usage of courage “concentrates attention on the poet’s relation to his materials and to his audience, rather than on the political result of speech.” We all know the stories of the poets in totalitarian nations throughout history who risked that political result and paid with their lives. Iran, of course, is one of them. How far are we, I asked myself when I finished reading Potter’s essay, from a time when the difference between writing a political poem and raising one’s tightened fist into the air will not be as different as he suggests.. **§§§** [*Refusenik*](https://www.yesyesbooks.com/product-page/refusenik?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Lynn Melnick: > Experience tells me > editors want to read my rape poems > until someone else sends rape poems > that are an extended metaphor > for this ancient god or that well known myth > and not a spirited description of what becomes of labia > when a man forces himself between. It sounds wrong to say I like this book, as if the book were not all that different from a delicious piece of cake or a well-cooked meal. At the same time, though, to say that I respect the book, that I admire it, falls far short of the ways in which Melnick’s poems—their exploration of the connections between and among her identities as a woman, as a survivor of sexual violence, and as a Jew—moved me and made me think. Overwhelmingly, though, the feeling I have carried with me since I finished *Refusenik* is the sense of identification I felt when I read the lines I quoted above, because I have found myself, when it comes to the poems I’ve written about my own experience of sexual violence, in the same position as Melnick’s speaker. Except for that declaration of solidarity, though, I don’t want to make this brief paragraph about me or my work, because *Refusenik* deserves your attention wholly on its own merits. The poems are meticulously crafted, but what I found most interesting in that regard are the poems where, to my ear, the speaker’s speech- and thought-rhythms have the flat, declarative, sometimes disorganized, and somewhat digressive character of someone who is trying to bring coherence to their memories of a trauma they have suffered. I don’t know if that was a conscious choice on Melnick’s part or if it is something I am reading into the poems, but it captured my imagination throughout the book. [**§§§**](https://www.poetryinreview.com/reviews/dialogue%5Fon%5Fpolitical%5Fpoetry.html?ref=richardjnewman.com) [Why I Didn’t Report My Rape](https://www.thenation.com/article/society/why-i-didnt-report-my-rape/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Anna Krauthamer: > The simple answer to the question of why I never reported the rape is that I believe in the abolition of police and prisons. The less simple, less articulate answer is that to pursue prosecuting and potentially incarcerating other people is inconceivable to me, even when they have hurt me more than I could have ever believed possible. Because of this, I can only vocalize what I want in negative and inherently impossible terms: that all I want is for it to never have happened. The prospect of being a participant in other peoples’ incarceration is as alien to me as anything could be, to the point that I can only conceive of it in childish terms—how silly and strange it would be to have a group of people incarcerated at my expense when doing so would do nothing to fix the damage they have already so thoroughly done. At the heart of this essay is Krauthamer’s attempt to understand the emotional roots of what she says in the paragraph I’ve just quoted. There have been times in my own life when I have wished I could be alone with the men who violated me while they were strapped down on a table, helpless. I never imagined what I might do to them in concrete terms, but I have been angry enough that I was willing to walk up to the edge of that fantasy. At the same time, I understand Krauthamer’s insistence, if I understand her correctly, that to deny the humanity of the men who raped her—which is what she believes would have happened if she’d reported her rape—would ultimately be, under the guise of justice, to validate the act of dehumanization of which those men were guilty. I remember when I told my father about the men who sexually abused me. He and I had not spoken in many years and I was by then in my thirties. “You should have told me,” he said. “At that time, I knew guys who would have broken their legs if I’d told them about it.” When I asked him what good that would have done me, what good he thought it did me in the moment to hear him say it, he was completely at a loss. I remembered this while reading Krauthamer’s article, and it made me think that maybe I agree with her. What I want is for those men not to have done to me what they did, and while I do think it’s important to devise ways for people like that both to be held accountable *and* to be restored in the community’s eyes to whatever we want to call the status of that accountability, the kind of punishment my father’s response represented——and let’s be honest prison is only a state sanctioned version of that response—will never accomplish that. --- ## Four Things To See These Disney cartoons are from the Internet Archive. (Unfortunately, if you want to watch the videos, you need to [click through](https://www.richardjnewman.com/p/fabb02b2-d695-4629-8d66-e90b623b1e4a/) to the copy of this issue on my website.) ### Steamboat Willie - 1928 **§§§** ### The Karnival Kid - 1929 **§§§** ### **The Skeleton Dance - (1929)** **§§§** ### **When The Cat’s Away - 1929** --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### Piers Faccini & Ballaké Sissoko - Special Rider Blues (Skip James Cover) **§§§** ### Bartok String Quartet No.1: 1\. Lento - Emerson String Quartet **§§§** ### Clarinet Yontev - The Klezmatics **§§§** ### **Engineering Memories - Arash Sobhani / مهندسی خاطره - آرش سبحانی** --- ## Four Things About Me From 1989, a dream I wrote down in one of the journals I kept when I was in South Korea: In a Chinese restaurant, I am walking with a friend past Dan \[whom I think was my music theory professor when I was an undergraduate\] jamming on the piano with someone whose face I can’t see and whose instrument I don’t remember. My friend and I are seated at a table with two other people, a man and a woman. The other man—whom I thought in the dream was someone else, but who turned out to be me—releases from his fingers a poisonous insect. His finger had a hole in it, and I remember thinking in the dream that it was hollow and that it must have held other insects as well. When I woke up, though, I remembered it as a penis, not a finger. Anyway, the insect was aimed at my companion. It took a few second before I could find where the insect had landed on the table, since it was same color as the tablecloth, and then I flicked it to the floor where a Korean waitress squashed it with a piece of bamboo weaving she held with a pair of tweezers. She was openly disgusted by the squashed insect. Then, my friend and I left in his red sports car. As we drove past a truck, the back of the truck caught fire. We stopped to help put it out and then I woke up. **§§§** These are four dreams from a journal I kept in 1985: I found these dreams in the pages of a journal I kept in 1985\. **Dream One:** Ricky Schroeder in a space suit chasing what I think was a dragon, also in a space suit. Schroeder threw a hook at the dragon which somehow landed in an eye that was attached to the end of the tail of the dragon’s suit. I think they were on the moon. **Dream Two:** A little girl with glasses runs out of a United Synagogue Youth function and tries to hide behind the rear wheel of a car as it drives way. I chase her, somehow, back into the building and go to look for Harvey, the youth director. He is watching a movie with Gina \[his wife\]. I see the kid and chase after her again, but when I come back I can’t find Harvey. He calls to me. He is in a chair with Gina in his lap and her arms around his neck. **Dream Three:** I am walking with two bags of groceries out of which things keep falling past the Knight of Columbus building where the drum and bugle corps I was in used to practice. Maureen, the girl who was the drum major, is standing outside, looking like she wants to help, but she doesn’t. I cross the street to the John Lewis Childs schoolyard \[of the elementary school I went to from third through sixth grade\] and the bags break. I am trying to tie everything up with two pieces of wire and suddenly I am George Burns telling jokes to an audience that has appeared in the schoolyard. They can’t stop laughing. Then I am on stage with Bing Crosby, but he is the center of attention. **Dream Four**: I am in a house, at the bottom of a stairwell, and there is a devil upstairs whom I don’t recognize. I am in the middle of a crowd that is challenging the devil, which appears suddenly at the top of the stair case and spits onto someone standing near me something that obliterates him. Everyone starts crossing themselves and saying “Our Father.” Those are the only words I hear. I’m not sure if I say the words with them, but I do not cross myself. We run to another room, which is a classroom being cleaned by a group of students. I’m the last one in. When I enter, everyone else disappears and I am alone with the devil. I either think or say, “If I think you away, you can’t hurt me.” I do it and the devil disappears. **§§§** When I was an undergraduate, I usually went home for intersession. One year, though, I stayed on campus. Since the dorm I lived in closed for the break, I had to move into a room in the only dorm that the administration kept open year round, the one where the college’s international students were housed. One evening, a graduate student from India and I were cooking dinner at the same time, and we ended up having a conversation about Judaism and Jewish culture. He’d never met a Jewish person before and he was very curious, specifically about our religious ceremonies. I was describing for him the point in Shabbos services when the Torah is taken out of the ark, when he interrupted me. He wanted to know if the Torah was one our idols and if the ark was where we kept them. I could understand why he might think that. I’d just finished telling him that everyone stood up when the Torah was taken out, that it was an honor to be the person chosen to do that and then to walk the Torah around the room while everyone sang the prayers, and that the congregants would touch the Torah as it passed—with a prayerbook or the edge of their prayer shawl or sometimes just their fingers—and then kiss the surface they’d touched the Torah with. To someone whose religious practice included actual idols, it would certainly sound like the Jews were venerating the Torah as a representation of the deity and not, simply, a sacred text. I don’t know if my explanation of the difference between the two made sense to him. I never spoke with him again. **§§§** In the early 1990s, I befriended a woman from Hungary named Katalin. I don’t remember why she’d come to New York, nor do I remember the circumstances under which we met, but we became good friends very quickly over a shared interest in language, literature, and language teaching specifically. I’d just started in my position as an English professor at Nassau Community College, where I was one of just a handful of people in the English as a Second Language program who actually had academic credentials in that field. I wasn’t sure back then whether or not I would stay at NCC, and Kate and I would sometimes fantasize about starting an English language school in Budapest. Obviously, that never happened. We stayed in touch by mail for a while after she went home, and I just found a letter that she sent me in August of 1992\. On the back is her translation of a poem by the Hungarian poet [Gyula Juhász](https://www.visegradliterature.net/works/hu-all/Juh%C3%A1sz%5FGyula-1883/biography?ref=richardjnewman.com#:~:text=Visited%20Vienna%20in%201926.,Rumanian%2C%20Serbian%2C%20and%20Slovakian). It’s called “What Was.” I have no idea how good the translation is, but this is exactly how Kate wrote it out: What was her blondness like, I don’t know already, But I know that the meadows are blonde, When the summer turning yellow comes with thick corns, And in this blondness I feel her again. What was the blue of her eyes like, I don’t know already, But when the skies open in autumn, At the faint farewell of September I’m day-dreaming back the colour of her eyes. What was the silk of her voice like, I don’t know already either, But on the spring’s coming, when the green field sighs, I feel as if Anna’s warm words speak From a spring which is as far as the sky. ****A gentle reminder:** Four By Four is part of the free tier of **It All Connects.* If you are not currently a paid subscriber and would like to subscribe, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signup/65988db373946800080fe780/yearly). If you would like to make a one-time contribution to support my work on **It All Connects*, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/support). --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in* [*my work*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/) *or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* ### From Saadi’s Bustan: Takla Is Deterred From Abdication URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/from-saadis-bustan-takla-is-deterred-from-abdication/ Last updated: 2026-04-22T10:00:13.000Z Dear Friends, I am posting these translations—revised versions of those included in my **Selections from Saadi’s Bustan—*as a way of making Iran’s culture and literary history visible at a time when that visibility seems more important than ever. In stories they tell of kings from long ago, it’s said that when Takla assumed the Zangi throne, his rule was marked by peace among his subjects. For that alone he’s worthy of renown. Still, he once confided to a man of heart, “My end is near and I’ve nothing to show. I want to sit in solitary worship and redeem whatever days I might have left. Crown, kingdom, status—all will fade. Only a pauper leaves this world a king.” At Takla’s words, the enlightened one responded, standing to his full height. “Takla! Enough! Service, the road you’re on, is the one you seek, not the prayer mat, tasbih, or darvish robes.\[1\] Stay seated on your throne; don’t end your reign. In selfless rule you’ll find the poverty your seek. Arm yourself with sincerity and truth! Keep your tongue from vanity and pretense! The way requires footsteps, not your words; otherwise, your words will find no footing. The truly great, whose purity was wealth, wore their darvish robes beneath their clothes.” --- 1. Tasbih signifies both Muslim prayer beads and the prayer said while using them; khergeh signifies the traditional robes of the darvish. I wonder if I should use khergeh. In any event, I want to avoid the inevitable Christian association that rosary/prayer beads and “cassock,” which is Wickens’ term carry. ↩︎ ### On My Desk Now: Junot Díaz and the Double Bind of Male Survivorship URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/on-my-desk-now-junot-diaz-and-the-double-bind-of-male-survivorship/ Last updated: 2026-04-17T10:00:18.000Z I recently finished and submitted for publication a triptych of essays called *Firsts* that examines the relative invisibility of male survivors of sexual violence in our society through the lens of my experience as a survivor whose healing is rooted in feminist politics. Right up until the final draft of the third essay in this triptych, I included a discussion of the controversy that ensued when Junot Díaz revealed in “[The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-silence-the-legacy-of-childhood-trauma?ref=richardjnewman.com)” that he’d been raped by a man when he was eight-years-old and, shortly thereafter, the writer [Zinzi Clemmons](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/books/junot-diaz-accusations.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.o08.TTGt.uM2Dt3HZkkVU&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com) alleged that Díaz had forcibly kissed her when she was a graduate student, even going so far as to suggest that he’d published the essay in order to pre-empt her accusations. As a result of the fallout from Clemmons’ allegations, Díaz was, as they say, canceled, and his career has never fully recovered, making it almost impossible even to mention his essay without raising the question of whether the consequences he suffered were just and proportional. Indeed, even as recently as 2022, Ben Smith wrote an article for [Semafor](https://www.semafor.com/article/11/27/2022/junot-diaz-in-limbo?ref=richardjnewman.com), in which he asked that question precisely. He interviewed members of the Pulitzer Prize Board—at the time, Díaz was the Board’s chair—who revealed that, according to their investigation, the kiss Clemmons alleged had been an unwanted “kiss on the cheek.” When I was a union officer, part of my job was to protect the contractual rights of members accused of sexual harassment both when they were questioned and when they were disciplined (if they were). In light of that experience, it seems to me there are two issues here: one regarding the impact that unwanted kiss had on Clemmons, which it is no one’s place other than hers to judge, and one regarding the degree of coercion to which an unwanted kiss on the cheek rises. How one balances those two questions in determining what a fair and just level of accountability would be, assuming Díaz did in fact kiss her (about which more below), is complicated, especially when it involves issues of employability, as it did in this case, since Díaz’ employer, MIT, investigated him as well to make sure he had never behaved inappropriately with his students. I had hoped in writing my essay to be able to note this complexity and then set it aside, not because I think it’s not important, but because it seemed (and seems) to me that trying to litigate the fairness of what happened to Díaz—especially so long after the fact—obscures an issue that is also important: the degree to which the controversy silenced Díaz as a survivor, short-circuiting the larger discussion about male survivors that his essay might have started. “The Silence” moved me. “It sucks,” I wrote in the concluding paragraph of an email I sent Díaz when I was done reading, > that men chose to do to us as children what they did…but what we make of ourselves, what we give to the world out of what they did does not have to suck. In fact, it can be beautiful and enriching and deeply, deeply important in helping to make the world a more just place. You have demonstrated this with your essay. I hope you know that. Some of what Díaz had to say made me hopeful that we might be on the verge of real change in how we talked about sexual violence against men and boys. “‘Real’ Dominican men,” Díaz wrote, “aren’t raped. And if I wasn’t a ‘real’ Dominican man I wasn’t anything. The rape excluded me from manhood, from love, from everything.” Díaz also made it clear that coming to terms with what the man who raped him did to him meant confronting head on the value system that defined what a “real Dominican man” was. “I’ve told,” he wrote, “even my toughest boys…fuck the consequences.” Díaz’ essay, however—and I offer this as observation, not criticism; survivors get to tell their stories on their own terms, full stop—does not explore that confrontation. We never learn what the consequences of telling his “toughest boys” were. Instead, “The Silence” takes the form of a letter to a person from Díaz’ past, a confessional to someone he wished he’d told the truth about himself years earlier, and it focuses much less on analysis than on revelation. *Let me tell you what my life was really like in the aftermath of what that man did to me,* Díaz says, leading us through a brutally honest accounting of the self-hatred from which he suffered and the harm he did to himself and others as a result, in particular to the women in his life. Initially, Diaz seemed to want to hold himself accountable in response to Clemmons’ allegations. He issued a [statement](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/books/junot-diaz-accusations.html?searchResultPosition=3&ref=richardjnewman.com) that read in part, “I take responsibility for my past…We must continue to teach all men about consent and boundaries.” Two months later, however, he essentially took that statement back in a [*Boston Globe*](https://aragi.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/1%5FJunot-D%C3%ADaz-case-may-be-a-MeToo-turning-point-1.pdf?ref=richardjnewman.com) interview carefully orchestrated to repair his reputation. Not only did Díaz categorically deny that he had kissed Clemmons; he also implied that because he’d been raped he would never have allowed himself to do what she said he did. “For someone like me, who’s a victim and a survivor,” he is quoted as saying, “MeToo stuff matters,” as if having been sexually violated had somehow inoculated him against committing such acts himself. Initially, I saw that response as no less cynical than Clemmons’ assertion that Díaz had published “The Silence” to pre-empt her accusations, and, read in the context of the interview, I continue to see his statement that way. Nothing, in other words, then or now, has given me any reason to doubt that Díaz did what Clemmons accused him of doing. At the same time, however—and this is ultimately where I hoped this subject matter would fit into my essay—I think it’s a mistake to read his statement that “MeToo stuff matters” only through the lens of that cynicism. There was a time early in my own coming to terms with what the men who violated me did to me when I might have made a similar assertion about myself, not because I had a reputation to salvage, but because I was convinced that the only way to make my status as a victim unassailable was to purify myself of anything that might even remotely align with the behavior of those men. To suggest that Díaz was trying with that statement to claim a similar kind of pure victimhood is neither to deny that the *Boston Globe* interview was a cynical public relations maneuver nor to diminish or trivialize the behavior of which he was accused. Rather, it is to recognize the double bind in which Díaz found himself. The act of publishing “The Silence” proclaimed his disloyalty to precisely the set of values embodied by what Clemmons accused him of, while Clemmons’ allegations, including her assertion that he’d published “The Silence” to pre-empt her, simultaneously called that disloyalty into question and attempted to cast serious doubt on his credibility as a survivor. That Díaz responded by trying to preserve that credibility in as absolute terms as possible makes emotional sense to me, even as I recognize the cynicism that is inescapably part of that attempt’s subtext. In the end, I had to take this discussion out of my essay because it distracted from, more than it added to, what I was trying to say there. Nonetheless, I think the double bind Díaz faced is worth sitting with precisely because it is a bind in which any male survivor who is similarly accused would find himself. Even more to the point, since the public discourse surrounding sexual violence implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, characterizes men, by definition, as potential perpetrators, perhaps it is a double bind in which we already exist whether we have been accused or not. For right now, I don’t have much else to say about this. As I said, I just think it’s something worth sitting with. ### From Saadi’s Bustan: Umar Ibn Abd al-Aziz Sacrifices A Jewel To Help the Starving URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/from-saadis-bustan-umar-ibn-abd-al-aziz-sacrifices-a-jewel-to-help-the-starving/ Last updated: 2026-04-15T10:00:50.000Z Dear Friends, I am posting these translations—revised versions of those included in my **Selections from Saadi’s Bustan—*as a way of making Iran’s culture and literary history visible at a time when that visibility seems more important than ever. ## **Umar Ibn Abd al-Aziz Sacrifices A Jewel To Help the Starving** A man whom other men of wisdom follow tells the story of Ibn Abd al-Aziz, who owned a ring in which was set a stone on which no jeweler could ever set a price. At night, you’d swear it was the rising sun. By day, its luster was the brightest pearl’s. Once, when fate decreed a year of drought, his people’s well-fed faces waned to crescents. He knew the royal comfort he enjoyed would unman him in his people’s eyes. who could watch another swallow poison then dare drink sweet-water in their sight?. He ordered the stone to be sold for silver, distributing the proceeds in one week to anyone in whom he saw a need. Right away his critics scolded him: “You’ll never find again a gem like that!” I’ve heard that when he answered them, tears running down his cheeks like melted wax, “A prince should not adorn himself with jewels when poverty burdens the hearts of his people. This ring without a stone looks fine on me, but a grieving people’s heart is not becoming. He will be happy who chooses their comfort over concern for his own vanity. Those who value virtue refuse to buy their own joy with others’ pain and sorrow. \*\*\* If the king sleeps content upon his throne, I doubt the poor will sleep undisturbed, but if he lights the night with watchful eyes, sleep will bring his subjects a soothing calm. Thank God the Atabeg, Abu Bakr ibn Saad, has made the proper way to rule his own! The only signs of trouble plaguing Pars are the women whose lunar beauty turns our heads. A verse from last night’s party caught my ear: “I held my moon-faced lover while she slept and wanted nothing more from life than that, but the sight of her so fully lost in sleep moved me. ‘Your slender grace shames the cypress. Wash this sweet slumber from your narcissus-eyes; smile, show us your lips like rose-petals; sing for us with your nightingale voice. Why let sleep hide the mischief your charms can do? Come! Bring the ruby wine you poured last night.’ She opened one indignant eye, ‘You say I’m mischievous, but rouse me nonetheless?’” Under the rule of our enlightened king, no other mischief dares to stir. ### Of Note: April 12, 2026 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/of-note-april-12-2026/ Last updated: 2026-04-17T15:02:28.000Z Dear Friends, Here is the latest round of links to pieces dealing with the US-Israel war against Iran and related issues. Some of these will be dated by the time you receive this, but the issues they raise—concerning Iran's internal politics, the economic impact of the war, and more—are not. I apologize for not offering my usual small commentaries, but I have been a little under the weather. In most cases, I think the titles speaks for themselves in terms of why the piece I've linked to is worth reading. ## The Links - [In Strait of Hormuz, Iran and China take aim at US dollar hegemony](https://aje.news/lphkea?ref=richardjnewman.com), by John Power - [Israeli Missile Interceptors Have Dwindled to “Double Digits”: Trump Administration Official](https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israeli-missile-interceptors-iran-war?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain - [A respite in the Gulf, but will it stop the slide to world war?](https://open.substack.com/pub/sayighyezid/p/a-respite-in-the-gulf-but-will-it) by Yezid Sayigh - [The Effects of the Ongoing Internet Shutdown and the 2 Wars on Journalism in Iran](https://truethings.naghmehs.com/p/the-effects-of-the-ongoing-internet?ref=richardjnewman.com), translations of two pieces from inside Iran by Naghmeh Sohrabi - [Understanding Pro-War Sentiments In Iran](https://truethings.naghmehs.com/p/understanding-pro-war-sentiments?ref=richardjnewman.com), from Naghmeh Sohrabi - [These Iranians supported the US-Israeli war. Now they realise their mistake](https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/these-iranians-supported-us-israeli-war-now-they-realise-their-mistake?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Fleur Hargreaves - [Sweet Lies and Bitter Truths: Iran's Propaganda War](https://truethings.naghmehs.com/p/sweet-lies-and-bitter-truths?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Roya Khoshnevis - [Inside the Israeli army’s propaganda wing](https://www.972mag.com/inside-israeli-army-propaganda-wing/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Illy Pe’ery - [Gulf Funds Are Recalibrating American Investments](https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/gulf-funds-recalibrating-american-investments-paramount-warner-brothers-ai?ref=richardjnewman.com), Drop Site News - [Iranian Kurds Deny Receiving US Weapons to Arm Iran's Protestors](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iranian-kurds-deny-receiving-us-weapons-arm-iran-protesters?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Wladimir van Wilgenburg - ["Not Guns for Hire": Trump's Failure to Trigger a Kurdish Uprising](https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/kurds-trump-iraq-iran-kurdistan-alliance?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Alexis Daloumis - [From Fox News to the Noose: How a Claim About Kurds Became a Useful Narrative](https://open.substack.com/pub/minakhanlarzadeh/p/from-fox-news-to-the-noose-how-a), by Mina Khanlarzadeh - [Teaching in the Ruins of Sharif](https://open.substack.com/pub/minakhanlarzadeh/p/teaching-in-the-ruins-of-sharif?r=1gwysa&utm%5Fmedium=ios), by Mina Khanlarzadeh - [The Iran War You're Not Hearing About](https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/the-iran-war-youre-not-hearing-about?ref=richardjnewman.com), Ken Klippenstein - [Trump’s NSPM-7 Alarms Law Firms While Congress Is Silent](https://open.substack.com/pub/kenklippenstein/p/trumps-nspm-7-alarms-law-firms-while), Ken Klippenstein (NSPM stands for National Security Presidential Memorandum) - [Exclusive: FBI’s New Political Pre-Crime Center](https://open.substack.com/pub/kenklippenstein/p/fbis-new-political-pre-crime-center?r=1gwysa&utm%5Fmedium=ios), Ken Klippenstein - [How Pakistan’s solar boom is shielding it from worst of Iran war crisis](https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/4/7/how-pakistans-solar-boom-is-shielding-it-from-worst-of-iran-war-crisis?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Zeeshan Nasir - [Why Turkey will be a key regional powerbroker after Iran war](https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/why-turkey-will-be-key-regional-powerbroker-after-iran-war?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Taha Ozhan - [‘Dying of thirst’: Inside Gaza’s al-Mawasi water crisis](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/7/dying-of-thirst-inside-gazas-al-mawasi-water-crisis?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Maram Humaid - [Bloodbath](https://luciantruscott.substack.com/p/bloodbath), by Lucian K. Truscott IV (An analysis of what would happen if Trump decided to put boots on the ground in Iran.) - [Epistles from Israel April 7, 2026](https://judylabensohn.substack.com/p/epistles-from-israel-april-7-2026), by Judy Lev - [Excerpts from "Trump Is Attacking Iranians, Not Just Iran"](https://nikkowsar.substack.com/p/excerpts-from-our-latest-for-foreign) an essay in Foreign Policy by Nik Kowsar and Alireza Nader - [Israeli-Backed Militia Launches Deadly Attack on Gaza Refugee Camp Under Cover of Airstrikes](https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-abu-nasira-militia-attack-maghazi-camp-gaza?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Mohammed Ahmed, Jawa Ahmad, and Sharif Abdel Kouddous - [30 Poets for National Poetry Month](https://scientistspoets.substack.com/p/30-poets-for-national-poetry-month), Scientists & Poets (A list of 30 poets from Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, and Ukraine) - [The Narrow Geometry of Peace](https://compoundsecurityunlocked.substack.com/p/the-narrow-geometry-of-peace), by Isaiah Wilson III (An analysis of the "bargaining space" between Washington and Tehran) - [Record animal sacrifice attempts at Al-Aqsa prompt status quo fears](https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/4/9/record-animal-sacrifice-attempts-at-al-aqsa-spark-status-quo-fears?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Jivara Budeiri and Mohammad Mansour - [Unfollow Mehdi Hasan: He Hurts Every Cause He Touches](https://maryamlove.substack.com/p/unfollow-mehdi-hasan-he-hurts-every), by Maryam Love ### Learning To Love The Questions: The Power We Pretend Not To See 5 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-power-we-pretend-not-to-see-5/ Last updated: 2026-09-05T09:33:00.000Z In *The Conference of the Birds,* a Sufi allegory which I summarized briefly in [Part One](https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-power-we-pretend-not-to-see-1/) of this series, Farid al-Din Attar calls the penultimate stage of enlightenment, the final one the birds must pass through before reaching their goal, “The Valley of Bewilderment.” In this context, however, bewilderment does not signify mere confusion. Rather, it names a stage of spiritual development when the categories the seeker has used to organize and understand the world collapse into a radical uncertainty about who he is within that world, and what he thinks he knows and can know about it. In Attar’s conception, the stage of bewilderment is the point at which the seeker moves beyond an understanding of God as the creator who exists in tension with the world he created and perceives God instead as existing outside that binary formulation, as something that is beyond the capacity of the human imagination even to begin to conceptualize. The seeker who reaches this stage exists in a state of paradox. On the one hand, because he still lives in the world, he knows it as he has always known it; on the other hand, once he apprehends God’s unknowability, the fabric of what he thinks he knows comes apart at the seams. His goal at this stage of enlightenment is to embody that paradox without attempting to resolve it. Bewilderment, in other words, is experienced not as something that happens *to* a seeker, but rather as a state of being he enters and internalizes. The story Attar chooses to illustrate this stage of spiritual development is rooted in the erotic. Read according to today’s norms, however, the person at the center of the story—a slave with whom a princess desires a sexual encounter—would be understood, legally and morally, to have been kidnapped and raped or, at the very least, made the victim of a drug-facilitated sexual assault; and the bewilderment he experiences would likely be glossed as a response to that trauma, not as spiritual growth. “The Story of the Princess Who Loved A Slave” begins with a conventional description of the princess’ beauty: > Her eyebrows were two bows bent back to shoot > The arrows of love’s passionate dispute; > The pointed lashes of her humid eyes > Were thorns strewn in the pathway of the wise\[.\] This “weaponry,” however, is not enough to protect the princess from the beauty of a newly arrived slave. The moment she lays eyes on him, she is overcome with desire. She struggles mightily to retain her self-control. She is, after all, a princess and to confess her desire to him directly would be to put her honor at risk in a way that she finds unacceptable. She “read\[s\] a hundred books on chastity,” but to no avail. In the end, unable to maintain her composure any longer, she tells her slave girls, “If I can’t make my affection plain,/I’ll die, I’ll waste away in secret pain,” and she concludes that she must find a way to have him, while also concealing from him the truth about their encounter. The slave girls understand this as a command and reassure the princess that they will bring the slave to her in such a way that “he won’t know a thing.” After one of them drugs him, they bring him unconscious to the princess’ bedchamber, where, when he wakes up, he and the princess spend a night of passionate lovemaking. When the lovers are done and he has again fallen asleep, the slave girls bring him back without his knowledge to “his own hard floor,” where, on waking, he is confronted with a paradox. On the one hand, he knows that he and the princess spent the night together—an experience he describes as “bliss vouchsafed to me, to me alone”—but on the other hand, since he does not know how he came to be with her, and since it looks to him as if he never left his own quarters, he can’t be sure if what he knows happened that night actually happened: > “Was it a dream, or was it true? > Was I drunk or sober? I wish I knew— > The world has never known a state like this, > This paradox beyond analysis, > Which haunts my soul with what I cannot find, > Which makes me speechless speak and seeing blind. > I saw perfection’s image, beauty’s queen, > A vision that no man has ever seen… > But did I see her? What more can I say? > Between this ‘yes’ and ‘no’ I’ve lost my way!” The slave’s inability to escape the paradox of this experience is Attar’s metaphor for the spiritual bewilderment that is his true subject. In order for that metaphor to work, however, both in literary terms and as a teaching tool, we as readers need to overlook not only the way that slave was deprived of any opportunity to consent meaningfully to the sex the princess wanted to have with him, but also the assumptions about gender that, as long as they remain unquestioned, render the issue of the slave’s consent irrelevant to the spiritual lesson the story is intended to teach. **§§§** Described in terms of its bare plot points, “The Story of the Princess Who Loved A Slave” resembles a story about sexual violence more than one about spiritual growth. First, the slave is drugged and transported against his will and without his knowledge to a place he’s never been. Then, once the drug wears off, he’s confronted by a princess who wants to have sex with him and to whom, once you take their different stations into account, it is unlikely he would have felt free to say no. When he’s fallen asleep after the princess is finished with him, he’s taken back—he doesn’t know how—to his own quarters. Read in light of today’s values, in other words, not only would the slave clearly be seen as a victim of sexual violence, but his inability to construct a coherent narrative to account for his experience would be understood as evidence not of spiritual growth, but of trauma. It’s possible to argue, of course, that my analysis is ahistorical and anachronistic, that it imposes a contemporary value system on a historical text informed by a very different set of cultural values. Imagine for a moment, though, that the genders in Attar’s story were reversed. That narrative would in some way have to account for the fact that, even back then, sex between a slave woman and a prince would by definition have had an impact on both her self-image and how she was seen by others that the sex the slave in Attar’s story had with the princess would not have had on him as a man. This difference rests on a foundational assumption about male sexuality that persists today in a form that is essentially no different than it was in Attar’s time: that men should always be ready, willing, and able to have sex, regardless of the circumstance. Within the logic of this assumption, in other words, a man’s consent is assumed as an a priori fact of his gender. Another way of saying this is that men are understood not to have sexual boundaries, which is why Attar’s narrative does not need to concern itself with the social meaning of the sex the slave had with the princess. As long as we remain within this logic, in other words, nothing about that sex would be at all destabilizing for the man. Some form of destabilization is necessary, however, for the story to work as Attar intended, which is why he structured the narrative such that the slave does not know how he came to be in the princess’ room or how he ended up back in his own. Those two plot points may radically undermine the slave’s confidence in what he thinks he knows about what happened to him, but nothing about the story even remotely suggests that the experience undermined his sense of himself as a man. The slave’s bewilderment can only function as a metaphor for its spiritual counterpart, in other words, only insofar as Attar’s narrative elides the coercion that lies at the heart of its plot, because that elision is what protects and preserves the slave’s gender integrity. If the kidnapping at the beginning were not implicitly understood as necessary for him to access a pleasure he is assumed a priori to want, sex, and if his consent to that sex were not also assumed, then there would be no way for his manhood and masculinity to survive his encounter with the princess intact. He would be reduced within the narrative to the powerless and sexually objectified slave that he was, and his experience of bewilderment would be more than anything else a reflection of that emasculated state. For Attar, in other words, what makes a man a man, the assumed “natural truth” of embodied male existence, structures how the spiritual experience itself is conceptualized. This does not mean, of course, that transcendence is not real for those men who achieve it, but it does suggest that transcendence as Attar understood it requires gender to remain unchallenged both as a component of personal identity and as the infrastructure that enables sexual inequality within society. It’s ironic, then, that the metaphor he constructed for bewilderment is itself “bewildered” in that it simultaneously reveals and denies both the sexual vulnerability of the male body and the trauma that is inherent in how the princess sexually coerces the slave. I don’t know what’s on the other side of pulling that metaphor apart. What I know is that the metaphor can only continue to function in this way as long as it remains a power we pretend not to see. ### From Saadi’s Bustan: Darius and His Herdsman URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/from-saadis-bustan-2/ Last updated: 2026-04-08T10:00:34.000Z Dear Friends, As I said last week, when I posted Saadi’s poem about [Nushirvan’s advice to his son Hormuz](https://www.richardjnewman.com/from-saadis-bustan/), I have decided to post a poem a week from my **Selections from Saadi’s* **Bustan* as a way of making Iran’s culture and literary history visible at a time when that visibility seems more important than ever. The versions I am posting here, however, are updated revisions of the ones in that book. They correct errors rooted mostly in the archaisms and compression that G. M. Wickens employed in his 1974 translation. How it is that I came to produce these translations in the first place is a story that I will tell next month in the final installment of the series I am calling “On The Trail of a Tale,” which tells the story of how a poem from **Bustan* became Benjamin Franklin’s **Parable Against Persecution.* You can read the first three parts of that series here: [Part 1](https://www.richardjnewman.com/on-the-trail-of-a-tale-part-one-benjamin-franklins-persian-parable/), [Part 2](https://www.richardjnewman.com/on-the-trail-of-a-tale-part-2-the-sources-of-franklins-parable-in-17th-century-christian-arguments-for-religious-tolerance/), [Part 3](https://www.richardjnewman.com/on-the-trail-of-a-tail-part-three-crossing-the-border-from-iran-to-europe/). ### **Darius and His Herdsman** I’ve heard that Darius, whose lineage is blessed, wandered off alone while hunting. A herdsman running towards him caught his eye. The king, whose faith was blessed as well, wondered, “Maybe this man’s looking for a fight. From here, I’ll nail him to the ground with this.” He placed a poplar arrow in his bow, preparing to erase the man’s existence. “Lord of Iran and Tur,” the man cried out. “May the evil eye never fall upon you. I’m your stable master come to serve you.” The intent to kill drained from the king’s heart. “You were a fool to run at me like that,” he smiled. “A hallowed angel rescued you. I’d brought the bowstring nearly to my ear.” The stable master also smiled, saying, “Because you’ve treated me so well, I won’t withhold advice from you that you should hear. Our battle-readiness deserves no praise, nor does it demonstrate judiciousness, when the king confuses enemy and friend. This is the burden your position carries: to recognize at once each one who serves you. You’ve seen me many times at court, and we have talked about your horses and their grazing, but now, when I have rushed with love to hunt with you, you see in me a mortal danger? If you ask me, O my king, I can bring from a herd of one hundred thousand horses the single beast you want to ride that day. That kind of knowledge drives my herdsmanship. Tend your own flock with as good an eye! Disorder will bring ruin to this land if the emperor can’t outthink a shepherd.” **§§§** It’s worth remembering that Saadi wrote *Bustan* for his royal patron and that there was an inherent risk in presuming to give advice to that patron at which the patron might take offense. Saadi was a courageous writer in this regard. I wrote a little bit about that in a post called “[The Kind of Courage These Times Call For](https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-kind-of-courage-these-times-call-for/).” ### Four By Four Quarterly Roundup: January-March 2026 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-quarterly-roundup-january-march-2026/ Last updated: 2026-04-06T10:00:02.000Z My selections from the last three issues of Four By Four, along with four selections from the archive _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Of Note: April 5, 2026 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/of-note-march-29-2026-2/ Last updated: 2026-04-05T10:00:41.000Z Dear Friends, Here is the latest round of links to pieces dealing with the US-Israel war against Iran and related issues. ## The Links - [Before you share that story about how troops were told the Iran War is for “Armageddon,” read this](https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/before-you-share-that-story-about?r=1gwysa&utm%5Fmedium=ios&triedRedirect=true&ref=richardjnewman.com): I shared with you [last month](https://www.richardjnewman.com/email/01f50857-e3df-47ea-b56f-30c14e10b900/), a link to [this article](https://jonathanlarsen.substack.com/p/us-troops-were-told-iran-war-is-for?r=1gwysa&utm%5Fmedium=ios&triedRedirect=true), which reported that military officials were framing the war with Iran as a holy war that is part of God’s plan. This article casts some doubt on that reporting, and it’s worth reading. - [The Fault Lines Shattering the Iranian Diaspora](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-fault-lines-shattering-the-iranian-diaspora/id1573983987?i=1000757103341&ref=richardjnewman.com): This episode of [On The Nose](https://jewishcurrents.org/podcast/p3?ref=richardjnewman.com), the [Jewish Currents](https://jewishcurrents.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) podcast, is worth listening to for a sense of what’s happening inside the Iranian diaspora and how it connects to larger questions of resistance. - [An Iranian’s Dispatch From the Digital Darkness](https://newlinesmag.com/first-person/an-iranians-dispatch-from-the-digital-darkness/?ref=richardjnewman.com): The writer of this piece on [New Lines Magazine](https://newlinesmag.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) compares the internet blackout imposed by the Islamic Republic in January to his time in solitary confinement in Iran’s notorious [Evin Prison](https://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/iran0604/5.htm?ref=richardjnewman.com). - [Beyond the Binary](https://truethings.naghmehs.com/p/beyond-the-binary?ref=richardjnewman.com): “It should be easy, but somehow it eludes many people, to condemn two things at once: The brutality of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the senseless violence of the current US/Israeli war.” The author of this piece, Ali Abdi, writes with conviction about the need to see humanity in those whose humanity we are encouraged to deny. Translated by Naghmeh Sohrabi. - [U.S. Can Only Confirm About a Third of Iran’s Missile Arsenal Destroyed, Sources Say](https://kayhanlife.com/news/iran/exclusive-u-s-can-only-confirm-about-a-third-of-irans-missile-arsenal-destroyed-sources-say/?ref=richardjnewman.com): “The assessment, which has not been previously reported, shows that while most of Iran‘s missiles are either destroyed or inaccessible, Tehran still has a significant missile inventory and may be able to recover some buried or damaged missiles once fighting stops.” - [Who Dug the Tunnels?](https://nikkowsar.substack.com/p/who-dug-the-tunnels) and [From Water Tunnels to War Tunnels](https://nikkowsar.substack.com/p/from-water-tunnels-to-war-tunnels): These two pieces from the Substack [Environmental Sarcasm: Where Water Cries and Politicians Lie](https://nikkowsar.substack.com/), written by Nik Kowsar, are worth reading for the perspective they offer on the tunnels where Iran’s missiles and drones are held. - [What Would We All Say If Iran Razed MIT Because of Military-Related Research?](https://theintercept.com/2026/03/30/iran-universities-mit-weapons-israel/?ref=richardjnewman.com): “Leaving aside the fact that [nothing](https://theintercept.com/2026/03/05/iran-war-end-times-christian/?ref=richardjnewman.com) in Trump’s war of choice against Iran is justified, the U.S. and Israel’s purported grounds for targeting Iranian universities are hollow and cynical. It is true that both universities had ties to military research. Would American and Israeli leaders consider their own equivalent institutions fair game? Of course not.” - [Today’s War, Tomorrow’s Inflation](https://truethings.naghmehs.com/p/todays-war-tomorrows-inflation?ref=richardjnewman.com): “The problem is not merely that war damages the economy. War reshapes the structure of the economy as well.” An Iranian economist thinks through the implications of the current war for what will happen to Iran socioeconomically afterwards. Translated by Naghmeh Sohrabi. - [Less Jesus, more Genghis Khan: How Netanyahu sees Israel’s place in the world](https://www.972mag.com/netanyahu-genghis-khan-jesus-sparta/?ref=richardjnewman.com): “There is nothing accidental about the analogies and examples that Israel’s prime minister draws from history.” It is telling that the leader of the Jewish State uses Jesus in the way that he is quoted as doing in this piece. It’s an analysis of his historical references that is worth reading. - [Popcorn, Rice Pudding, and Explosions: A Civilian Account from the War](https://guardeddomains.substack.com/p/popcorn-rice-pudding-and-explosions): This is Reza Akbari’s second translation of a war diary being written by Azadeh Sadeghi. It’s well worth reading. - [The Ghost in the Machine: Iranian Society and the Failure of Opposition Politics](https://minakhanlarzadeh.substack.com/p/the-ghost-in-the-machine-iranian): “My focus here is on Iranian society, which spent years trying to prevent this moment and is now too often treated as a mere backdrop to a geopolitical drama. I argue that Iranian society has been made into a ghost in the machine: present, vocal, and costly in its resistance, yet repeatedly denied recognition as a political force in its own right. That denial is one reason the present catastrophe became possible.” This analysis is worth reading, especially if you have never been aware of the oppositional currents within Iranian society. - [This Is What a Genocidal Society Looks Like From the Inside](https://avigail.substack.com/p/this-is-what-a-genocidal-society?r=1gwysa&utm%5Fmedium=ios&triedRedirect=true): “Gov’s phrasing positions Israel purely as the target of aggression — no cause, no history, no agency. Just a ‘passive’ ‘besieged’ people ‘asking politely’ for a break. The fact that this society is simultaneously unleashing complete destruction in every direction...does not exist in Israeli TV’s alternate reality. It has been laughed away with a genteel little joke about manners.” - [Israeli police are violently suppressing our growing anti-war protests](https://www.972mag.com/anti-iran-war-protests-police-violence/?ref=richardjnewman.com): “This expansion of our anti-war protests appears to have unsettled the Israel Police, which has responded with disproportionate and indiscriminate force.” - [‘They already shoot us for no reason. Now they have a death penalty’](https://www.972mag.com/israel-death-penalty-law-palestinian-prisoners/?ref=richardjnewman.com): “On March 30, the Knesset crossed a new threshold, passing a [death penalty law](https://www.972mag.com/israel-death-penalty-right/?ref=richardjnewman.com) aimed squarely at Palestinians. For the occupied West Bank, the law mandates Israeli military courts to impose the death sentence on anyone convicted of killing an Israeli citizen or resident “with the intent of rejecting the existence of the State of Israel,” which means that in practice, only Palestinians will be targeted.” ### On The Trail of a Tail - Part Three: Crossing The Border from Iran to Europe URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/on-the-trail-of-a-tail-part-three-crossing-the-border-from-iran-to-europe/ Last updated: 2026-05-26T17:26:51.000Z [T]ranslation as the performance of centrality—in this case of a Christian centrality—that emerges from and serves to perpetuate real political power and that is therefore both demonstrably false and inherently harmful. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### From Saadi’s Bustan URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/from-saadis-bustan/ Last updated: 2026-04-01T20:22:27.000Z As you know, I have published several books of translations of classical Persian poetry, among them [*Selections from Saadi’s Bustan*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/selections-from-saadis-bustan/)*.* Saadi, a 13th century poet from the city of Shiraz, is among the most important writers in the Persian literary canon, and his work has been translated into many languages worldwide. In light of the damage already done to some of [Iran’s most important cultural and historical sites](https://www.dw.com/en/us-israeli-strikes-damage-irans-cultural-heritage-sites/a-76350565?ref=richardjnewman.com), and since Iran itself is likely to remain contested territory in people’s imaginations for the foreseeable future, even after the current hostilities end, I thought it would be worthwhile to share with you a part of Iran’s rich literary history that most people don’t know about, but that is certainly worth knowing. (I am writing more extensively on a specific connection between Saadi’s *Bustan* and United States culture in the series “On The Trail of a Tale: Benjamin Franklin’s Persian Parable.” Parts [1](https://www.richardjnewman.com/on-the-trail-of-a-tale-part-one-benjamin-franklins-persian-parable/) and [2](https://www.richardjnewman.com/on-the-trail-of-a-tale-part-2-the-sources-of-franklins-parable-in-17th-century-christian-arguments-for-religious-tolerance/) have already been posted. Part 3 will post on April 3rd and Part 4 is coming in May.) **§§§** *Bustan* is divided into ten chapters, the first of which deals with the question of what it means to be a just ruler. This poem, which serves as the chapter’s prologue, contains an irony that would have been known to Saadi’s readers but that is lost unless you know a bit of history. Nushirvan was popularly known as a good and just king, while his son Hormuz had just the opposite reputation. After this selection from *Bustan,* I’ve included my versions of two stories from another of Saadi’s works, [*Golestan*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/selections-from-saadis-gulistan/)*,* that illustrate the difference between the kind of ruler each man was understood to be. --- I’ve heard that Nushirvan with his last breaths advised his son Hormuz on how to rule: “Guarantee your poorest subject’s comfort; do not permit your own comfort to bind you. None who call your kingdom home will live at ease, if ease is all you choose to live for. No judge will find a shepherd innocent who slept and let the wolf among the sheep. Be vigilant! Protect the poor and needy; the crown you wear you wear because of them. The peasants are the roots, my son; the king, the tree that needs the roots to give it strength. Do your best to keep from hurting them; to hurt them is to dig up your own roots. If you wish to set your feet upon The Path, let the pious lead you through Hope and Fear. A man who fears evil and hopes for good becomes a man whose wisdom is innate. If you find a king with both those attributes, you’ll find his realm secure, his people safe. To those who hope he offers his indulgence, hoping God will be indulgent too. He sees no joy in other people’s pain, fearing pain will spread throughout his realm. A king who lacks these traits will rule a realm lacking the peaceful life that people seek. If you are hobbled, accept it as your fate, but if you gallop freely, go where you will. You’ll never have the room you need to run in a kingdom where the king abuses power. Fear the bold and proud among your subjects, but fear as well the ones who don’t fear God. A king who lays waste to his people’s hearts will see his kingdom flourish in his dreams. Tyranny leads to ruin and a ruined name; a prudent king will take full measure of these words. Your people shelter and support your rule, so don’t kill anyone without just cause. See to the comfort of those who tend your land; their happiness will mean a greater yield. Repay with evil the good someone does you and you unman yourself in public view. --- ## From Saadi’s Golestan ### *Story 19 (about Nushirvan)* This is how I heard the story: The hunting party had stopped to eat, but there was no salt to season the meat they were roasting for Nushirvan, and no one wanted to serve him an improperly seasoned meal. So they sent one of the boys who was with them to get some salt from a nearby village. Before the boy left, however, Nushirvan told him, “Make sure you pay for what you take. Otherwise, the village will be ruined.” Surprised and more than a little incredulous, those who were standing nearby asked how such a simple thing as bringing some salt to the king could have such profound consequences. Nushirvan replied, “When the world began, oppression was a small hut that few people entered, but as more and more people chose to go inside, they built it up, and look how high it reaches now.” > To please the king who eats a single apple > from a subject’s garden, his slaves will pull > the tree up whole to plant in the palace yard; > and if he lets five eggs be taken by force, > his army will commandeer a thousand birds. > Tyrants die. The curses on them do not. ### *Story 8 (about Hormuz)* When he was asked what crime his father’s viziers had commit- ted, Hormuz replied, “None. I put these men in jail because they feared my power without respecting it. I knew that to protect themselves from the capriciousness they saw in me and the harm they thought might come to them because of it, they might try to kill me. So I had no choice. I took the advice of the sages, who said: > The power to wipe out a hundred men > should not replace your fear of one who fears you. > Watch when a cat is fighting for its life; > it plucks the tiger’s eyes out with its claws. > To stop the stone the shepherd might throw down > to crush its head, the viper bites, and lives. ****A gentle reminder:** “From Saadi’s Bustan” is part of the free tier of **It All Connects.* If you are not currently a paid subscriber and would like to subscribe, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signup/65988db373946800080fe780/yearly). If you would like to make a one-time contribution to support my work on **It All Connects*, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/support). ### Of Note: March 29, 2026 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/of-note-march-29-2026/ Last updated: 2026-03-29T10:00:53.000Z Dear Friends, Here is the latest round of links to pieces dealing with the US-Israel war against Iran and related issues. I am also adding to these notes a second section. As you know, I have published several books of translations of classical Persian poetry, among them [*Selections from Saadi’s Bustan*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/selections-from-saadis-bustan/)*.* Saadi, a 13th century poet from the city of Shiraz, is among the most important writers in the Persian literary canon, and his work has been translated into many languages worldwide. In light of the damage already done to some of [Iran’s most important cultural and historical sites](https://www.dw.com/en/us-israeli-strikes-damage-irans-cultural-heritage-sites/a-76350565?ref=richardjnewman.com), and since my *Bustan* has been out of print for some time now (and is likely to stay that way), I thought a worthwhile thing to do would be to share with you some of Iran’s rich literary history. (I am writing more extensively on a specific connection between Saadi’s *Bustan* and United States culture in the series “On The Trail of a Tale: Benjamin Franklin’s Persian Parable.” Parts [1](https://www.richardjnewman.com/on-the-trail-of-a-tale-part-one-benjamin-franklins-persian-parable/) and [2](https://www.richardjnewman.com/on-the-trail-of-a-tale-part-2-the-sources-of-franklins-parable-in-17th-century-christian-arguments-for-religious-tolerance/) have already been posted. Part 3 will post on April 3rd and Part 4 is coming in May.) ## The Links - [How Iran Rewrote Its War Strategy](https://www.irananalytica.org/p/how-iran-rewrote-its-war-strategy?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Hamidreza Azizi, analyzes the Islamic Republic’s shift “from a defensive posture to an offensive one.” - [Black Rain Over Tehran](https://www.aljazeera.com/video/the-take-2/2026/3/25/aje-onl-tt%5Firn%5Fchemicalwarfare%5Fav%5Fv2-240326?traffic%5Fsource=rss&ref=richardjnewman.com), a video from Al Jazeera, talks about the environmental and health consequences of US-Israeli attacks on Iran’s energy facilities. It asks, reasonably, if those attacks, because of those consequences, end up being a kind of chemical warfare. - [The Factory Was Always The Target](https://alikadivar.substack.com/p/the-factory-was-always-the-target), by Ali Kadivar: Provides historical context for US-Israeli strikes against Iranian steel plants. - [This piece](https://foreignaffairsinfo.substack.com/p/seven-fault-lines-the-iran-war) from the Foreign Affairs Newsletter brings discusses seven global “fault lines” the follow from the Iran war. There’s nothing new here, but it’s interesting to read about them all in one piece like this. - These two pieces from Real Dialectical are also worth reading: “[Criticizing America for War Crimes is like Criticizing Fire for Burning](https://open.substack.com/pub/realdialectical/p/criticizing-america-for-war-crimes)” is from 2025 and is about the war-crimes controversy surrounding the United States’ attacks on boats in the Caribbean, but it sets a useful context for “[The Iran War Has Clear Objectives. That's Why No One in Washington Will Name Them](https://realdialectical.substack.com/p/the-war-on-iran-has-objectives-but),” which argues that the brouhaha over how the US went to war, how the war is being conducted, whether or not there are clear objectives, and so on functions as a purposeful smokescreen for the war’s real objectives. - Naghmeh Sohrabi’s “[True Thing for Today](https://substack.com/@naghmehsohrabi/note/c-231483531?ref=richardjnewman.com)” (March 22)” “Ghasseminejad is the main creator of the Pahlavi transition plan that states after Reza Pahlavi enters Iran as the leader of the national movement to get rid of the Islamic Republic, he will lead the transitional government by appointing the heads of every branch, become the commander in chief, and retain the power to impose martial law.” If you haven’t been paying attention to Reza Pahlavi’s role, it’s worth noting. - [This conversation](https://bidoun.org/articles/the-true-things?ref=richardjnewman.com) with Sohrabi on [Bidoun](https://bidoun.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) offers some insight not just into why she started True Things for Today, but also into what it’s like to try to make sense of what is happening in Iran on a human level. - Bidoun also published [this diary](https://bidoun.org/articles/iran-diary-3?ref=richardjnewman.com) written by a woman in Iran as Iran began to crack down on the protests in January. - [They Would Not Dream of Flowers: Translating Through the Tehran Blackout](https://www.publicbooks.org/they-would-not-dream-of-flowers-translating-through-the-tehran-blackout/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Miaad Banki: A literary translator’s account of what it was like to try to work during the Iran’s violent January suppression of protests. - [The Catastrophe That Has Befallen All Of Us](https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-catastrophe-that-has-befallen-all-of-us/?ref=richardjnewman.com): This is one of Sohrabi’s translations published on the [Boston Review](https://www.bostonreview.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) website. The writer is the director of an art center in Tehran. - [Iranian Officials Say They Have Been Ignoring Witkoff's Private Requests to Talk](https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/iran-war-trump-witkoff-araghchi?ref=richardjnewman.com): This piece from Drop Site news will likely be a little dated by the time you see it here, but it’s worth reading nonetheless. It provides a kind of context that is hard to find anywhere else. - In *Jewish Currents,* [this piece](https://jewishcurrents.org/the-iran-war-is-about-palestine?ref=richardjnewman.com), “The War in Iran is About Palestine,” offers an analysis of how the Iran war fits into Israel’s goals in the region and, in particular, Netanyahu’s strategy of turning the issue of Palestine and the Palestinians into a “civilizational” one, rather than one rooted in colonization and occupation. - I do not know who Ori Goldberg is, but I was moved by [this meditation](https://origoldberg22.substack.com/p/i-used-to-think-it-was-about-life) on Israel’s behavior in light of his diagnosis with stage IV colon cancer. - Here are two views of Tucker Carlson in the context of the current “Middle East moment,” one by [Avrum Berg](https://avrumburg.substack.com/p/the-messiah-from-washington-and-us?r=1gwysa&utm%5Fmedium=ios&triedRedirect=true), who believes Carlson needs to be taken seriously for “saying the quiet part out loud” even, and perhaps especially, when you disagree with him; and one in which historian [Marcia Kupfer](https://marciakupfer.substack.com/p/hallucinatory-anti-judaism-in-the) does a deep, detailed, and more (and necessarily) intellectualized dive into the anti-Judaism that informs Carlson’s positions. [This piece](https://yoramhazony.substack.com/p/my-contacts-with-tucker-carlson-about) by conservative Yoram Hazoni, who tried to engage Carlson on the subject of his antisemitism is also worth reading. - I don’t agree with Elyse Wien’s politics, but “[The Myth of the Indigenous](https://elysew.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-the-indigenous)” is interesting nonetheless in its critique of how the left deploys the concept to serve their own purposes. - [On the Warpath: Messianic Zionism, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and Israel's War Without End](https://savageminds.substack.com/p/on-the-warpath), by Ilan Pappé: The title is self explanatory. It’s short, but offers an interesting angle. ## From Saadi’s Bustan *Bustan* is divided into ten chapters, the first of which deals with the question of what it means to be a just ruler. This poem, which serves as the prologue of the chapter, contains an irony that would have been known to Saadi’s readers but that is lost unless you know a bit of history. Nushirvan was popularly known as a good and just king, while his son Hormuz had just the opposite reputation. After this selection from *Bustan,* I’ve included my versions of two stories from another of Saadi’s works, *Golestan,* that illustrate the difference. --- I’ve heard that Nushirvan with his last breaths advised his son Hormuz on how to rule: “Guarantee your poorest subject’s comfort; do not permit your own comfort to bind you. None who call your kingdom home will live at ease, if ease is all you choose to live for. No judge will find a shepherd innocent who slept and let the wolf among the sheep. Be vigilant! Protect the poor and needy; the crown you wear you wear because of them. The peasants are the roots, my son; the king, the tree that needs the roots to give it strength. Do your best to keep from hurting them; to hurt them is to dig up your own roots. If you wish to set your feet upon The Path, let the pious lead you through Hope and Fear. A man who fears evil and hopes for good becomes a man whose wisdom is innate. If you find a king with both those attributes, you’ll find his realm secure, his people safe. To those who hope he offers his indulgence, hoping God will be indulgent too. He sees no joy in other people’s pain, fearing pain will spread throughout his realm. A king who lacks these traits will rule a realm lacking the peaceful life that people seek. If you are hobbled, accept it as your fate, but if you gallop freely, go where you will. You’ll never have the room you need to run in a kingdom where the king abuses power. Fear the bold and proud among your subjects, but fear as well the ones who don’t fear God. A king who lays waste to his people’s hearts will see his kingdom flourish in his dreams. Tyranny leads to ruin and a ruined name; a prudent king will take full measure of these words. Your people shelter and support your rule, so don’t kill anyone without just cause. See to the comfort of those who tend your land; their happiness will mean a greater yield. Repay with evil the good someone does you and you unman yourself in public view. --- ## From Saadi’s Golestan *Story 19 (about Nushirvan)* This is how I heard the story: The hunting party had stopped to eat, but there was no salt to season the meat they were roasting for Nushirvan, and no one wanted to serve him an improperly seasoned meal. So they sent one of the boys who was with them to get some salt from a nearby village. Before the boy left, however, Nushirvan told him, “Make sure you pay for what you take. Otherwise, the village will be ruined.” Surprised and more than a little incredulous, those who were standing nearby asked how such a simple thing as bringing some salt to the king could have such profound consequences. Nushirvan replied, “When the world began, oppression was a small hut that few people entered, but as more and more people chose to go inside, they built it up, and look how high it reaches now.” > To please the king who eats a single apple > from a subject’s garden, his slaves will pull > the tree up whole to plant in the palace yard; > and if he lets five eggs be taken by force, > his army will commandeer a thousand birds. > Tyrants die. The curses on them do not. *Story 8 (about Hormuz)* When he was asked what crime his father’s viziers had commit- ted, Hormuz replied, “None. I put these men in jail because they feared my power without respecting it. I knew that to protect themselves from the capriciousness they saw in me and the harm they thought might come to them because of it, they might try to kill me. So I had no choice. I took the advice of the sages, who said: > The power to wipe out a hundred men > should not replace your fear of one who fears you. > Watch when a cat is fighting for its life; > it plucks the tiger’s eyes out with its claws. > To stop the stone the shepherd might throw down > to crush its head, the viper bites, and lives. ### Four by Four #53 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-52-2/ Last updated: 2026-03-27T10:00:38.000Z #### Contents ## Publication News The world of small press publishing works very, very slowly sometimes. *T'shuvah,* my third book of poetry, was published in 2023\. Only now, however, has one of the reviews that I know was written about the book—this one by [Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.](https://etgrayjr.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com)—been published. It appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of American Book Review. You can read the review [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2026/02/Elizabeth-Gray-s-Review-of-T-shuvah.pdf). ## Four Things To Read [They Killed My Source](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/mohammad-tajik-iran-cyber-intelligence/684954/?gift=9L5E0%5F00dQA8ldt%5F3rAKn71rXA9SHIgMz8ROGGU%5F5gE&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share), by Shane Harris: > A “huge number” of Iranian cyber operations “had my signature on the paperwork or I designed it altogether,” Mohammad claimed. At the time, Iran had been credibly linked to disruptions of the global financial system and to the penetration of computers that run crucial infrastructure, such as electrical grids and dams, including one in New York State. Was I now talking to the guy who oversaw those covert operations? And if so, why was he talking to me? This piece in the Atlantic reads like the intricate subplot of a spy movie. According to Harris, he was contacted by a man named Mohammad Hossein Tajik, who claimed both to be in charge of an elite cyber-warfare unit in Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security and to have been a CIA asset within Iran. Both claims, Harris discovers, were true. Neither that fact alone, however, nor the far more chilling fact that Mohammed is eventually killed, almost certainly by Iran’s government, are what make this essay worth reading, especially now, given the ongoing unrest in that country. What I found most compelling about the story is the way it locates the geopolitical conflict between the US and Iran within the lives of ordinary human beings and demonstrates, by implication at least, how distant that conflict is, despite the players’ ordinariness, from the real, material, and ordinary interests of the ordinary Iranians who are now taking to the streets. **§§§** [*Salient*](https://www.ndbooks.com/book/salient/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr: > My situation is difficult: I have to reconcile the trig and leveling data of the various systems available for this area…with my own emotions—complex mathematical calculations and a feeling of loss. *Salient* is a book-length poem in which Gray explores what emerges when she brings into juxtaposition what she calls in her Preface “two obsessions of mine,” the [Battle of Passchendaele](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle%5Fof%5FPasschendaele?ref=richardjnewman.com), which took place in late 1917, and the [*chöd*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%B6d?ref=richardjnewman.com) ritual, which she describes as “the core ‘severance’ practice of a lineage founded by Machikn Lapdrön, the great twelfth-century female Tibetan Buddhist saint.” That description might make it sound like you need either specialized knowledge of or a pre-existing interest in either subject in order to appreciate the book, and I am sure that people with that knowledge or that interest will be able to read *Salient* at a much deeper level than I did. Nonetheless, I found the poem to be a compelling and moving meditation on meaning-making. The excerpt I quoted above, for example, from “In Some Ways The Situation Is Analogous To That Facing Second Army in 1915,” can also be read as an account of the difficulties a poet encounters in trying to reconcile the mechanics of craft with the the emotional impulse that pushes a poem into existence; and the beginning of “General Description Of The Line,” which is, on the surface about military strategy, can also be read as a way of thinking about poetic composition: > The first line generally consists of two parts, one an obstacle, > and is continuous except for narrow inconspicuous passages > that may serve as exits. Interestingly, a question the book asks without asking or definitively answering it is this: If making war requires the same kinds of imaginative engagement with reality as the making of art, then the imagination is truly amoral. What, then, are the constraints we can put on the imagination that will harness it to a moral purpose? **§§§** [Is It Possible to Atone for Genocide?](https://jewishcurrents.org/is-it-possible-to-atone-for-genocide?utm%5Fsource=newsletter&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=body), by Avigayil Halpern: > As we approach Yom Kippur, I am left wondering: What does repentance look like as we try to move forward, both as a Jewish community, and also as part of the human community? How do we understand our own complicity and the specific ways we each need to be held accountable? For those of us who have opposed the genocide since its beginning: How do we relate to people who had been more reticent to speak out against Israel but are doing so now? We know that for hundreds of thousands of people, this reckoning is far too little, far too late. And still, this is not an intellectual exercise. For me, this question matters insofar as it can help hasten an end to the genocide, which needs to be our primary focus right now. Before telling you whose words those were, it’s important to say that the conversation of which they were a part first appeared in [*Jewish Currents*](https://jewishcurrents.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) in the October 2025 “Chevruta,” the column the magazine models after “the traditional Jewish method of study in which a pair of students analyze a religious text together.” I deeply appreciate that the magazine honors in this way a thread in Jewish culture that often gets subsumed beneath the homogenizing press of the culture at large, i.e., that in the Jewish tradition individuals are responsible for coming to their own understanding of what it means to live a Jewish life by “learning Torah,” engaging on a personal level with the texts of the tradition. It doesn’t mean that we are our own absolute authority, but that we are responsible for making sense of the tradition on our own terms within the ever-widening context that the tradition makes possible as it evolves. So, the words I quoted above belonged to Audrey Sasson, the executive director of [Jews for Racial and Economic Justice](https://www.jfrej.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) (JFREJ) with whom Halpern was in conversation. Interestingly, Sasson does not ask about what teshuvah, the Hebrew word for atonement, would look like for, say, Netanyahu or other members of the Israeli government, or even for the Israeli soldiers who fought in Gaza. Rather, she is asking about those Jews here in the United States, and specifically for the Jewish leadership here in the States, whose move from complicity to opposition raises the question of why the move itself came so late in the game. The answers that she and Halpern come to—based on their readings of Maimonides, the [Mishnah](https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/mishnah/?ref=richardjnewman.com) tractate [Horayot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horayot?ref=richardjnewman.com), and [*On Repentance and Repair*](https://www.onrepentance.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg—are worth dwelling on. For the sake of brevity, though, I will just name a couple: the idea that the confessional component of atonement needs to come at the end of an internal process, not at the beginning of that process; the idea that someone who repents a murder they have committed should never be allowed to return to a position of authority they formerly held; and the differences between and among individual, collective, and institutional accountability. On a personal level, this conversation reminded me of a question I did not have the courage to ask about teshuvah when I was in yeshiva: Would teshuvah have been possible for Hitler? The point of asking that, for me, was not to try to enumerate what such repentance might look like—the answer to that is far beyond my capabilities—but rather to test a related question: If repentance is not available to everyone, regardless of the wrong they have done, then is there really such a thing as repentance to begin with? [**§§§**](https://www.poetryinreview.com/reviews/dialogue%5Fon%5Fpolitical%5Fpoetry.html?ref=richardjnewman.com) [*Emerson in Iran: The American Appropriation of Persian Poetry*](https://sunypress.edu/Books/E/Emerson-in-Iran2?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Roger Sedarat: > As important as source language remains in any discussion of literary translation, Emerson further follows the Sufi mystics in his conception of an ideal poet who can “speak through the symbolic language of nature” (Loili 112). Important to an application of Emerson’s approach to translation and its early effect on his own verse, such a seemingly translingual symbolic connection helps to build a strong case for his having anticipated Ezra Pound’s appropriation of the East in his influence of the American poetic tradition. This is a book for scholars of American literature, in particular those who are deeply familiar with Emersonian scholarship, which I will admit up front that I am not. Nonetheless, despite the fact that my ignorance made it difficult to follow a good deal of what Sedarat had to say, as someone who, like Emerson and Pound, produced what some call “bridge translations” of classical Persian literature I resonated with what I was able to understand. (“Bridge translation” is a label signifying that I used an informant because I am not literate in Persian.) I wrote a little bit in [Four By Four #41](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-41/#four-things-to-read) about the translation work I’ve done and the ethical dilemma(s) attached to it. What I appreciated most about what I could follow of Sedarat’s argument is that he allowed me to place that work and my thinking about it in an American literary tradition I’d never really thought all that much about. In particular, I appreciated the way Sedarat set up a kind of continuum, with Emerson, who respected the integrity of the Persian poets he translated on one end—which is where I have tried to place myself—and, on the other, people like Coleman Barks and Daniel Ladinksy, who so deracinate the poets they “translate” (Rumi and Hafez respectively) that they are almost unrecognizable as the deeply religious, Muslim poets they were. (If you want to read a critique of Barks that is completely in line with but far more accessible than Sedarat’s, check out [*The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi*](http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-erasure-of-islam-from-the-poetry-of-rumi?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Rozina Ali.) --- ## Four Things To See ### Books Are Weapons ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/02/books-are-weapons-1.jpg) **§§§** ### Black Banjo Player With A Wooden Leg This photo, which is dated to around 1865, is unattributed, but you can read an expert’s take on it at Wellcome Collection’s [website](https://wellcomecollection.org/works/n3733yh6?ref=richardjnewman.com). You can also read about the African American history of the banjo on the [Afropop Worldwide](https://www.afropop.org/articles/black-history-of-banjo-playlist-and-pictures?ref=richardjnewman.com) website, and you can listen to playlist called Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina and Virginia on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/album/0HxTY3aFRGiSubaGmDD0KF?si=dcuh3blMTfWJYKhG4fKlZQ&ref=richardjnewman.com). (You’ll need a free Spotify account to listed to the whole thing.) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/02/black-banjo-player-with-a-wooden-leg-1-1.jpg) **§§§** ### Shirley Chisolm Presidential Campaign Poster [Shirley Chisolm](https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/shirley-chisholm?ref=richardjnewman.com) was the first African American woman elected to Congress in 1968 and the first woman and African American to seek the nomination for president of the United States from either the Democratic or Republican parties in 1972\. The Tag line on the poster—*Unbought and Unbossed*—was also the title of her [autobiography](https://bookshop.org/p/books/unbought-and-unbossed-shirley-chisholm/c02fbc87c900c2bd?ean=9780063160873&next=t&ref=richardjnewman.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/02/shirley-chisolm-for-presidents-1.jpg) **§§§** ### Employment of Negroes in Agriculture (1934) This painting by [Earle Richardson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earle%5FWilton%5FRichardson?ref=richardjnewman.com) is in the collection at the [Smithsonian](https://www.si.edu/object/employment-negroes-agriculture:saam%5F1964.1.183?ref=richardjnewman.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/02/images-of-negroes-in-agriculture-1.jpg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### Arash Sobhani - For Gina **§§§** ### Adam Silverman & Susan Gubernat - Elegy for The Earth (Performed by The Jenesais Choir) Susan Gubernat was my officemate for many years. She is the author of [*The Zoo At Night*](https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496202055/the-zoo-at-night/?ref=richardjnewman.com)and [*Flesh*](https://www.amazon.com/Flesh-Susan-Gubernat/dp/188423528X?ref=richardjnewman.com)*.* In addition to this piece, she collaborated with composer [Adam Silverman](https://adambsilverman.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) on the opera [Korczak’s Orphans](http://jmwc.org/korczaks-orphans-opera-in-brooklyn/?ref=richardjnewman.com). Elegy for the Earth is a deeply moving song cycle. **§§§** ### Beth McCarthy - How Am I Supposed To Love Myself? **§§§** ### **KATSEYE (캣츠아이) - Gabriela** --- ## Four Things About Me I wrote these words on June 11, 1988\. I don’t know what specifically I was responding to, but I definitely recognize the feelings of the younger me who wrote it: > To say “I love you” in a poem that means “I love you,” you need the obligatory irony that the language will never suffice for what you want it to mean. Otherwise, the poem will fail. > To say “I love you” to a friend who is not your lover, but whom you can imagine as a lover for a night or a week or a lifetime, you need somehow to keep their fear that you want your words to be a cage from ruining your friendship. > And if you want to say “I love you” to more than one person, you need to pick one as your lover and the rest to be “just friends” or you’ll be told you can’t make commitments. They’ll say you’re cheating someone out of the full and undivided attention the world wants love to be between two people. **§§§** I was speaking with a friend of mine who is not Jewish the other day about the different stances towards Israel that exist within the Jewish community in the United States and she asked me how I felt about the idea that Israel and its existence is a necessary component of Jewish identity and survival. Intellectually and historically, not to mention morally and ethically, I don’t think that position has ever truly held water, but I still get it emotionally. First, I am of the generation whose post-Holocaust Jewish education included the imperative that Jews needed some kind of safe haven should a situation like the Holocaust ever arise again. As a kind of prooftext for that, we were told, consider the experience of the role Israel was playing at that moment in the lives of the [refuseniks](https://www.refusenikproject.org/history/?ref=richardjnewman.com#historical-overview), Soviet Jews who were persecuted for being Jewish and refused permission to emigrate to Israel. My own experience with antisemitism, which I wrote about briefly in this post on [Israel and Palestine](https://www.richardjnewman.com/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are-you-on/), also functioned for me as a real-life demonstration of what I was learning in Hebrew School. I remembered something else during my conversation with this friend that I have not written about before. Part of what made the idea of Israel so compelling to me at the time was the possibility of being in a place where not only the overwhelming majority of people, but also the dominant culture was Jewish, where I would not have constantly to translate “being Jewish” for a Christian, or at least secularized Christian society that seemed entirely uninterested in really understanding what that identity was all about. Here’s one example from when I was in junior high school. There’s a major Jewish holiday call [Sukkot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukkot?ref=richardjnewman.com) (or Succos, if you’re Ashkenazi, like me) that occurs shortly after Yom Kippur. It’s a week-long holiday, on the first and last two days of which observant Jews do not work or go to school and follow restrictions on other activities similar [to those they follow on Shabbat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/39%5FMelakhot?ref=richardjnewman.com). My family was not orthodox, but I wanted to be observant and so my mother let me stay home from school on Sukkot so I could go to shul. When I was in seventh grade, on the second day of Sukkot, my junior high’s truant officer called my home to find out why I wasn’t in school that day. I don’t remember how I and not my mother ended up being the one to talk to them, but when I explained to her that I had stayed home because it was a Jewish holiday, she refused to believe me since she knew there were Jewish people working at the school who hadn’t stayed home. When I tried to explain the difference between observant and non-observant Jews, she didn’t believe me. Ultimately, though I have no memory of how, the situation was resolved and I was not charged with truancy. Nonetheless, it had made me aware of my own difference in a way that left a very bad taste in my mouth. I could point to more recent examples as well, but this one illustrates just how far back in my life this experience goes. **§§§** I’ve never been a jealous person. I don’t mean that I don’t experience jealousy. Of course I do. I mean that I have never been the kind of person who expects someone else to live their life in a way that protects me from jealousy, especially when it comes to love. On June 16, 1988, I wrote this in response to reading [*Jealousy*](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7823056M/Jealousy?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by [Nancy Friday](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy%5FFriday?ref=richardjnewman.com): > \[W\]e cannot expect other people to live according to our fears…jealousy is normal, is part of acknowledging the separateness of another human being—and…that acknowledgement is, in fact, a very, *very* important component—if not the entire basis—of love. I think now I would rewrite that last sentence to read “That acknowledgement is, in fact, foundational to one’s ability to love another human being.” **§§§** I had a very serious girlfriend when I was in my twenties. We were together for almost seven years. At the beginning, however, for two or three of those years, we lived far enough apart and saw each other rarely enough that we decided it would be okay if we saw other people. If I remember correctly, we put it to ourselves like this: *When we’re together, we’re together; when we’re not, what we do is our own business.* We didn’t hide from each other the fact that we had friends of the opposite sex, but we never pressed each other to reveal more about those relationships than we wanted to. She spoke often, for example, about a guy she’d go dancing with on the weekends and I remember thinking that something in the way she talked about him indicated that they were probably also having sex; and I know I told her about the women who were my friends, one of whom became my lover for a while. Once, after my girlfriend and I were living close enough to each other that our “long-distance accommodation” was no longer necessary, she asked me outright if I’d been with another woman during our “don’t ask don’t tell” period. I saw no reason to lie, so I told her yes. She responded by punching me really hard in the arm. When I asked her why she’d hit me, she didn’t apologize. Instead, she explained that she was angry at herself, not me. “I thought I’d be able to tell if you were with someone else,” she said, “It bothers me that I couldn’t.” ****A gentle reminder:** Four By Four is part of the free tier of **It All Connects.* If you are not currently a paid subscriber and would like to subscribe, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signup/65988db373946800080fe780/yearly). If you would like to make a one-time contribution to support my work on **It All Connects*, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/support). --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in* [*my work*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/) *or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* ### On My Desk Now: Translating Korean Poetry URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/translating-korean-poetry/ Last updated: 2026-03-20T10:00:28.000Z I’ve had an interest in translating poetry for as long as I can remember. As an undergraduate, I was awarded the B’nai Zion medal for excellence in Hebrew, largely on the basis of an independent study I did with Professor Robert Hoberman for which I produced translations of biblical, medieval, and contemporary Hebrew poetry. If I am ever able to locate those translations, I will publish them in a future issue of On My Desk Now. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/02/IMG_0604-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/02/IMG_0605-1.jpg) If I had to trace my interest in translation to a single point of origin, though, it would be to the year in junior high school when I-don’t-remember-which-rebbe encouraged our class to buy the ArtScroll edition of [*Shir Hashirim: The Song of Songs*](https://www.artscroll.com/Books/9781578191055.html?ref=richardjnewman.com), so that we could better understand “the most misunderstood book in the entire [Tanach](https://reformjudaism.org/tanach?ref=richardjnewman.com).” Because the ArtScroll translation was allegorical, he explained, it revealed the text’s true significance in a way that translations based on the text’s plain meaning did not. I don’t think I understood at the time what the word allegorical meant, but I was in for a shock when I opened the book. I understood *Shir HaShirim* to be a book of sometimes quite erotic love poems, the beginning of which is usually [rendered](https://faculty.washington.edu/snoegel/PDFs/articles/Song%20of%20Songs%20Translation.pdf?ref=richardjnewman.com) as something like “May he kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” The same verse in the ArtScroll version, however, is translated like this: “Communicate Your innermost wisdom to me again in loving closeness…” Many years later, I would discover a [podcast episode](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/misfit-torah/id1399327341?i=1000599659126&ref=richardjnewman.com) in which the host offers a really interesting, philosophical, and very-much-worth-wrestling-with justification for the allegorical translation. At the time, though, my only response to what ArtScroll had done was anger, since the only purpose I could discern for their allegorical approach was to obscure the eroticism of the original. Ever since then, I have been fascinated by what’s at stake culturally and otherwise in why and how a text gets translated from one language into another. That interest notwithstanding, the possibility of translating Korean literature did not even enter my mind when I arrived in the country in the summer of 1988\. One of the first friends I made there, however, a woman who worked the front desk at the school where I taught—her name was Yu Eun Hee—had majored in Korean literature in college and when she told me that she hoped one day to publish English translations of Korean poetry, we decided it would be a fun project to work on together. She chose the poems, rendered them in English as best she could and then we worked together on shaping that initial version into an English language poem that could stand on its own. The project ended after she got married—at that time, newly married women had to leave their jobs, or at least they did at the school where I worked—but I just found the notebook in which I wrote out the finished or near-finished versions of the first poems we worked on. I make no claim as to their quality, but I think they’re interesting enough to share here. **§§§** We gave the first poem we worked on the title “A Lad.” It’s by [Yun Dong Ju](https://artsandculture.google.com/story/life-and-poetry-of-the-eternal-young-poet-yoon-dongju-yoon-dongju-memorial-hall/ZQVxOv5SmmRsAw?hl=en&ref=richardjnewman.com), one of the most important poets in the Korean canon. I’ve adapted this bio from [All Poetry](https://allpoetry.com/Dongju-Yun?ref=richardjnewman.com): Yun Dong-ju wrote during the tumultuous period of the Japanese colonial rule of Korea (1910–1945). His work grapples with themes of national identity, personal guilt, and the search for purity in a time of oppression, embodying a quiet yet profound resistance to the cultural and political hegemony of the time. Although he died young, Yun left behind a body of work that has had a significant impact on Korean literature, and his focus on personal struggle within a larger context of political oppression finds echoes in the works of other poets writing under oppressive regimes, such as Pablo Neruda and Nazim Hikmet. His exploration of individual guilt and responsibility in the face of societal injustice remains relevant to contemporary readers grappling with similar questions. This is our version of the poem: > **A Lad** > > Fall’s grief scatters the maple leaves > and each newly created emptiness > is preparation for the coming spring. > The sky unfolds above a fading tree, > above a lad gazing quietly > until his brows are tinged with blue. > He rubs his warm cheeks > and the blue enters his palms. > He stares. Clear rivers flow > along his life-line, his heart-line, > and the vision, the face > as sad as love, Sun-hi, > behind the water. Through closed eyes > he relives past joys, but still > the rivers run, the face > sad as love, Sun-hi, beautiful, > a vision through his tears. You can find another version of this poem online at [All Poetry](https://allpoetry.com/poem/8611587-Boy-by-Dongju-Yun?ref=richardjnewman.com). **§§§** The second poet we worked on was [Hwang Jin-Hi](https://blogs.surrey.ac.uk/medievalwomen/2019/11/17/hwang-jin-i-a-sixteenth-century-korean-kisaeng-sijo-poet/?ref=richardjnewman.com), a 15th century [kisaeng](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kisaeng?ref=richardjnewman.com), or courtesan—though you should click through each of the above links to get a sense of exactly what that meant in a Korean cultural context. Some people claim Hwang Jin-Hi as a kind of proto-feminist figure in Korean history. Her literary status can be broadly compared to Sappho’s, though there are important differences. This is the poem we translated: > **The Long Mid-Winter Night** > > I will wrap the middle > of this long mid-winter night > round and round > in spring blankets > until my lover comes > and slowly > together > we can unravel it > around us. I do not remember how we arrived at this version, nor can I find any of the notes we made or earlier drafts. I am struck, though, by how different it is from the version I found in [*Songs of the Kisaeng*](https://archive.org/details/songsofkisaengco0000unse)*,* translated by Constantine Contogenis and Wolhee Choe: **A Cold Solstice** > At cold solstice I cut > the night, take its long waist > to my quilted bed, > curl up the dark under > > broideries of spring, to wait > a night spread out again for you. I will also add that the introduction to *Songs of the Kisaeng* provides a really interesting overview of who those women were and the lives they led. **§§§** The third poet we worked on was [Kim Hu Ran](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim%5FHu-ran?ref=richardjnewman.com). I have adapted this information from the [Digital Library of Korean Literature](https://library.ltikorea.or.kr/writer/200406?ref=richardjnewman.com): Deeply rooted in the more traditional forms of Korean lyricism, Kim Huran’s poetry is characterized by an intense exploration of symbolist imagery. Her poems explore the conflicts and contradictions of life with a modernist sensibility and capture the beauty and complexities of nature. Ms. Yu and I worked on two poem by Kim Hur Ran, “Land of Snow” and “The Miner.” > **Land of Snow** > > Winter brings the world’s snow to cover me, > to make me a citizen of itself, > of its wordless commandment: > “Be silent. Be silent. > Be white and white, like snow.” > > Lovers do not know winter. > They move like the blue feet of the fog, > like the bare feet of Isadora Duncan, > two flames combining in a blaze. > > In winter, I gently fold my wings > and become a citizen of the land of snow. > > But sometimes I am a flame, > and sometimes a tear hanging in air, > a snowflake filled with sorrow. > > **The Miner** > > A miner digs deep in the earth, > deep in the unplumbed darkness, > seeking words. > > He chips away at the sleeping stones, > waking them. Charcoal black, > they, we, > emerge together— > > you for the sake of me, > I for the sake of you— > to return once again > to the human truth > > from which we come, > > to go down, our vision > the perfect light > of virtuous miners, > and transform the night > into flame. ### Learning To Love The Questions: The Power We Pretend Not To See 4 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-power-we-pretend-not-to-see-4/ Last updated: 2026-09-05T09:32:37.000Z *Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you* *As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;* *That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend* *Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.* *I, like an usurp’d town to another due,* *Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;* *Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,* *But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.* *Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,* *But am betroth’d unto your enemy;* *Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,* *Take me to you, imprison me, for I,* *Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,* *Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.* —“[Holy Sonnet XIV](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44106/holy-sonnets-batter-my-heart-three-persond-god?ref=richardjnewman.com),” by John Donne I first read John Donne’s Sonnet XIV sitting in the front row of twelfth grade AP English. I don’t remember a word of our class discussion, but I have a distinct picture in my head of Mr. Giglio listing all the verbs Donne used, pointing out how violent so many of them were, and then looking away from us when he said the word *ravish.* “Do you know what that word means when it’s used as a verb?” he asked, clearly unwilling to meet our gaze. Maybe someone answered him, maybe not, I don’t recall, but I’m going to paraphrase his explanation here because even though I am sure *you* know what the word means, I want you to understand exactly how he framed the poem for us. Ravish, he said, staring at a point in space off to his left, near the classroom door, was an old fashioned word for what happened when a man “sexually possessed a woman.” I don’t remember if he ever used the word rape as he continued to talk about the poem, but he really did say *possessed,* and a palpable sense of wonder entered his voice as he made sure we understood that Donne’s speaker was asking God, metaphorically of course, to do the same thing to him. I had a hard time taking the poem seriously. As a Jewish kid who to that point had been attending an Orthodox yeshiva, I frankly found the premise of Donne’s poem—and I mean no disrespect by this; I am reporting what I felt at the time—kind of ridiculous. Nothing like the Devil existed in the universe of my religious education, and so the notion that Donne would experience himself as “betroth’d” to such an entity, and that it would take “real metaphorical” violence on God’s part to free him from that betrothal, felt precisely antithetical to everything I had learned about the relationship between the human and the divine. I did not dismiss the poem out of hand—even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t; we eventually had to write an essay about it—but I found trying to wrap my head around the paradox that fascinated Mr. Giglio, *How could being ravished make someone chaste?*, both more trouble than it was worth and deeply troubling, though I could not back then have articulated why that was so. What I could have told you at the time was that Mr. Giglio was a devout Catholic—I found out many years later that he’d left teaching to become a priest—and that Donne’s poem moved him in a way that he was trying and failing to hide from us. It did not occur to me until years later that the homoeroticism I initially did not recognize in the poem might have touched something in Mr. Giglio that he would have preferred not to reveal. I do not know for sure if he was gay, which matters only because he would have had no choice back then but to be in the closet, but, assuming for the moment that he was—there *were* whispers—I am struck as I write this by the risk he took in teaching that poem. I did not have a lot of respect for Mr. Giglio as a teacher—to explain why would require telling you stories that are at best marginally relevant here—but no one deserves to live with the fear he might very well have been living with, of suffering the consequences of what it would have meant for him to out himself simply because he could not hide the fact that he was moved by a poem. **§§§** According to Lawrence Beaston in [Talking To a Silent God: Donne’s Holy Sonnets and The Via Negativa](https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A54668858/AONE?u=nysl%5Foweb&sid=googleScholar&xid=c00a44a1&ref=richardjnewman.com), the Holy Sonnets, which Donne wrote between 1609 and 1610, render a spiritual struggle that many contemporary readers find troubling. For these readers, Beaston asserts, the “note of despair” the poems consistently strike is “out of keeping” with Donne’s position not just as an Anglican priest, but also as the [Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean%5Fof%5FSt%5FPaul%27s?ref=richardjnewman.com). Given the spiritual leadership Donne was expected to provide, Beaston goes on, these readers expect the Holy Sonnets to arrive at some version of “spiritual health.” Since the poems explicitly do not do that, he argues, since they actively resist such a reading, to find them wanting on this account is to fail read them on their own terms. Instead, Beaston proposes a reading that places the poems in the “long tradition of Christian mysticism,” known as the via negativa, which “insists upon…the vast difference” between God and humans not as a reason for despair, but as evidence that God “work\[s\] to effect the salvation of his believers even in their experience of his silence, his apparent absence.” In this view, Donne’s speaker becomes a “penitent individual…beseeching God for some spiritual grace,” despite the fact that he receives “no apparent response;” and God’s silence becomes not an occasion for the speaker’s “despair,” but rather the poet’s way of representing God’s “radical otherness”—the impossibility of rendering God’s presence in words. Read in this context, the homosexual violence the speaker calls down upon himself, metaphorical though it may be, becomes a final, desperate act of abject surrender, offered in full knowledge that God will neither accept nor reject it; and the speaker should be understood as being fine with that, in the sense that God’s response is not his goal. Having arrived at the point where he can surrender himself in this way is. What makes this surrender an especially rich source of interpretive readings is the paradox Donne crafts into the metaphor he uses: that being ravished by God will somehow make him chaste. Critics have deployed a range of strategies to make sense of this, including those that treat the metaphor as a species of spiritual sublimation, allowing the same-sex dynamic to be both accepted and denied at the same time; those that corral the poem into heteronormative heterosexuality by arguing that the speaker’s expressed desire to be raped by God turns him into a metaphorical woman; and those that use kink as a framing device, seeing Donne’s speaker as having consented to being raped by God, much as a submissive in S&M play consents to acts that would otherwise be considered violations. What all of these readings have in common is that they tend to focus on resolving the first part of the metaphor, the part where Donne’s speaker asks God to ravish him. None, as far as I can tell, ask why the chasteness Donne’s speaker craves—and it’s important to remember that chaste for Donne did not mean sexually untouched or celibate, but rather, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, “pure from immoral intercourse”—why that should require an act of sexual violence in the first place, much less one that is generally understood in the real world to be something men perpetrate almost exclusively against women. **§§§** Much of the controversy surrounding Andrea Dworkin’s book [*Intercourse*](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/andrea-dworkin/intercourse/9780465017522/?lens=basic-books&ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* first published in the late 1980s, centered around what Dworkin called “the fundamental question of feminism and freedom: can an occupied people—physically occupied inside \[as women are in sexual intercourse with men\]—be free\[?\]” Dworkin was not talking about rape. Rather, she was asking about consensual intercourse, an act thoroughly entrenched in our cultural imaginary as being beyond politics, as the natural and therefore ultimate expression of love and commitment between a man and a woman. Given that this act has historically been understood in terms of a woman’s surrendering herself to a man, Dworkin asked, does that understanding not imply that, as Donne might put it, heterosexual intercourse is by definition an act through which a man “enthralls” a woman, making her his in ways that are antithetical to any notion of her own personal freedom? For Dworkin, one consequence of politicizing consensual sex in this way is that female virginity also becomes politicized. Broadly speaking, Dworkin defines two ways of understanding virginity, “a woman’s framing” of the concept and “the male frame,” which she characterizes as the one in which we now live. As you might expect, the two frames are inversely related to each other. In the woman’s frame, virginity is not about whether a woman has had sex per se, but about the degree to which she is able to control the physical boundaries of her own body and thus remain whole unto herself. In the male frame, on the other hand, a woman who is a virgin is not whole, and what completes her is sex with a man—but not just any sex. Fully to lose her virginity, according to this logic, a woman must experience “sexual desire \[powerful\] enough to be made sick by it” and a “passion \[strong\] enough to crave it,” such that she is willing to do whatever is required in order to fulfill it. As an example of this male-defined virginity, Dworkin offers a reading of how Gustave Flaubert’s character [Emma Bovary](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/286336/madame-bovary-by-gustave-flaubert/?ref=richardjnewman.com), despite the fact that she’d had sex with her husband, did not experience that kind of transformative sexual desire until her adulterous affair with Rodolphe. In male terms, in other words, Emma remained ontologically a virgin, incomplete as a woman and as a human being, until that affair. If we understand the Devil to whom Donne’s speaker considers himself betrothed to be analogous to Emma Bovary’s husband, then Donne’s speaker is—at least within Dworkin’s logic—just as virginal as Flaubert’s character. Granted, the desire that Donne’s speaker feels is spiritual in nature, not carnal, but the underlying dynamic is still the same. What he wants is to be forced by God into the kind of surrender that will make him spiritually whole, no differently than Emma wants to be made whole by surrendering herself to a man capable of making her feel the desire to do so. The only difference is that Emma’s pursuit of fulfillment is ultimately self-destructive, while the desire Donne’s speaker feels remains, at least within the fourteen lines of the poem, forever unfulfilled. **§§§** Dworkin offered the experiences of three female saints as exemplars of what she meant by women’s framing of virginity: [Joan of Arc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan%5Fof%5FArc?ref=richardjnewman.com), [Saint Catherine of Alexandria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine%5Fof%5FAlexandria?ref=richardjnewman.com), and [Saint Margaret of Antioch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret%5Fthe%5FVirgin?ref=richardjnewman.com). St. Catherine provides perhaps the most straightforward example, since she turned down a chance to save her life by becoming the Emperor Maxentius’ mistress, choosing instead to remain faithful to Jesus who, in a vision, had already made her his spouse. The physical boundary Catherine thus maintained, Dworkin wrote, which the other two saints did as well, is fundamental to the kind of “personal freedom and self-determination” without which there can be “no private conscience, no personal relationship to God, no way of life that \[is\] self-chosen, self-actualized, self-sustained”—in other words, no way to have the sense of self that made her vision of marrying Jesus possible. In one of the marginal notes I made for myself when I first read *Intercourse* almost forty years ago, I asked what it would mean if we could redefine male virginity along the same lines, as a boundary meant to protect the integrity of a man’s sexual interior, together with everything that interior might represent in terms of how he lived his life. What if, in other words, we understood male virginity as belonging to the same species of wholeness Dworkin attributes to those female saints, rather than as something a boy must “lose” in order for his transition into manhood to be considered complete? Dworkin suggests that as long as we remain within the logic of the male frame that question is unanswerable. “Men are rarely ontological virgins,” she wrote, by which I understand her to mean that because patriarchy does not define men’s bodies as sexually contested territory in the way that women’s bodies are, men are not understood to have the kind of emotional and psychological sexual interiority that is taken for granted in women. As a result, male virginity has no intrinsic value in and of itself, not to the man who wants to end it—it is not, for example, understood to be something he should give only to “the right woman”—and not to the woman, whether she is “right” or not, with whom he has the sex that removes his virginity from him. Looked at this way, the question of male virginity becomes primarily a mechanical one. A man is or is not a virgin; he either has or has not had sex for the first time; and while there may be consequences if he remains a virgin for too long, those consequences no longer apply once he is not a virgin anymore. The ontological question, in other words, is whether he is or is not a man, not whether he is or is not a virgin. Within the logic of patriarchy, then, the kind of intimacy with God that, in Dworkin’s analysis, virginity allowed the female saints to experience would be impossible for a man. Consider, for example, the tenderness with which St. Catherine’s experience of her marriage to Jesus is described by William Caxton in his 15th century [*The Life of St. Katherine, Virgin and Martyr*](https://www.christianiconography.info/goldenLegend/catherine.htm?ref=richardjnewman.com)*.*[1](#fn1-22070) > And as soon as she heard \[Jesus\] name her name, so great a sweetness entered into her soul that she was all ravished, and therewith our Lord gave to her a new strength which passed nature, and said to her: Come my spouse, and give to me your hand. And there our Lord espoused her in joining himself to her by spiritual marriage, promising ever to keep her in all her life in this world, and after this life to reign perpetually in his bliss, and in token of this set a ring on her finger… As Caxton describes it, Catherine’s soul was capable of being entered spiritually—the way a woman’s body is capable of being entered sexually—before Jesus said her name. If Donne’s speaker experienced his soul in the same way, as something that was always already in a state that could be entered, the last line of Sonnet XIV would not be necessary. He does not, which is why he needs the kind of violation he invites in the poem’s final line to create that interiority for him. The question I could not articulate back in Mr. Giglio’s twelfth grade English class was why that should be so. At the time, it would never have occurred to me that the answer lay in Donne’s inability to think of himself, in strictly heteronormative terms, as anything other than a man, someone who could not be ontologically virginal in the way that Catherine was. Nor would it have occurred to me that this inability to imagine himself outside the boundaries of those terms might account for the shape of his search for oneness with God. Within those boundaries, however, and within the metaphorical logic set up by the poem, the violation Donne’s speaker invites is inescapable and not paradoxical at all. In heteronormative terms, for a man to be ravished by another man—and Donne’s God is unambiguously understood to be male—whether that ravishment is voluntary or not, is for him to surrender that which makes him a man, which is precisely the kind of ultimate surrender Donne’s speaker believes he needs to make in order to achieve the spiritual fulfillment he desires. --- 1. The difference in spelling notwithstanding, Caxton and Dworkin were writing about the same saint. [↩︎](#fnr1-22070) ### On The Trail of a Tale - Part Two: The Sources of Franklin’s Parable in 17th Century Christian Arguments for Religious Tolerance URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/on-the-trail-of-a-tale-part-2-the-sources-of-franklins-parable-in-17th-century-christian-arguments-for-religious-tolerance/ Last updated: 2026-05-26T17:27:29.000Z For Saadi, in other words, the Zoroastrian’s sincere commitment to his faith was worthy of respect on its own terms and was therefore more valuable as a guide for human behavior than the orthodoxy he would have been merely performing had he given thanks to God as Abraham had expected him to. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Four by Four #52 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-52/ Last updated: 2026-02-27T11:00:34.000Z #### Contents ## Publication News I am happy to say that three poems from my manuscript called *2020* have been published by [Unlikely Stories](https://www.unlikelystories.org/content/making-it-up-as-i-go-along-2-since-you-asked-and-the-coming-storm?ref=richardjnewman.com), “Making It Up As I Go Along,” “Since You Asked” (which is written in elegiac couplets, a form I have rarely, if ever, seen used in contemporary poetry), and “The Coming Storm,” which is a ghazal. I hope you'll [check the poems out](https://www.unlikelystories.org/content/making-it-up-as-i-go-along-2-since-you-asked-and-the-coming-storm?ref=richardjnewman.com). ## Four Things To Read [*Just Here For The Comments*](https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/just-here-for-the-comments?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Gina Sipley: > The difficult-to-track, hard-to-communicate nature of digital lurking is what makes it problematic for those who seek to monetize social media interaction. It is interesting to note that social media platforms are free of monetary cost for users because the payment for operating costs is derived from a user’s consent…to data collection and surveillance. Although selfish and greedy have been terms used to describe the behaviour \[sic\] of lurkers as individual internet users, lurking in this sense could more accurately describe the social media business model. Sipley’s study of lurking on the internet—the book is based on her doctoral dissertation—occupies a really interesting space between the work of a public intellectual and that of a scholarly researcher. If you’re interested in thinking critically about your own online habits, *Just Here For The Comments* is chock-full of useful insights. I recognized myself at several different points as I read, and I found Sipley’s analysis of choices I have made both affirming and thought-provoking, especially when she connects her analysis to progressive socio-economic and cultural politics. One thing I found particularly interesting was how Sipley’s critique of the way lurking has historically been devalued for its refusal of proactive participation in online life recalled for me a similar critique of the assumption that students who don’t actively participate in class must be unengaged and are therefore unlikely to be learning. I found that point of view especially frustrating as an ESL teacher, since it implicitly denied the fact that there are cultures where “lurking” in the classroom—absorbing the content of a professor’s lecture without commenting or asking questions—is the culturally approved mode of learning. I will confess that much of Sipley’s scholarship was well beyond my normal purview, but I appreciated very much the degree to which her work demonstrated both the limitations of disciplinary silos and the value of forging connections between them, if not of breaking the silos down completely. Even if literacy—online or otherwise—is not your field, her work is a model worth taking into account when you think about cross- or inter-disciplinary practices in your own research. **§§§** [*Kiss The Scars On The Back Of My Neck*](https://bywaterbooks.com/product/kiss-the-scars-on-the-back-of-my-neck-by-joe-okonkwo/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Joe Okonkwo: The characters in these taut, beautifully sculpted stories all find themselves at a crossroads where they must choose between different courses of action, each of which has its own moral valence and consequences that are either realized in the narrative or left to the reader’s imagination as it constructs what happens after the story’s completion. In some stories, the choice is whether or not to use and/or let themselves be used; in others, “like Skin,” it’s the choice to be honest with themselves about an ugly part of who they are. Sometimes the choice seems to work out in their favor, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes it’s the fact that they’ve made the choice that resolves the story and we may not even know precisely which choice they made. “Skin,” in fact, is one of my favorites. Terrence is a gay man consumed with physical self-hatred; he cannot stand his own scrawny body. The situation Okonkwo forces him into confronts him with the fact that he is no better than the men who will not give him a second, or even a first look because of how he looks. In “Paulie,” the eponymous sixteen-year-old main character, who is gay, ruins his mother’s love life out of spite, hates himself for it, but then finds comfort in a place he never expected to. The characters in these stories, all of them deeply drawn and compellingly complex, drew me in and would not let me go. Even now, weeks after finishing the book, I find myself thinking about them. I also appreciated the way Okonkwo worked jazz, the blues, opera, and visual art into the stories by making them a visceral part of these characters’ lives. Joe has read for my reading series, [First Tuesdays](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com), twice. Once from this book and once from his novel [Jazz Moon](https://www.kensingtonbooks.com/9781496701176/jazz-moon/?ref=richardjnewman.com), which I highly recommend as well. **§§§** “[This Common Infection Was Thought to Affect Only Women. Now Doctors Know Better.](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/health/bacterial-vaginosis-sexually-transmitted-infection.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.F1A.DSd9.IdJtHvAWRyx6&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com)” by Rachel E. Gross: > For years, doctors have known that the bacteria associated with \[bacterial vaginosis\] could also be found on the penis. Yet on paper \[the condition\] was just a vagina problem — it’s right there in the name, vaginosis. For 50 years, gynecology treated it as if it were solely a women’s issue, with ineffective treatments that left women vulnerable to re-infection. I don’t remember if any of the women I’ve been with over the course of my life were ever diagnosed with bacterial vaginosis. With urinary tract infections, yes, but reading this article was the first time I’d ever encountered the name of this infection. Given that it was only as recently as 2012 that Cosmopolitan first printed the word “vagina” on its [cover](https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/259/4e5/e0889ca59dda849447ad11fe9f56b194b8-03-cosmo-feb2012-b.2x.rvertical.w330.jpg?ref=richardjnewman.com), and also that I remember only one of my lovers from before I got married more than three decades ago ever using the word vagina to talk about her own body, it would not surprise me to learn that a lover who had been diagnosed with bacterial vaginosis might choose to avoid the discomfort associated with the word by calling it a UTI instead. (Given the state of the culture thirty or forty years ago, it also wouldn’t surprise me to learn that she would have assumed the discomfort would be more mine than hers.) In any event, Gross’ article is very much worth reading. A couple of my takeaways: First, the fact that the bacteria causing bacterial vaginosis can live in semen demonstrates in unavoidably concrete terms that the emotional and psychological “ecosystem” created by a sexual encounter needs to be expanded to include the biological as well. Second, the way in which Gross discusses the permeable and contested boundaries of terms like “sexually transmitted infection” illustrates quite powerfully the ways in which social attitudes and cultural values shape and inform medical science. That is not a new insight, of course, but it was interesting to see it so starkly illustrated. It’s also worth reading the article for this bit of medical history: > Like most advancements in modern gynecology, the discovery of bacterial vaginosis can be traced back to a male doctor experimenting on his patients without consent. The doctor, Dr. Herman Gardner, suspected that B.V. must be a result of some pathogen being transferred back and forth. > In 1955, Dr. Gardner performed an appalling experiment to find out. He transferred vaginal fluid from 15 women who had B.V. into the vaginas of women who did not have the condition, and he allowed the newly infected women to pass B.V. on to their unsuspecting husbands. > Upon culturing bacteria from some of the husbands, Dr. Gardner declared B.V. to be “the most prevalent and one of the most contagious” of all S.T.I.s. For his efforts, Dr. Gardner’s name was forever enshrined in the species of bacteria most associated with B.V.: Gardnerella vaginalis. [**§§§**](https://www.poetryinreview.com/reviews/dialogue%5Fon%5Fpolitical%5Fpoetry.html?ref=richardjnewman.com) [*Acrobat*](https://archipelagobooks.org/book/acrobat/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by [Nabaneeta Dev Sen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabaneeta%5FDev%5FSen?ref=richardjnewman.com), translated from the Bengali by [Nandana Dev Sen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nandana%5FSen?ref=richardjnewman.com): > Poetry flies away as well, > if you let go of the thread— > it flutters in space like a lost kite. > The poet floats in an infinite void, desolate, > like a spacecraft disconnected from earth, > with no destination. I’ve chosen these six lines from a poem called “And Yet, Life,” which appears towards the end of this volume—a collection spanning a sixty year career—because their subtext, the idea that poetry is that which connects the poet to the world, is the thread around which my experience as a reader cohered. Read carefully, each poem in the book reveals itself as something that needed to be written, not because the world required it, but because the poet’s consciousness and conscience did. “This Child,” for example, which opens with the line “One day this child too will die,” confronts a question with which children by their very presence ask of their parents: Why did you bring me into this world. Dev Sen’s speaker, “Choking with fear, with ignorance,” tells us this question will make her “run away/to a dark cave, numb and empty” because she has no satisfactory answer to give. In “Growing-up Lesson,” she addresses a boy who fears the requirements of manhood—the most interesting line in the poem, to me, is “Are you terrified of plucking virginity?”—and then offers, as (a perhaps ironic) alternative, the kind of strength and maturity and analogous manhood that can be found in the use of words. In some ways those different but related spheres of concern—that of a parent responsible for a child’s life and that of a woman turning a critical eye on patriarchal gender roles—are the poles between which all the poems in the volume move. In her moving introduction to the volume, Nandana Dev Sen, the poet’s daughter and translator, offers a quote from her mother that I think speaks to what makes this book worth reading as more than just an interesting volume of poetry in translation: “I speak of poetry as being central to woman’s freedom. Yes, I am partial, I cannot be and do not wish to be objective…” --- ## Four Things To See ### Adeline Ravoux - Vincent van Gogh (1890) This portrait, completed during the last months of [van Gogh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent%5Fvan%5FGogh?ref=richardjnewman.com)’s life, depicts [Adeline Ravoux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait%5Fof%5FAdeline%5FRavoux?ref=richardjnewman.com), 13-year-old daughter of Arthur Ravoux, from whom van Gogh rented a room in Auvers, a small town north of Paris. (This image is from the [Cleveland Museum of Art](https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1958.31?ref=richardjnewman.com).) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/01/Adeline-Ravoux.jpg) **§§§** ### Yan Yan - Norman A. Spenser Yan Yan is a Chinese actress and former singer who continues to act in Chinese film series and now owns a media company. She won Chinese singing contests when she was 16, acted in two famous Chinese film series and then took a break for two years before resuming her acting career. Young female Chinese actresses have had to face the same challenges that their Hollywood counterparts have faced in the past. Norman was a colleague of mine. You can find more of his work at the Chinese Independent Film Archive, [*I See the World through the Lens of My Camera*](https://www.chinaindiefilm.org/8058/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/01/yan-yan-1.JPG) **§§§** ### Self-Portrait - Camille Pissarro This print is of Camille Pissarro’s only etched one self-portrait, made when he was 60 years old or so. The image is from the [Cleveland Museum of Art](https://www.clevelandart.org/art/2023.119?ref=richardjnewman.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/01/camille-pissarro-1.jpg) **§§§** ### Portrait of a Captured Modoc Warrior - Louis Herman Heller [The Modoc War](https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/modoc%5Fwar/?ref=richardjnewman.com) took place between 1872 and 1873\. This image, taken by [Louis Herman Heller](https://www.jmaw.org/louis%5Fherman%5Fheller%5Fmodoc/?ref=richardjnewman.com), is part of a collection of pictures he took of Modoc warriors captured by the United States Army during that conflict. One-hundred-fifty-three Modoc were held as prisoners of war until 1909. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2026/01/kintpuash---captain-jack.webp) --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### Eddie Vinson - They Call Me Mr. Cleanhead **§§§** ### Tori Amos - Me and a Gun **§§§** ### Front Country - I Don’t Want To Die Angry **§§§** ### The The - Good Morning Beautiful --- ## Four Things About Me I live in apartment 61, in the building next to the one in which my grandparents also lived in apartment 61\. The living room and dining room in the front of my apartment are laid out just as they were in my grandparents’ apartment, which means the view from our windows is the same view, essentially, as the view they had from theirs. Every time I look out the window from the seat where I am sitting now, at the southeast corner of our dining room table, I am struck by the memory that this was exactly where I sat in my grandparents’ dining room for dinner every Sunday for as far back as I can remember. I didn’t always sit there on holidays, when there were many more people around the table. After my grandfather died, I migrated to his seat at the head of the table, especially on Passover, but in my memory, accurately or not, the seat where I am sitting now is the seat that was mine back then. I didn’t intentionally choose to make this my seat at my own dining room table. I just naturally sat here from the moment we started living in this apartment. **§§§** When I was younger, I was an athlete, not a star by any means, but I loved to play sports, basketball in particular. In the yeshiva, I was one of the two tallest boys in the class, and of the two of us, I was the better ball player, which meant I got to play starting center on our basketball team. When I graduated from the yeshiva in 11th grade and decided to do my senior year in high school, though, I was suddenly only tall enough to play forward and there was no way I could compete with the guys who’d been playing true high school ball since before they were in 9th grade. I did in fact make the team when I tried out, but I learned that I was second string at best. That’s not why I decided not to play, though. I quit the team because I realized two things. First, I didn’t care enough about winning. Yes, I liked to play, but I didn’t have the competitive edge that my teammates did, and—though I never would have put it this way back then—I didn’t like the testosterone-heavy ethos I was expected to adopt as a team member. Second, and in some ways more importantly, I began to realize that I felt most at home with the artistic kids. I thought of myself at that point more as a performer than a writer. I was playing horn in the local drum corps; learning to fake my way as a piano player; and I really enjoyed being on stage. I still liked to play sports, but being an athlete was not central to my identity, and I found myself over the years playing less and less, and, even when I was around people who did play, being asked to play less and less. I started to think about this just now because I remembered the one and only time I tried to go skiing. I have never understood the appeal of that sport. You go up a hill to go down a hill, just to go back to the top to do it all over again. I get that it takes real skill and that the trip down can be exhilarating, but the experience never called to me as something I wanted to have for myself. Anyway, we were visiting my sister-in-law in Canada and my son wanted me to try snowboarding with him. I was game, but I was not prepared for how out of shape I was. I could not maintain a center of gravity and I kept falling on my ass—to the point where I had to ride my ass down the beginner’s hill, not the board my feet were buckled into. I laugh about it now, but it was really embarrassing at that time. **§§§** Back in 2012, [in this blog post on Alas](https://amptoons.com/blog/?p=14829&ref=richardjnewman.com), I wrote the following: > but it has been years since I have been able to create at the center of my life a space for the kind of reading that nourishes me as a writer, reading that puts me back in touch with myself just for the sake of that experience, that connects me to language in ways that are challenging and revitalizing, that affirms my right to claim a place in this world simply because I am, that shapes who I am and shows me possibilities of being I would not otherwise have imagined. Now that I am retired, I am finding it easier than I thought to get back into the rhythm of that kind of reading, and including books in the “Four Things To Read” section of *Four By Four* has helped as well. The comment is still a fair one, though, if only because I can’t help but feel the tug—as I am sure you do too—of the digital world, reminding me that I might miss something I do not want to miss if I don’t start scrolling on my phone right this second. One of the regular Alas commenters responded to my post by asking if I could give an example of the kind of reading I was talking about. The post I wrote in response is dated in ways that make it not worthwhile to reproduce here, even in miniature, but part of that post was a list I made of books that had made a difference in my life. It’s kind of long, so I’ve put in the toggle box below for those who are interested: #### My 2012 List of Books That Made a Difference in My Life - [Intercourse](http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780465017522?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Andrea Dworkin - [Talk Dirty to Me](http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780385468558?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Sallie Tisdale, - [Peel My Love Like An Onion](http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780385496773?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Ana Castillo - [A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis](http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780142002599?ref=richardjnewman.com), by David M. Friedman - The poetry and political essays of [June Jordan](http://junejordan.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) - The poetry and critical essays of [Hayden Carruth](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/hayden-carruth?ref=richardjnewman.com) - The poetry and essays of [Albert Goldbarth](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/albert-goldbarth?ref=richardjnewman.com) - The novels and essays of [James Baldwin](http://www.americanwriters.org/writers/baldwin.asp?ref=richardjnewman.com) - [He Sleeps](http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780312421045?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Reginald McKnight - [The Waves](http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780156031578?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Virginia Woolf - [The Lord of the Rings](http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780618640157?ref=richardjnewman.com), by J. R. R. Tolkien - [Imajica](http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780060937263?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Clive Barker - [A Poet's Work](https://www.google.com/books/edition/A%5FPoet%5Fs%5FWork/v0qFAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Sam Hamill - [Love, Sex, Death and the Making of the Male](https://archive.org/details/lovesexdeathmaki0000mile), by Rosalind Miles - [Men on Rape](https://www.amazon.com/Men-Rape-About-Sexual-Violence/dp/0312529511?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Timothy Beneke - [Transgender Erotica; Trans Figures](https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/transgender-erotica-trans-figures-southern-tier-editions%5Fm-christian/1404378/?ref=richardjnewman.com#edition=3248700), edited by M. Christian - [They Whisper](https://www.robertolenbutler.com/novels/they-whisper/16/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Robert Olen Butler - [1982 Janine](https://archive.org/details/1982janine00gray), by Alasdair Gray - [Greenvoe](https://archive.org/details/greenvoenovel0000brow), by George Mackay Brown - [Sex and other Sacred Games](https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Other-Sacred-Games-Chernin/dp/081291676X?ref=richardjnewman.com), by [Kim Chernin and Renate Stendhal](https://www.kimchernin.com/collaboration/?ref=richardjnewman.com) - [I Am The Clay](http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780449221389?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Chaim Potok - [Jewish Self-Hatred](http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780801840630?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Sander Gilman - [Violence](http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780679779124?ref=richardjnewman.com), by James Gilligan - [Eros and the Jews](http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780520211346?ref=richardjnewman.com), by David Biale - [Manhood in the Making](http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780300050769?ref=richardjnewman.com), David D. Gilmore - [The Jew's Body](http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780415904599?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Sander Gilman - [Cunt](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/inga-muscio/cunt-20th-anniversary-edition/9781580056649/?lens=seal-press&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Inga Muscio - [A Dangerous Profession](http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780767903981?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Frederick Busch - [The Yellow Wind](http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780312420987?ref=richardjnewman.com), by David Grossman - [Women, Race and Class](http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780394713519?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Angela Davis - [The Songlines](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/311457/the-songlines-by-bruce-chatwin/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Bruce Chatwin - [City of God](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/41519/city-of-god-by-e-l-doctorow/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by E. L. Doctorow - [God's Phallus](http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780807012253?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz - [Soul Crisis](https://archive.org/details/soulcrisisonewom00nathrich/page/n5/mode/2up), by Sue Nathanson **§§§** The first gay bar I ever went to was called The Betsy Ross, located on 37th Road in Jackson Heights, a strip that was known back in the 1970s—though I had no way of knowing this at the time—as [Vaseline Alley](https://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2011/03/julio-of-jackson-heights.html?ref=richardjnewman.com). I was sixteen years old, which makes the year 1978, and I was working as a waiter and (underage) assistant bartender for the local Jewish Center’s catering hall, which was owned by a friend of the family. The bartender was a guy whose name I remember as John. He and I had become friendly over the course of the couple of months we’d been working together. I enjoyed talking to him because he didn’t treat me like a kid. On this particular night, as we cleaned up after an affair, he asked me if I had a girlfriend. When I told him yes, that we’d been seeing each other for about six months, he said something about how, at sixteen, “that must seem like an awfully long time.” When we were finished cleaning, he asked me if I wanted to keep talking. When I said yes, he told me to get my coat and we walked over to the Betsy Ross. I remember white lettering on a black background over closed, matte black doors, with no one out front. Once we were inside—I also recall whoever was watching the door greeting John as a regular and nodding a smile in my direction—it was pretty obvious where we were. There were no women, and two men in white, hip-hugging bell-bottoms and skin-tight shirts were dancing more sensuously in the sparkle of the disco ball than I’d ever seen anyone dance before. At first, I couldn’t stop staring. Once we were seated, John ordered whatever he was drinking and a Pepsi for me and then he said, “You know you’re in a gay bar, right?” I nodded towards the men on the dance floor and said, “Yes, I know.” He reached over and touched my face. “I knew you’d be cool about it,” he said and told me the story of why he was no longer a cop—which now that I’ve written it makes me think that was the subject we’d switched to after talking about my girlfriend. Back then, you couldn’t be a cop and be out of the closet and John had refused to hid who he was. He’d had no choice but to leave the force. Then a friend of John’s joined us at the table. We talked about I-don’t-know-what until I said I needed to leave. We said goodbye and, though I’d hoped to see John at the next catering job, I did not. After that night, I never saw him again. ****A gentle reminder:** Four By Four is part of the free tier of **It All Connects.* If you are not currently a paid subscriber and would like to subscribe, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signup/65988db373946800080fe780/yearly). If you would like to make a one-time contribution to support my work on **It All Connects*, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/support). --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in* [*my work*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/) *or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* ### On My Desk Now - February 2026: Ruth’s Story URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/on-my-desk-now-february-2026-ruths-story/ Last updated: 2026-02-20T11:00:12.000Z _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Learning To Love The Questions: The Power We Pretend Not To See 3 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-power-we-pretend-not-to-see-3/ Last updated: 2026-09-05T09:32:09.000Z *Cross-posted from* [*Learning To Love The Questions*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/category/learning-to-love-the-questions/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*. Read Parts* [*1*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-power-we-pretend-not-to-see-1/) *&* [*2*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-power-we-pretend-not-to-see-2/) The idea of love at first sight has always struck me as a scam. It’s possible, of course, for two people to feel an immediate and intense connection that can go well beyond the physical, but the happily-ever-after we’ve mythologized as the inevitable result of that connection sets up expectations that the often heart-breaking work of building a real and enduring “ever after” simply cannot fulfill. I have similar reservations about stories in which love-at-first-sight remains unrequited. Granted, these narratives can be emotionally compelling, but they all-too-often idealize the ostensibly untainted purity of purpose that fidelity to unrequited love requires, to the extent that the messiness of being in relationship with another human being can seem the weaker choice. Severus Snape’s character arc in the Harry Potter series is a recent example. The fact that Lily Potter does not return Snape’s love is not only insufficient reason for him to seek the love of another; it also becomes the prod to a lifelong commitment that results in him sacrificing his own life in order to save her son. Within the Sufi framework I’ve been exploring in this series, Snape’s story would be read as a cautionary version of [the parable of the moth and the candle](https://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/Poets/A/AttarFaridud/mothsthe/index.html?ref=richardjnewman.com), in which his willingness to self-immolate in the flame of his all-too-human love is revealed as a poor substitute for the ecstasy of achieving ultimate union with God. In *The Conference of The Birds,* the book that I discussed in Parts [1](https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-power-we-pretend-not-to-see-1/) & [2](https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-power-we-pretend-not-to-see-2/), Farid al-Din Attar tells a story analogous to Snape’s about Sheikh Sam’an, a holy man, “the first man of his time,” who falls in unrequited love with an entrancingly beautiful Christian girl. Unlike Snape, however, who surrenders himself to earthly desire and dies for it, Sam’an is able to leave his hunger for the merely human behind and continue on his path to true enlightenment. At the heart of Sam’an’s story are the depths of humiliation to which he is willing to subject himself in order to win the Christian girl’s love, up to and including his complete disavowal of Islam. In the end, though, after the intercession of the Prophet Mohammed, Sam’an is able to reclaim his commitment to Islam and resume his journey on the mystical path. I have compressed the narrative quite a bit here, but the overall point is that Sam’an is only able to grasp the limited and spiritually impoverished nature of his desire for another human being because he allows himself to suffer the full measure of humiliation that surrendering himself to unrequited desire in the first place made inevitable. I’m not interested in debating either the interior validity of the experience the story of Sheikh Sam’an is supposed to illuminate or the value of pursuing it. What seems beyond debate to me, however, is that Sam’an conflates desire and love in the same way my mentor did—see the introduction to [Part 2](https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-power-we-pretend-not-to-see-2/) of this series—when he defined as love the erection he would have in his wife’s presence despite how deeply unhappy he was in his marriage and the fact that he really did want a divorce. My mentor didn’t tell me what it was about his wife that aroused him in contradiction to his emotional reality, but Attar’s description of the Christian girl makes clear that Sam’an’s heart was captured—and I’ve chosen that word carefully—by her beauty. > The man about whose heart her ringlets curled > Became a Christian and renounced the world; > The man who saw her lips and knew defeat > Embraced the earth before her bonny feet; > … > The pupils of her eyes grew wide and smiled, > And countless souls were glad to be beguiled; > The face beneath her curls glowed like soft fire; > Her honeyed lips provoked the world’s desire; > … > Her chin was dimpled with a silver well > In which a thousand drowning Josephs fell; > … > One hair converted hundreds; how could he > Resist that idol’s face shown openly? These lines frame the Christian girl’s beauty as a kind of unconscious weapon for her faith, one that compelled men to pursue her, even to the extent of becoming Christian, like Sam’an did, whether she expressed a desire for them to do so or not. I recognize that, for Attar, the girl’s beauty was a vehicle for exteriorizing Sam’an’s inner struggle—that, in other words, it does not function in the story as beauty for its own sake—but I was struck nonetheless by the degree to which Attar’s description of that beauty resembled how some of the men Timothy Beneke interviewed for his book, [Men on Rape: What They Have to Say about Sexual Violence](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Men%5Fon%5FRape/phRtHQAACAAJ?hl=en&kptab=getbook&ref=richardjnewman.com), characterized the impact women’s beauty had on them. Here, for example, is part of what “Jay” said: > A lot of times a woman knows that she’s looking really good and she’ll use that and flaunt it, and it makes me feel like she’s laughing at me and I feel *degraded.* I also feel dehumanized, because when I’m being teased I just turn off, I cease to be human…I don’t like the feeling that I’m supposed to stand there and take it, and not be able to hug her or kiss her; so I just turn off my emotions. It’s a feeling of humiliation…If I were actually desperate enough to rape somebody, it would be from wanting the person, but also it would be a very spiteful thing, just being able to say, “I have power over you and I can do anything I want with you,” because really I feel that *they* have power over *me* just by their presence. Just the fact that they can come up to me and just melt me and make me feel like a dummy makes me want revenge. (20–21, italics in the original) There are, of course, obvious differences between Jay and Sam’an, stemming mostly from the fact that Jay is an actual human being, while Sam’an is a character in a story carefully constructed to represent an idealized template of one stage in a mystical seeker’s spiritual growth. For example, while Jay implicitly endorses rape as a valid, emotionally-driven response to the way a woman’s beauty can make a man feel “degraded,” nothing in Attar’s narrative even hints at that kind of logic. Instead, Attar has Sam’an submerge himself in an ever deepening pool of degradation, keeping the contour of that arc closely aligned with the spiritual agenda of the story as a whole. This difference, however, does not erase the fact that each man, Jay and Attar/Sam’an, conceives of female beauty as a weapon that women use against men, consciously or not. More to the point, since it is unlikely that Attar invented this metaphor out of whole cloth—there are too many examples throughout Persian literature for that to have been the case—the metaphor’s existence in his culture at least begs the question of whether actual men in Attar’s time might have had responses to female beauty that were closer to Jay’s than Sam’an’s. Obviously, since we cannot ask any of those men the way Timothy Beneke was able to ask Jay, there is no way to answer that question with any authority. It is, however, still possible to trace the continuity of the metaphor across time and space by noting some of the expressions we have in English—I’ve taken these from Beneke’s book—that embody *our* cultural conception of women’s beauty: - She’s a *knockout!* - What a *bombshell!* - She’s *strikingly* beautiful! - That woman is *ravishing!* - She’s really *stunning!* - She’s dressed *to kill!* (20, italics in the original) Beneke does not say this outright, but the clear implication of his analysis is that the culturally inscribed power women’s beauty has over men—that men like Jay clearly experience as real—is actually power that male dominant culture attributes to women. This attribution has the effect of appearing to absolve men *a priori* of both responsibility and accountability for maintaining the line between having sexual feelings *for* a woman and the felt need to be sexual *with* her in response to her physical beauty. This cultural and rhetorical sleight-of-hand is what makes possible all the ways in which the trope that “she was asking for it” has been successfully used to blame women for men’s sexual violence against them. A similar sleight-of-hand is at work in the story of Sheikh Sam’an. In much the same way as Jay experiences a woman’s beauty as violating his sense of sexual integrity as a man, Attar’s narrative attributes to the Christian girl’s beauty a power strong enough to violate and invalidate Sam’an’s Muslim identity and spiritual being. Instead of responding as Jay does, however, by shutting his desire down, Sam’an leans into the existential nature of the violation as he experiences it, living out its most extreme consequences, until he emerges on the other side, both restored to his former self and ready to move on to the next stage of spiritual development. One way of reading Sam’an’s experience is that it makes the sleight-of-hand I’ve been talking about visible. He comes to understand the Christian girl’s power over him as something he attributed to her because of her beauty, not as something that inhered in her as a woman. The point of this realization, however, is not for Sam’an to enter into a healthier relationship with women and his own sexuality, as it might have been for Jay. Rather, Attar’s point is that Sam’an had to experience the existential nature of this violation as a prerequisite of his continued spiritual growth, the trajectory of which is toward the surrender of self in the interests of true enlightenment and away from human relationships, sexual or otherwise. While the story of Sheikh Sam’an is in this sense clearly a critique of human sexual desire, Attar would never have understood what he wrote as a gendered critique in the way that I have just framed it. According to the Sufis, women too were able to achieve enlightenment, and their path was understood to be essentially no different from that of a man’s. For example, in a story Attar tells in [*Elahi Nameh*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il%C4%81h%C4%AB-N%C4%81ma?ref=richardjnewman.com) (Book of God), one of his other major works of Sufism, a woman falls in love-at-first-sight with a prince, whose beauty, like that of Sam’an’s Christian girl, is described in weaponized terms, and just like the Christian girl, the prince does not return the love of this woman who so passionately loves him. The humiliation the woman suffers is analogous to what Sam’an suffered, but, in the end, she proves willing to go even farther than he did, offering to give life for love as long as the prince is the one who kills her. “If that fair prince is my destroyer,” she says (this translation is mine): > I will in fact be alive forever. > If I am slain by the one I love, > love’s light will raise me high… The parallel between the two narratives essentially ends there, though, because the woman is portrayed not as a spiritual seeker, but as an exemplar of what it means on a human level to surrender to love so fully that you would be willing to die in order to unite with your beloved. Nonetheless, the inciting incident remains essentially the same as in Sam’an’s story. The prince’s beauty violates the woman’s sense of self and everything else follows from there. On the surface, in other words, at least in Attar’s work, there seems to be an egalitarian thread running through how Sufism understands sexual desire and spiritual growth. In the story that has come to be known as “[The Tale of Marhuma](https://www.academia.edu/31809902/Attars%5FTale%5Fof%5FMarhuma%5FThe%5FWoman%5FWith%5Fa%5FManly%5FHeart?ref=richardjnewman.com),” however, the first one in *Elahi Nameh,* you can see how this apparent egalitarianism results from a male dominant sleight-of-hand not so different from the one I described above. In “The Tale of Marhuma,” a woman repeatedly endures the crucible of uninvited male desire—she is nearly raped several times and ends up posing as a man for a time to avoid further attempts—in order to remain faithful to her absent husband. Through that experience—I am, as I did with Sam’an, compressing the narrative—she ends up becoming “a woman whose prayers God answered,” one, in other words, who had achieved enlightenment. That achievement, however, the story makes clear, depended on her ability to transform herself spiritually *into* a man. The fact that she was a woman, in other words, and that her experience was quintessentially female, excluded her from the experience that Sheikh Sam’an could take for granted as inherently available to him. The sexual politics of male dominance functioned no differently in her story than in the other two stories I’ve been talking about. The rapes that Marhuma almost experienced—because I think a cultural sense of propriety would have prevented Attar from writing such a story about a woman who’d actually been raped—are the physical embodiment of the metaphorical violations experienced by both Sam’an and the woman in love with the prince. If you take those narratives at face value, though, those violations seem less like actual assaults, literal or metaphorical, than a necessary condition for spiritual growth to take place. That framing—the rhetorical sleight-of-hand that turns penetration and even, given the right context, forced penetration into a good thing in and of itself—is what keeps the path to spiritual enlightenment, at least as defined in Attar’s version of Sufism, firmly anchored in a male defined and male dominant ethos. I have nothing to say about the degree to which that ethos shapes or otherwise informs the interior experience of the enlightenment spiritual seekers pursue. To the degree that mystical teaching of any sort is shaped and informed by that ethos, however, it is important to make visible the way those teachings perpetuate a gendered power structure that both those who teach and those who follow those teachings pretend not to see. ****A gentle reminder:** “The Power We Pretend Not To See” is part of Learning to Love The Questions, a free-tier component of **It All Connects* that is cross-posted from Fernwood Press’ [blog](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/category/learning-to-love-the-questions/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**.* If you are not currently a paid subscriber and would like to support my work by subscribing, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signup/65988db373946800080fe780/yearly). If you would like to make a one-time contribution to support my work on **It All Connects*, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/support). ### On The Trail of A Tale - Part One: Benjamin Franklin's Persian Parable URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/on-the-trail-of-a-tale-part-one-benjamin-franklins-persian-parable/ Last updated: 2026-05-26T17:27:53.000Z Had Franklin gotten his wish...and the Parable had remained unpublished, neither its origin in the work of the 13th-century Persian poet Saadi of Shiraz nor the story I am telling you would have become known, at least not in the way we know them now. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Four by Four #51 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-51/ Last updated: 2026-01-23T11:12:14.000Z #### Contents ## Four Things To Read [They Killed My Source](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/mohammad-tajik-iran-cyber-intelligence/684954/?gift=9L5E0%5F00dQA8ldt%5F3rAKn71rXA9SHIgMz8ROGGU%5F5gE&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share), by Shane Harris: > A “huge number” of Iranian cyber operations “had my signature on the paperwork or I designed it altogether,” Mohammad claimed. At the time, Iran had been credibly linked to disruptions of the global financial system and to the penetration of computers that run crucial infrastructure, such as electrical grids and dams, including one in New York State. Was I now talking to the guy who oversaw those covert operations? And if so, why was he talking to me? This piece in the Atlantic reads like the intricate subplot of a spy movie. According to Harris, he was contacted by a man named Mohammad Hossein Tajik, who claimed both to be in charge of an elite cyber-warfare unit in Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security and to have been a CIA asset within Iran. Both claims, Harris discovers, were true. Neither that fact alone, however, nor the far more chilling fact that Mohammed is eventually killed, almost certainly by Iran’s government, are what make this essay worth reading, especially now, given the ongoing unrest in that country. What I found most compelling about the story is the way it locates the geopolitical conflict between the US and Iran within the lives of ordinary human beings and demonstrates, by implication at least, how distant that conflict is, despite the players’ ordinariness, from the real, material, and ordinary interests of the ordinary Iranians who are now taking to the streets. **§§§** [*Salient*](https://www.ndbooks.com/book/salient/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr: > My situation is difficult: I have to reconcile the trig and leveling data of the various systems available for this area…with my own emotions—complex mathematical calculations and a feeling of loss. *Salient* is a book-length poem in which Gray explores what emerges when she brings into juxtaposition what she calls in her Preface “two obsessions of mine,” the [Battle of Passchendaele](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle%5Fof%5FPasschendaele?ref=richardjnewman.com), which took place in late 1917, and the [*chöd*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%B6d?ref=richardjnewman.com) ritual, which she describes as “the core ‘severance’ practice of a lineage founded by Machikn Lapdrön, the great twelfth-century female Tibetan Buddhist saint.” That description might make it sound like you need either specialized knowledge of or a pre-existing interest in either subject in order to appreciate the book, and I am sure that people with that knowledge or that interest will be able to read *Salient* at a much deeper level than I did. Nonetheless, I found the poem to be a compelling and moving meditation on meaning-making. The excerpt I quoted above, for example, from “In Some Ways The Situation Is Analogous To That Facing Second Army in 1915,” can also be read as an account of the difficulties a poet encounters in trying to reconcile the mechanics of craft with the the emotional impulse that pushes a poem into existence; and the beginning of “General Description Of The Line,” which is, on the surface about military strategy, can also be read as a way of thinking about poetic composition: > The first line generally consists of two parts, one an obstacle, > and is continuous except for narrow inconspicuous passages > that may serve as exits. Interestingly, a question the book asks without asking or definitively answering it is this: If making war requires the same kinds of imaginative engagement with reality as the making of art, then the imagination is truly amoral. What, then, are the constraints we can put on the imagination that will harness it to a moral purpose? **§§§** [Is It Possible to Atone for Genocide?](https://jewishcurrents.org/is-it-possible-to-atone-for-genocide?utm%5Fsource=newsletter&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=body), by Avigayil Halpern: > As we approach Yom Kippur, I am left wondering: What does repentance look like as we try to move forward, both as a Jewish community, and also as part of the human community? How do we understand our own complicity and the specific ways we each need to be held accountable? For those of us who have opposed the genocide since its beginning: How do we relate to people who had been more reticent to speak out against Israel but are doing so now? We know that for hundreds of thousands of people, this reckoning is far too little, far too late. And still, this is not an intellectual exercise. For me, this question matters insofar as it can help hasten an end to the genocide, which needs to be our primary focus right now. Before telling you whose words those were, it’s important to say that the conversation of which they were a part first appeared in [*Jewish Currents*](https://jewishcurrents.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) in the October 2025 “Chevruta,” the column the magazine models after “the traditional Jewish method of study in which a pair of students analyze a religious text together.” I deeply appreciate that the magazine honors in this way a thread in Jewish culture that often gets subsumed beneath the homogenizing press of the culture at large, i.e., that in the Jewish tradition individuals are responsible for coming to their own understanding of what it means to live a Jewish life by “learning Torah,” engaging on a personal level with the texts of the tradition. It doesn’t mean that we are our own absolute authority, but that we are responsible for making sense of the tradition on our own terms within the ever-widening context that the tradition makes possible as it evolves. So, the words I quoted above belonged to Audrey Sasson, the executive director of [Jews for Racial and Economic Justice](https://www.jfrej.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) (JFREJ) with whom Halpern was in conversation. Interestingly, Sasson does not ask about what teshuvah, the Hebrew word for atonement, would look like for, say, Netanyahu or other members of the Israeli government, or even for the Israeli soldiers who fought in Gaza. Rather, she is asking about those Jews here in the United States, and specifically for the Jewish leadership here in the States, whose move from complicity to opposition raises the question of why the move itself came so late in the game. The answers that she and Halpern come to—based on their readings of Maimonides, the [Mishnah](https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/mishnah/?ref=richardjnewman.com) tractate [Horayot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horayot?ref=richardjnewman.com), and [*On Repentance and Repair*](https://www.onrepentance.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg—are worth dwelling on. For the sake of brevity, though, I will just name a couple: the idea that the confessional component of atonement needs to come at the end of an internal process, not at the beginning of that process; the idea that someone who repents a murder they have committed should never be allowed to return to a position of authority they formerly held; and the differences between and among individual, collective, and institutional accountability. On a personal level, this conversation reminded me of a question I did not have the courage to ask about teshuvah when I was in yeshiva: Would teshuvah have been possible for Hitler? The point of asking that, for me, was not to try to enumerate what such repentance might look like—the answer to that is far beyond my capabilities—but rather to test a related question: If repentance is not available to everyone, regardless of the wrong they have done, then is there really such a thing as repentance to begin with? [**§§§**](https://www.poetryinreview.com/reviews/dialogue%5Fon%5Fpolitical%5Fpoetry.html?ref=richardjnewman.com) [*Emerson in Iran: The American Appropriation of Persian Poetry*](https://sunypress.edu/Books/E/Emerson-in-Iran2?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Roger Sedarat: > As important as source language remains in any discussion of literary translation, Emerson further follows the Sufi mystics in his conception of an ideal poet who can “speak through the symbolic language of nature” (Loili 112). Important to an application of Emerson’s approach to translation and its early effect on his own verse, such a seemingly translingual symbolic connection helps to build a strong case for his having anticipated Ezra Pound’s appropriation of the East in his influence of the American poetic tradition. This is a book for scholars of American literature, in particular those who are deeply familiar with Emersonian scholarship, which I will admit up front that I am not. Nonetheless, despite the fact that my ignorance made it difficult to follow a good deal of what Sedarat had to say, as someone who, like Emerson and Pound, produced what some call “bridge translations” of classical Persian literature I resonated with what I was able to understand. (“Bridge translation” is a label signifying that I used an informant because I am not literate in Persian.) I wrote a little bit in [Four By Four #41](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-41/#four-things-to-read) about the translation work I’ve done and the ethical dilemma(s) attached to it. What I appreciated most about what I could follow of Sedarat’s argument is that he allowed me to place that work and my thinking about it in an American literary tradition I’d never really thought all that much about. In particular, I appreciated the way Sedarat set up a kind of continuum, with Emerson, who respected the integrity of the Persian poets he translated on one end—which is where I have tried to place myself—and, on the other, people like Coleman Barks and Daniel Ladinksy, who so deracinate the poets they “translate” (Rumi and Hafez respectively) that they are almost unrecognizable as the deeply religious, Muslim poets they were. (If you want to read a critique of Barks that is completely in line with but far more accessible than Sedarat’s, check out [*The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi*](http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-erasure-of-islam-from-the-poetry-of-rumi?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Rozina Ali.) --- ## Four Things To See I was originally going to post these videos during the “16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence,” from November 25 (International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women) – December 10 (Human Rights Day). Unfortunately, I was not able to do so, so I am including them in this month’s issue of Four By Four. I remember reading the text of Andrea Dworkin’s “[I Want A Twenty-Four-Hour Rape Truce](https://mitpress.mit.edu/i-want-a-twenty-four-hour-truce-during-which-there-is-no-rape-an-excerpt-from-last-days-at-hot-slit-the-radical-feminism-of-andrea-dworkin/?ref=richardjnewman.com)” in the late 1980s or early 1990s. I don’t usually post videos in this section of Four By Four, but I think juxtaposing them like this raises interesting and important questions. ### I Want a 24-Hour Rape Truce (Text by Andrea Dworkin) ### Survivor of Sexual Trauma Reveal an Important Truth (1in6) **§§§** *These images are from the* [*Cleveland Museum of Art*](https://www.clevelandart.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *and are in the public domain.* ### The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew, 1606–7, by Caravaggio ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/12/1976.2_web.jpg) **§§§** ### Seated Female Nude (Self-Portrait?), c. 1899\. Paula Modersohn-Becker [Paula Modersohn-Becker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula%5FModersohn-Becker?ref=richardjnewman.com) died in 1907, just as the Expressionist groups in Dresden and Munich were forming. Nonetheless, the themes of her work prefigure the movement. This likely self-portrait reflects her desire to convey not the idealized appearance of the female body but rather its fundamental essence, stripped of all the world’s trappings. The sitter’s piercing stare invites the viewer to move beyond the body as flesh and blood toward her emotional or spiritual state. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/12/1973.35_web.jpg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### Arash Sobhani - For Gina **§§§** ### Adam Silverman & Susan Gubernat - Elegy for The Earth (Performed by The Jenesais Choir) Susan Gubernat was my officemate for many years. She is the author of [*The Zoo At Night*](https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496202055/the-zoo-at-night/?ref=richardjnewman.com)and [*Flesh*](https://www.amazon.com/Flesh-Susan-Gubernat/dp/188423528X?ref=richardjnewman.com)*.* In addition to this piece, she collaborated with composer [Adam Silverman](https://adambsilverman.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) on the opera [Korczak’s Orphans](http://jmwc.org/korczaks-orphans-opera-in-brooklyn/?ref=richardjnewman.com). Elegy for the Earth is a deeply moving song cycle. **§§§** ### Beth McCarthy - How Am I Supposed To Love Myself? **§§§** ### **KATSEYE (캣츠아이) - Gabriela** --- ## Four Things About Me I wrote these words on June 11, 1988\. I don’t know what specifically I was responding to, but I definitely recognize the feelings of the younger me who wrote it: > To say “I love you” in a poem that means “I love you,” you need the obligatory irony that the language will never suffice for what you want it to mean. Otherwise, the poem will fail. > To say “I love you” to a friend who is not your lover, but whom you can imagine as a lover for a night or a week or a lifetime, you need somehow to keep their fear that you want your words to be a cage from ruining your friendship. > And if you want to say “I love you” to more than one person, you need to pick one as your lover and the rest to be “just friends” or you’ll be told you can’t make commitments. They’ll say you’re cheating someone out of the full and undivided attention the world wants love to be between two people. **§§§** I was speaking with a friend of mine who is not Jewish the other day about the different stances towards Israel that exist within the Jewish community in the United States and she asked me how I felt about the idea that Israel and its existence is a necessary component of Jewish identity and survival. Intellectually and historically, not to mention morally and ethically, I don’t think that position has ever truly held water, but I still get it emotionally. First, I am of the generation whose post-Holocaust Jewish education included the imperative that Jews needed some kind of safe haven should a situation like the Holocaust ever arise again. As a kind of prooftext for that, we were told, consider the experience of the role Israel was playing at that moment in the lives of the [refuseniks](https://www.refusenikproject.org/history/?ref=richardjnewman.com#historical-overview), Soviet Jews who were persecuted for being Jewish and refused permission to emigrate to Israel. My own experience with antisemitism, which I wrote about briefly in this post on [Israel and Palestine](https://www.richardjnewman.com/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are-you-on/), also functioned for me as a real-life demonstration of what I was learning in Hebrew School. I remembered something else during my conversation with this friend that I have not written about before. Part of what made the idea of Israel so compelling to me at the time was the possibility of being in a place where not only the overwhelming majority of people, but also the dominant culture was Jewish, where I would not have constantly to translate “being Jewish” for a Christian, or at least secularized Christian society that seemed entirely uninterested in really understanding what that identity was all about. Here’s one example from when I was in junior high school. There’s a major Jewish holiday call [Sukkot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukkot?ref=richardjnewman.com) (or Succos, if you’re Ashkenazi, like me) that occurs shortly after Yom Kippur. It’s a week-long holiday, on the first and last two days of which observant Jews do not work or go to school and follow restrictions on other activities similar [to those they follow on Shabbat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/39%5FMelakhot?ref=richardjnewman.com). My family was not orthodox, but I wanted to be observant and so my mother let me stay home from school on Sukkot so I could go to shul. When I was in seventh grade, on the second day of Sukkot, my junior high’s truant officer called my home to find out why I wasn’t in school that day. I don’t remember how I and not my mother ended up being the one to talk to them, but when I explained to her that I had stayed home because it was a Jewish holiday, she refused to believe me since she knew there were Jewish people working at the school who hadn’t stayed home. When I tried to explain the difference between observant and non-observant Jews, she didn’t believe me. Ultimately, though I have no memory of how, the situation was resolved and I was not charged with truancy. Nonetheless, it had made me aware of my own difference in a way that left a very bad taste in my mouth. I could point to more recent examples as well, but this one illustrates just how far back in my life this experience goes. **§§§** I’ve never been a jealous person. I don’t mean that I don’t experience jealousy. Of course I do. I mean that I have never been the kind of person who expects someone else to live their life in a way that protects me from jealousy, especially when it comes to love. On June 16, 1988, I wrote this in response to reading [*Jealousy*](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7823056M/Jealousy?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by [Nancy Friday](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy%5FFriday?ref=richardjnewman.com): > \[W\]e cannot expect other people to live according to our fears…jealousy is normal, is part of acknowledging the separateness of another human being—and…that acknowledgement is, in fact, a very, *very* important component—if not the entire basis—of love. I think now I would rewrite that last sentence to read “That acknowledgement is, in fact, foundational to one’s ability to love another human being.” **§§§** I had a very serious girlfriend when I was in my twenties. We were together for almost seven years. At the beginning, however, for two or three of those years, we lived far enough apart and saw each other rarely enough that we decided it would be okay if we saw other people. If I remember correctly, we put it to ourselves like this: *When we’re together, we’re together; when we’re not, what we do is our own business.* We didn’t hide from each other the fact that we had friends of the opposite sex, but we never pressed each other to reveal more about those relationships than we wanted to. She spoke often, for example, about a guy she’d go dancing with on the weekends and I remember thinking that something in the way she talked about him indicated that they were probably also having sex; and I know I told her about the women who were my friends, one of whom became my lover for a while. Once, after my girlfriend and I were living close enough to each other that our “long-distance accommodation” was no longer necessary, she asked me outright if I’d been with another woman during our “don’t ask don’t tell” period. I saw no reason to lie, so I told her yes. She responded by punching me really hard in the arm. When I asked her why she’d hit me, she didn’t apologize. Instead, she explained that she was angry at herself, not me. “I thought I’d be able to tell if you were with someone else,” she said, “It bothers me that I couldn’t.” ****A gentle reminder:** Four By Four is part of the free tier of **It All Connects.* If you are not currently a paid subscriber and would like to subscribe, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signup/65988db373946800080fe780/yearly). If you would like to make a one-time contribution to support my work on **It All Connects*, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/support). --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in* [*my work*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/) *or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* ### On My Desk Now - January 2026: Either Way, You Choose A Side URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/on-my-desk-now-january-2026-either-way-you-choose-a-side/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T19:29:22.000Z Dear Friends, When I sat down to write this first issue of “On My Desk Now,” I did not plan for it to become a full-blown essay. I thought I was going to write for paid subscribers a short, behind-the-scenes look at the project I am currently working on—which is what “On My Desk Now” is supposed to be, nothing more. What was actually on my desk when I sat down to write, however, both digitally and in print, was a collection of articles each of which addressed a different aspect of the increasingly overwhelming current state of the world. The pressure of needing to do something in the face of all that despite my own relative helplessness pushed the first two sentences of this essay out of me without my even thinking about it. I know these are only words, but now that I’ve written them, sharing them in this very fraught moment is something concrete that I can do; and since I have no doubt that some of you at least are feeling the same way I have been, I’ve taken down the paywall behind which “On My Desk Now” would normally sit. I felt less helpless and, oddly, less alone when I finished writing this; I hope reading it will help some of you feel the same way. In Solidarity, Richard **1** Like you, I imagine, I’m having a hard time keeping up with current events, much less making sense of everything that’s been happening. Actually, let me put that a little differently, because it’s less that I have a hard time making sense of what’s going on than that I would rather not arrive at the conclusions the sense I’m making leads me to. The list *is* long: Iran (not only the ongoing civil unrest, but also the question of whether Trump, or for that matter Israel, will actually make good on their threats to bomb the country again), Venezuela, Greenland, Ukraine, Gaza, the immigration crackdown (which, after the recent ICE shooting in Minnesota, is now unmistakably a euphemism), tariffs, the economy, the attacks on reproductive autonomy, trans rights, and higher education (an umbrella issue that encompasses other issues as well), not to mention basic science, health care and health research. I could go on. What makes this list so troubling, however, is not just its length. It’s the way it maps only some of the pressure points in a well-planned, carefully coordinated campaign to dismantle just about every move we have made over at least the past sixty years, as a society and even to some degree as a world community, towards greater equity and egalitarianism. It would be naïve, of course, to call those moves anything other than imperfect or to pretend they were motivated entirely by the desire for social justice, but there is a huge difference between what it might have meant for our government to try to revise them in good faith—assuming we could ever elect such an administration—and the Trump administration’s clear intent to ride roughshod over the idea that equity and egalitarianism, not to mention diversity and inclusion, matter at all. If you were paying attention, you could feel the first rumblings of this onslaught well before now. The Supreme Court’s 2018 [*Janus*](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-1466%5F2b3j.pdf?ref=richardjnewman.com) decision, a successful broadside against public sector unions and a precursor of President Trump’s attacks on federal workers, is a good example. Moreover, if you dug into the genealogy of that decision, as Mary Bottari did for [*In These Times*](https://inthesetimes.com/features/janus%5Fsupreme%5Fcourt%5Funions%5Finvestigation.html?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* you would both uncover the network of highly organized, disciplined, and very well-funded organizations that the right has been using to establish the intellectual, legal, and political credentials for its causes and discover the degree to which they have sought to shield that network and its funding sources from public scrutiny. When I was secretary of my faculty union I wrote a [blog post](https://www.nccft.org/2018/04/23/preparing-for-janus-3-what-were-up-against/?ref=richardjnewman.com) and gave a presentation for our members about that network, since the outcome of *Janus* would have a direct impact on our local. I was surprised and not a little frustrated that those in attendance were moved neither to any visible anger nor to some form of mobilization by what I told them. I eventually came to understand, though, that this lack of response had less to do with the inertia of indifference than with how powerless the membership felt, individually and collectively, confronted with that network’s vast and apparently indomitable presence. That kind of paralysis is perfectly understandable in a rank and file, whether we’re talking about union members or people on the street. It seems inexcusable to me, however, in those who have been charged with leading the opposition to what the Trump administration and the forces behind it are trying to accomplish. Even though the Democratic leadership should have known perfectly well from Trump’s behavior during his first administration, for example, that appealing to politics-as-usual was unlikely to work as a deterrent—especially since he no longer had around him the advisors and other staff members to whom such an appeal would matter—they initially chose to respond as if that playbook was still the best way to counter Trump. Or, to put that another way, as if they did not have resources, platforms, and institutional power of their own that they could have used to respond to him on his own terms. Since then, there have been some bright spots: Supreme Court cases that have not gone Trump’s way; the fact that some Republicans have begun, even if only tentatively, to push back against some of his excesses; the fact that his approval ratings, despite small fluctuations, have remained consistently so low; the “No Kings” protests; grassroots organizing to counter the administration’s anti-immigrant offensive; and California’s redistricting success in response to efforts by Republicans to use that strategy in other states to help them gain seats in Congress. Perhaps the most prominent bright spots, however—though it may be hard to keep them front of mind given how overwhelming the twenty-four hour news cycle can be—were the elections of Democratic governors in New Jersey and Virginia, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger respectively, and the against-all-odds election of Zohran Mamdani as the mayor of New York. **2** I have been saddened, but not surprised by the continuing attempts, both Republican and Democratic, to discredit Mamdani, not by arguing seriously against his positions and proposals, but by smearing him for being Muslim, and a proud one at that, for having the temerity to think for himself on the question of Israel and Palestine and to put his money where his mouth is on that question, and for running unapologetically as a Democratic Socialist who stands first and foremost with working people. Among the many virtues of Mamdani’s campaign, which he crystalized in his inaugural address, was its intellectual rigor. If you listened carefully, you could hear the vibrations not just of Marxist, but also post-colonial analysis—all of it synthesized and made accessible through story and concrete, verifiable examples that surfaced the concerns not only of those who voted for him, but also those who didn’t. One might be forgiven, in fact, for thinking that it was and is his opponents’ unwillingness to take on this intellectual rigor that led them to default to their ultimately unsuccessful smear campaigns; and we should take it as a truly hopeful sign that a majority of New Yorkers seem to have understood this and voted for the candidate who gave them credit for being intelligent enough to do so. In a way, Mamdani’s victory is an inverse mirror image of Trump’s. Trump, too, wove a narrative that convinced the people who voted for him that he cared about their concerns and would put them first once he was in office. Despite his narrative’s easy falsifiability, however, no convincing counterstory has emerged to capture voters’ imaginations at the national level. One reason for this is that the people behind Trump have not only spent decades building an intellectual infrastructure to give the story he tells credibility—it’s part of the network of organizations that Mary Bottari uncovered for *In These Times*—they have also devoted their energies during that same period to undermining public trust in the infrastructure that provides scaffolding for stories like the one Mamdani has told: higher education. **3** If you trace the genealogy of Project 2025, the current iteration of the right’s playbook, you’ll find it leads back to a document from the 1970s called the [Powell Memorandum](https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/assets/usa-courts-secrecy-lobbyist/powell-memo.pdf?ref=richardjnewman.com), which was written by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. for the Education Committee of the United States Chamber of Commerce. In that document, Powell outlined a strategy for combatting what he characterized as a “broad attack” from the left on “the American economic system.” Powell recognized that higher ed had become a bastion of the left from which it could launch this attack with relative impunity, and he proposed a two-pronged strategy in response. First, he argued for setting up an opposing network of think tanks outside the academy to provide an intellectual pedigree on which the popularizers of the right’s positions could rely. Second, he advocated the corporatization of higher education as a way of undermining the left’s hold on those institutions. If colleges were run like businesses, the subtext of his argument ran, if higher ed administrations were given no choice but to prioritize the bottom line in fulfilling their missions, the idea that the purpose of higher education was first and foremost to further the public good in a civic sense would collapse on itself, essentially neutering the intellectual pedigree on which the left had been depending. Broadly speaking, Powell’s strategy boiled down to two main tactics: stack university boards of trustees with business leaders who would bring a bottom-line, productivity-oriented, profit and loss sensibility to how an institution defined and fulfilled its mission and be unapologetic in using funding as leverage to shape an institution’s curricular and programmatic offerings. It’s not hard to find evidence that Powell’s strategy worked. I would hate to have been, for example, in the position of the administrators at NYU Langone who had to make the devil’s choice between [pausing gender affirming care](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/nyregion/nyu-langone-hospital-trans-care-youth.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.DFA.tEK2.JF3ur-J4o4jd&smid=nytcore-ios-share&ref=richardjnewman.com) for those under the age of nineteen and facing the prospect of losing funding that other patients’ lives might have depended on. I am also glad not to have been in the administration of any of the universities that capitulated to Trump when he went after them for their handling of both pro-Palestinian demonstrations and antisemitism, whether real or imagined, on campus. It’s easy to call those decisions cowardly, though I think it would be dishonest to claim that cowardice played no role in how they were made. It would be similarly dishonest, however, to pretend that those institutions were not caught between a financial rock and a hard place, just as Powell intended. I may disagree in the strongest terms with the decisions those institutions ultimately made, but I am also reluctant to Monday morning quarterback the people who had to make them. I wasn’t in the room and therefore cannot weigh all the factors they had to take into consideration when deciding whether to defy Trump and hurt one group of people or to capitulate and hurt another. What I know for sure is that no one with real political power made the case that universities should not be defined by the corporate values that held, collectively, billions of dollars of both public and private funding over the heads of those administrations and that higher education should instead be protected as a civic institution the goal of which is to advance the public good. The Democrats have been complicit in the corporatizing of higher ed almost from the start. You can see this in the fact that they have, at all levels of government, underfunded public higher education for decades. In 2017, for example, student-paid tuition accounted for [nearly half of the total revenue](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/05/american-higher-education-hits-a-dangerous-milestone/559457/?gift=9L5E0%5F00dQA8ldt%5F3rAKn1FwwZLJ9R7Q-MJY4nWK5Aw&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share) for public institutions of higher education nationwide and for more than half of that revenue in twenty-eight states. There have been some recent attempts to rectify this situation. States like New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Mexico are actively trying to make community college free. Those efforts, however, tend to focus on some form of workforce development, which is entirely in keeping with a corporatizing ethos and is, in fact, strong evidence of the degree to which the Democratic leadership has ceded to the Republicans the argument over what kind of public good higher education is supposed to do. **4** The right’s goal in all this, and they have achieved it to a disheartening degree, is to erode public trust in higher education as a civic infrastructure for the ongoing democratization of culture and society, replacing it instead with a vision of higher ed as a transactional site where students exchange money for a degree that will earn them a job. Consider, for example, how relatively easy it was for Republicans to pave the way for the government-imposed curricular restrictions on teaching so-called race or gender ideology. Without any proactive, sustained, coherent, substantive pushback from the other side of the aisle, they were able to transform critical race theory—a method of structural analysis originating in law schools—into a catchall term for any teaching about racism that named it for what it was; and they turned “woke” into a caricature of identity politics taken to its extreme and then made that caricature stand in the public’s imagination for the left’s politics as a whole. That Mamdani was able to win by campaigning on a left-wing analysis with unmistakable roots in higher education, turning it into a position that people felt they could trust, that gave them hope, is all the more remarkable for the ways in which it clearly broke a significant number of people out of the kind of paralysis I spoke about above. More to the point, he broke the hold of that paralysis without asking them for the kind of naïve loyalty that most politicians seek to elicit. One way he did this was by unapologetically defining the aspirational component of his campaign as both collective and inclusive, in stark contrast to the individualistic and exclusionary ways that not only Trump, but also Andrew Cuomo campaigned—at least until Cuomo realized that he needed to try to respond to Mamdani on his own terms. That kind of all-too-common reactive shift within a campaign season is precisely why voters tend to see politicians’ promises as the necessary rhetoric a candidate must put out there and that may or may not bear any resemblance to what they will do if they are elected; and it is, I have no doubt, why many people who did not succumb to the smear campaign against Mamdani still tended to see his proposals—like free bus service, universal child care, and [city-funded grocery stores](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jul/25/mamdani-nyc-public-grocery-stores?ref=richardjnewman.com)—as pie-in-the-sky, bait-and-switch politics as usual. Strip those doubts of their (well-earned) cynicism and set aside labels like capitalism and socialism, each of which carries inaccurate ideological baggage in the public imagination, and you’re still left with a fact that voters have to contend with in any election: the policy positions put forward by those running for office, the promises they make about what they are going to do, are by definition never going to be fully realized. To use that fact as an excuse not to take Mamdani’s proposals seriously, however, is to surrender to the paralysis I talked about above, which serves only the needs of those who would prefer that the public remain paralyzed, making it that much easier for them to have their way with both the country and the world, empowering and enriching themselves at our expense. In the wake of Mamdani’s victory, a reporter asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez whether she thought he was the future of the Democratic Party. She responded by pointing out the differences between him and now-Governors Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger, suggesting that maybe the future of the party had more to do with figuring out how to use those differences productively when speaking to an electorate as varied as that of the United States, rather than trying to homogenize them into a single party persona. Ocasio-Cortez could only take that position, however, because each of those women ran on the region-appropriate versions of the same kinds of collective and inclusive aspirations that Mamdani ran on. When I say that it’s important to take Mamdani’s proposals seriously, in other words, I am not saying, simply, “give him a chance,” the way we often say newly elected officials deserve a chance merely because they have been elected. I am suggesting that the choice to take him seriously on his own terms, or not, is actually a choice between two different aspirational visions for the people of New York City, and by extension the nation and the world, and I am suggesting that the choice we make—collective and inclusive or exclusionary and individual—will also make a statement about whose side we are truly on. ### Learning To Love The Questions: The Power We Pretend Not To See 2 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-power-we-pretend-not-to-see-2/ Last updated: 2026-09-05T09:31:43.000Z *(Read Part 1* [*here*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-power-we-pretend-not-to-see-1/)*.)* When I was an undergraduate, a man I looked up to as a teacher and a mentor took me to his studio so I could see some of his recent paintings. There was one that I could not stop staring at: a naked man falling through a fractured landscape of colors, which I remember as different shades of gold, brown, and orange. The canvas seemed to vibrate with the pain my mentor had recently revealed when he told me how deeply unhappy he was in his marriage. He asked what I thought of the piece, and I immediately drew the connection to his life that, to me at least, seemed perfectly obvious. He, however, was surprised. “You really see that here?” he asked, pointing at the painting. Then, without waiting for an answer, he turned to me and spoke out loud a question I didn’t feel I had the right to ask, “You want to know why I don’t divorce my wife, don’t you? It’s because I love her, and by love I mean I still get an erection when I’m near her. It’s like being in prison.” I thought about that conversation for the first time in decades when I read the hoopoe’s prelude to “The Story of Sheikh Sam’an” in [*The Conference of the Birds*](http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780140444346?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* the book I started to tell you about in my [previous “Learning To Love The Questions” post](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2025/12/06/the-power-we-pretend-not-to-see-1/?ref=richardjnewman.com). The hoopoe has just finished giving the birds what is essentially a spiritual pep talk, reassuring them that they do indeed have what it takes to attain enlightenment. When the hoopoe is finished, the birds ask what their next step should be. This is what their guide tells them: > “A lover,” said the hoopoe…, > “Is one in whom all thoughts of Self have died; > Those who renounce the Self deserve that name; > Righteous or sinful, they are all the same!” (56) For the hoopoe, to be a lover is to be one who desires union with God, who seeks, therefore, the self-immolation that is a prerequisite for that experience. Similarly, though on a more human and mundane scale, the desire for sexual union that my mentor’s erection signified for him required for its fulfillment that he renounce the version of himself that was so unhappy in his marriage that he wanted a divorce. I did not understand why my mentor would conflate love and sexual arousal like that, but his pain was so palpable, and I was so young and inexperienced, that it didn’t feel right to point that out. The hoopoe, though, would have told him that his pain came from the fact that what he was calling love was rooted in his body and his sense of self and that the resulting need to remain attached to the material world—his desire for his wife—kept him from experiencing love in its purest, most transcendent form: communion with God. Since God exists by definition outside the material world, this logic goes, the only way to enter into such communion is to renounce our attachment to that world. Once you achieve this level of renunciation, you’ll find yourself standing before the unknowable blankness of what [Kierkegaard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren%5FKierkegaard?ref=richardjnewman.com) called in [*Fear And Trembling*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear%5Fand%5FTrembling?ref=richardjnewman.com) “the absolute,” the line that separates creation from what lies beyond it. Since you were created by God, which means that there is already within you a small part of what lies beyond creation, you will at that point be able to experience “the absolute” as if you were looking in a mirror, much as Attar’s birds discovered at the end of their journey that they themselves were the Simorgh. The quest for enlightenment, in other words, in these terms at least, can be understood as the quest for a kind of self-love, a way of honoring what it means to say God created us in his image. I can’t help thinking, though, that there is something masturbatory about this quest. I realize that I am taking exception here to what a mystic would likely claim, specifically that because the self is annihilated in mystical transcendence a comparison to masturbation—which requires the presence of a self—is irrelevant, but I mean nothing demeaning or disrespectful in this comparison. Some Daoists understood masturbation—with the goal of controlling ejaculation—as a form of “self-cultivation,” a way of practicing sexual pleasure in order to enable higher levels of consciousness, which might be thought of as analogous though clearly not identical to the enlightenment sought by Attar’s birds. The difference is that within those forms of Daoism this higher level of consciousness generally requires the presence of a partner. It is not something you achieve entirely on your own, which means it cannot be apolitical, at least not as mystical experience is often defined in monotheistic traditions, because it will always require some form of negotiation with another person. **§§§** I know very little about Hinduism, but something I read more than three decades ago in [Alain Danielou](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain%5FDani%C3%A9lou?ref=richardjnewman.com)’s translation of the *Kāma Sūtra,* which he published as [*The Complete Kāma Sūtra*](https://www.alaindanielou.org/books/corpus/india/the-complete-kama-sutra/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* planted the seed of the question I am trying to explore in these posts. Inaccurately known in the West as a secular sex manual, the *Kāma Sūtra* is in fact a religious text, which Danielou made clear by including in his translation commentaries that elucidate the ethical, philosophical, and cosmological beliefs in which the text is rooted—beliefs that would be considered idolatrous within any of the three monotheistic traditions. Creation, for example, is understood in these commentaries to have occurred not through the will of a singular, omniscient and omnipotent divine entity, but rather through “the copulation of Shiva \[pure consciousness\] and Shakti \[divine energy\].” > The idea is that duality precedes the birth of the Word \[through which the world was created\]…and that duality implies a relation, or copulation, between two principles. Respect, devotion, love, affection, sympathy, friendship, courtship, embraces, kisses are all manifestations of attraction, of relations of an erotic kind. (18) I’m not going to pretend to know what that statement means in the context of Hindu belief and practice, but after reading it, I began to wonder in a way I hadn’t before about the consequences different cosmologies have for how people understand their place in the world. In the monotheistic traditions, the created world emerged from a single, self-contained and self-sufficient, perfectly unified, divine source; and everything those traditions teach us about how to live in the world follows from the belief in that unity. What would change, I asked myself, if we started instead from the belief that the creative act itself requires the tension inherent in a preceding disunity, in the differences between two forces that need to come together for creation to occur? As the list of all the different “manifestations of attraction” given by the Kāma Sūtra commentator shows, that tension need not be understood as sexual by definition, though it can of course be that as well. Instead, to me, it feels akin to what Audre Lorde talks about in her essay “[Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power](https://uk.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/11881%5FChapter%5F5.pdf?ref=richardjnewman.com):” > \[T\]he first \[way\] in which the erotic \[functions for me\] is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding…and lessens the threat of…difference. Lorde, of course, was writing out of a Black lesbian feminist sensibility, not the desire to achieve mystical enlightenment. Her essay was specifically about the need for women to reclaim the erotic within themselves over and against patriarchy’s pornographic narrowing of that capacity. Nonetheless, her position has in common with the Hindu thought I quoted above the notion that there is no such thing as a relationship that does not involve the negotiation of power—that all relationships, in other words, whether between people or between humans and the divine, are in that sense political. I’m not trying to suggest that Lorde’s critique had its roots in Hindu cosmology or that the Hindu commentator was a proto-feminist of some sort; but when I think back to my mentor—how he experienced love as a prison because he experienced the desire his erection signified as making him a prisoner in his own body—I wonder how the framework I am using these two sources to work out for my own purposes might have changed the way he understood the predicament in which he found himself. I will write more about this next month in Part 3. *Cross posted from* [*Learning To Love The Questions*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/category/learning-to-love-the-questions/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*.* ### Bodies As Bodies: Fetal Personhood and The Politics of Reproductive Autonomy URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/bodies-as-bodies-fetal-personhood-and-the-politics-of-reproductive-autonomy/ Last updated: 2026-01-02T18:06:12.000Z Dear Friends, Happy New Year! I hope your holiday season was filled with joy and meaning, and I hope that 2026 brings you much happiness, peace, and fulfillment. This essay, “Fetal Personhood and the Politics of Reproductive Autonomy,” inaugurates the paid tier of It All Connects. If you are a paid subscriber, you will be able to read the entire piece and you will have access to the full text on my website as well. If you are on the free tier, you will be able to read a preview here and on the website. If you would like to read the entire essay, as well as receive the other benefits of the paid tier, you will have to subscribe at that level. As a reminder, those of you on the paid tier will receive four weekly emails per month: a long-form essay, a cross-posting from Learning To Love The Questions; a behind-the-scenes look at what I’m working on; and an issue of Four By Four. Those of you on the free tier will receive Four By Four and the cross-posting from Learning To Love The Questions. If a particular issue touches you, please consider clicking on one of the reaction buttons at the bottom of the email. It will let me know what does and what does not resonate with you, which is very useful information for me to have. I'd also like to let you know about some good news I have to share. Minyan Magazine has published my poem “[He Learned His Voice Could Not Destroy The World](https://www.minyanmag.com/richardnewman.html?ref=richardjnewman.com).” They’ve also nominated the poem for [Best Spiritual Literature](https://www.minyanmag.com/nominations.html?ref=richardjnewman.com), which is published each year by [Orison Books](https://www.orisonbooks.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com). Regardless of the tier you are on, I value you as a reader and I look forward to your accompanying me as I continue to explore the kind of publication this newsletter can be. Sincerely, Richard # Bodies As Bodies: Fetal Personhood and The Politics of Reproductive Autonomy **1** I first encountered the so-called “[genetic perspective](https://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/noonan.htm?ref=richardjnewman.com)” on fetal personhood in the [comments section](https://amptoons.com/blog/?p=2078&cpage=1&ref=richardjnewman.com#comment-115863) of [Alas](https://www.amptoons.com/blog?ref=richardjnewman.com), a well-known male feminist blog, where I was a regular contributor twenty or so years ago. Rooted in [Justice John D. Noonan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%5FT.%5FNoonan%5FJr.?ref=richardjnewman.com#Noteworthy%5Frulings)’s argument that [the possession of a human genetic code](https://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/noonan.htm?ref=richardjnewman.com) at conception is the only objective, non-arbitrary way to define what it means to be a human being, this perspective played a central role in the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022\. The strength of the genetic perspective, of course, is that it appears to be incontrovertibly scientific. An organism possessing human DNA is formed at conception; that organism is by definition a human being; therefore, ending that organism’s life is murder. This claim to objectivity lends the genetic perspective another strength as well: it is, at least on its face, entirely secular, which allows antiabortion advocates to pretend that the fight over abortion rights is between those who accept science and those who don’t. In fact, however, that fight has almost nothing to do with actual science. It is instead a clash of competing and perhaps irreconcilable cultural narratives about what a fetus is, what a pregnant person is, and what it means to be human. Right now, the antiabortion side is winning. Not only have they managed to overturn Roe v. Wade; they’ve put laws on the books in states throughout the country that define embryos as “children” in both civil and criminal law, and they have successfully prosecuted pregnant women for alleged crimes against the fetuses they were carrying. Moreover, to the extent that these victories enshrine as women’s legal status a contemporary version of what used to be referred to as biology-is-destiny, it’s not only women’s freedom that is at stake, but also the freedom of anyone whose gender identity and/or sexual orientation violates the heteronormative ideology informing that status—because policing women’s bodies in this way means by definition policing everyone else’s body into congruence with what women’s “reproductive destiny” is supposed to be. One thing that made debating the antiabortion commenters on Alas especially frustrating was their refusal to acknowledge that their arguments, whether explicitly faith-based or expressed through the genetic perspective, were implicitly rooted in and framed by metaphors without which the arguments themselves would fall apart. The claim that sharing human DNA renders the personhood of a newly formed zygote morally equivalent to yours or mine, for example, requires for its validity that we ignore all the ways in which a bunch of undifferentiated cells growing in someone’s womb is qualitatively different not only from an already existing adult human being, but also from the adult human being that bunch of cells might one day grow to become. That elision is how metaphor works. It excludes the differences between its tenor, the thing being described, and its vehicle, the thing the tenor is being compared to, in order to focus on the similarities between them. To take a more familiar example, the metaphor comparing a lover’s blue eyes to, say, a summer lake in which you would like to swim requires for its success that we ignore the many and obvious differences between the eyes and the lake, including at the very least the fact that one is human while the other is not. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Repost - Israel and Palestine: Whose Side Are You On? URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are-you-on/ Last updated: 2025-12-29T11:00:59.000Z Dear Friends, For this fourth and last paid-tier preview, I am reposting as a stand-alone essay “Israel and Palestine — Whose Side Are You On?” which I originally published as a three-part series back in January of 2024, just shy of two full years ago. I have edited the prose only slightly, for continuity and clarity, but I have not updated it to account for all that has transpired in the region since then, including how Israel’s war in Gaza revealed itself to be inarguably a genocide and the bombing of Iran by Israel and the United States. Not only would that have required me to write an entirely new essay, but, those developments notwithstanding, I think the question I pose in the title is still worth asking in the way that I asked it in 2024—especially given that the right’s ongoing [weaponization of antisemitism](https://www.propublica.org/article/ucla-antisemitism-investigation-trump-doj?ref=richardjnewman.com) epitomizes [the divide-and-conquer strategy](https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/global-currents/jvp-rejecting-project-esther/?ref=richardjnewman.com) I talk about at the end of the essay. I know that many of you read the original three-part series with great interest, and the responses you shared with me figured prominently in my decision to transform **It All Connects* into the more formal newsletter that it will become starting next month. I hope that the promise of renewal that the new year brings with it brings peace and justice where it is needed and, to you in particular, happiness and fulfillment. With gratitude, Richard ## I. Context My early Jewish education was saturated with the idea that the existence of the State of Israel was a categorical imperative of both Jewish identity and, especially in the shadow of the Shoah, Jewish survival. My early experience of antisemitism, which started in the third grade and lasted into my college years, made it all too easy to believe that idea was incontrovertibly true. The white, Christian kids in my neighborhood threw pennies, rocks, and bottles at me when I walked past, calling me “Cheap Jew!” and “Fucking Heeb!.” They harassed me in school, attacked me physically on multiple occasions, screaming as they did that they had ovens in their basements waiting for me and my family; and they burglarized the apartment where my family lived, targeting my room in particular by trashing the books of Jewish learning I had on my bookshelf and carving the word “kike” into my closet door. Their message was clear. Because I was Jewish, I was not welcome among them, and the white, Christian adults who stood by while all this happened without lifting a finger or speaking a word to stop it only reinforced that message. Perhaps the best example I can give of how unwelcome I was made to feel, however—or, more precisely, of how clear the message was that Jews in general were not welcome in that neighborhood—is what didn’t happen after one of those kids wrote antisemitic graffiti about me on the wall of the town’s public library. I was fifteen when he spray painted “Newman is a Jew” on the wall facing on the avenue that ran through the center of town, illustrating his words, just in case a passerby didn’t get it, with the image of a penny. That was in 1977\. Fifteen years later, in 1992, when I brought the woman who would become my wife to meet my mother, the graffiti was still legible, the town having done nothing more than scribble a sand blaster across the words in wide, sweeping arcs that left both the letters and the penny clearly visible. The letters were more faded fifteen years later, when my seven-year-old son asked to see the neighborhood where I grew up, but you could still read them just as easily as when they were first written. Out of curiosity, I drove by the library not too long ago—now almost fifty years after the fact—and I found that the words had finally faded to the point where, if you had not seen them in the first place, you would not know they had ever been there. I have no idea, however, whether that’s because someone in authority finally decided it was time to erase them or because the wind and the rain and the snow finally did what someone in authority should have done a long time ago. For at least thirty years, though, anyone walking past the library could read on its wall just precisely how unwelcome Jews were in that town. Growing up, in other words, it was hard not to feel like I was living my own small version of the history of antisemitism, which has always contained within itself the seed of the idea that the Jews need to be eliminated, whether by expulsion, forced conversion, or total annihilation. As a result, the need for a Jewish state as both a homeland and a safe haven seemed like common sense to me, a truth made even more self-evident by my indoctrination into the myth of the State of Israel’s inherent moral superiority. I was particularly taken with the way then-Israeli Prime Minister [Golda Meir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golda%5FMeir?ref=richardjnewman.com) expressed this at a [press conference](https://libquotes.com/golda-meir/quote/lbr6b1j?ref=richardjnewman.com) in London in 1969: > When peace comes, we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. At the time, I mistook the sentimental self-righteousness of Meir’s statement for an authentic moral stance. All the Jews wanted was a country where we could live freely as Jews, at peace with the rest of the world and unmolested by antisemitic hatred, whether that hatred was writ small, like my experience growing up, or large, like the examples I learned about in school and in the books I read. Meir, I thought, had said it perfectly: the moral failing was not ours if others forced us to kill to defend ourselves in pursuit of that goal. This conviction started to unravel during my sophomore year of college. A friend who was not Jewish and I were talking about Israel and Palestine in the hallway of our dorm. I don’t remember specifically what we were talking about, but at some point I repeated one of the more heinous, anti-Palestinian canards I had internalized: that when Palestinian women became pregnant, they prayed to give birth to boys who could grow up to martyr themselves, perhaps as suicide bombers, for the Palestinian cause. My friend’s jaw dropped, and he stared at me open-mouthed. I wish I could recall exactly what he said next, but the meaning of it is still with me: Did I really believe, he wanted to know, that Palestinian mothers loved their sons so little that they did not want for them the long and happy lives that all mothers desire for their children? That was the first time anyone had ever spoken aloud the implications of what I had been taught to believe, and the more I thought about it, the more ashamed I was for having believed it. What surprises me now when I think about this is that I didn’t get defensive, or at least not as defensive as I know I had been in other discussions with non-Jews about the same subject; and that was because my friend had not done what so many others did. He did not make our discussion’s subtext a test to see if my presumed Jewish loyalty to Israel outweighed my basic humanity. In all the years since then, and it’s been more than forty, I think I can count on two hands the number of people with whom I have been as sure of that as I was with him. ## II. Subtext It is a fact that accusations of antisemitism are all too often used to silence voices critical of Israel. It is also a fact, however, that antisemitism sometimes does lie unintentionally embedded within those voices, just as it sometimes animates them, like the antisemitism enshrined in both the original version of Hamas’ charter from [1988](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th%5Fcentury/hamas.asp?ref=richardjnewman.com) and the revised version of [2017](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full?ref=richardjnewman.com). The 1988 version, for example, explicitly invokes [*The Protocols of The Elders of Zion*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FProtocols%5Fof%5Fthe%5FElders%5Fof%5FZion??ref=richardjnewman.com) as proof that the goal of Zionism is world domination. > The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying. First published in Russia in the early 1900s, the *Protocols* purports to expose the Jewish plan to rule the world. As Hamas understood things in 1988, in other words, the State of Israel was not simply an occupying power that needed to be resisted. Rather, it was the political manifestation of something far more sinister and far-reaching, a Jewish plot to turn the world into one big Jewish state. The fight against Israel, therefore, was not just the fight for Palestinian freedom; it was a fight to ensure the freedom of the entire world. (If you’ve never heard of the *Protocols,* these articles, by [Michael Fox](https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2016-09-08/ty-article/.premium/the-elders-of-zion-113-years-of-a-lie-that-refuses-to-die/0000017f-e781-dea7-adff-f7fb67240000?ref=richardjnewman.com) and [Steven J. Zipperstein](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/08/conspiracy-theory-rule-them-all/615550/?ref=richardjnewman.com) are worth reading.) On the surface, the 2017 revision of the charter suggests that Hamas had a substantive change of heart. It contains in Article 16 an explicit disavowal of antisemitism, “affirm\[ing\] that \[Hamas’\] conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion;” and, in Article 17, the document identifies “anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews” exclusively with “European history,” asserting that those phenomena have no place in “the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or their heritage.” (This last claim might have some validity if you define antisemitism in strictly historical terms, but if you understand antisemitism more broadly as Jew-hatred, it is, as David Nirenberg has shown in [*Anti-Judaism*](https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393347913?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* certainly contestable.) Taken at face value, in other words, Hamas’ 2017 charter suggests that the organization now considers antisemitism to be completely alien to its purpose and goals. The Articles I have quoted from, however, stand in direct contradiction to other language in the document that essentially reproduces the claims about the Jews that the 1988 charter took from the *Protocols.* This is from Articles 14 and 15: > The Zionist project is a racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist project based on seizing the properties of others…The Zionist project does not target the Palestinian people alone; it is the enemy of the Arab and Islamic Ummah posing a grave threat to its security and interests \[and also\] to international security and peace and to mankind and its interests and stability. The 2017 charter may not mention the *Protocols* at all; it may substitute the word *Zionists* for *Jews;* and it may contain language nominally disavowing antisemitism; but Hamas still clearly defines its anti-Zionism not in opposition to the State of Israel per se—a position which is not, in itself, antisemitic—but rather to the same campaign of world domination that the *Protocols* attributes to the Jews. The change in Hamas’ position, in other words, seems more cosmetic than anything else. I thought about this a lot as I tried to figure out how to respond in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ October 7th attack. On the one hand, not to acknowledge what Hamas did as an expression of Palestinian resistance would be to deny both the reality of Israel’s ongoing occupation and the fact that the Palestinians have the right to resist that occupation on their own terms. On the other hand, not to call out at the same time the antisemitism that is central to Hamas’ identity would be to allow it to remain an unexamined subtext in any discussion of the attack, one that neither I nor any other Jewish person should be expected to set aside, minimize, or ignore. I know it may sound like I’m trying to use antisemitism to “both sides” the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but I am not. There is no question that the current Israeli government is using Hamas’ attack as a pretext for furthering the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians that has been woven into Israel’s DNA since its [founding](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/may/18/a-jewish-case-for-palestinian-refugee-return?ref=richardjnewman.com); and there is also no question that the [unspeakable scale and brutality](https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/?ref=richardjnewman.com) of Israel’s response to that attack should disabuse anyone who still believes, as I once did, in Israel’s inherent moral superiority. What we are witnessing in Gaza is the logic of military occupation being carried out to its completely one-sided conclusion. Calling out Hamas’ antisemitism changes none of that. What it does do, however, is connect Hamas’ overall agenda (which is not necessarily the agenda of the Palestinian people as a whole), and, in particular, the [atrocities](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/21/october-7-forensic-analysis-shows-hamas-abuses-many-false-israeli-claims?ref=richardjnewman.com) the Hamas fighters [committed](https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/07/17/october-7-crimes-against-humanity-war-crimes-hamas-led-groups?ref=richardjnewman.com) on October 7 to other instances of antisemitism worldwide: the [chants](https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5003402,00.html?ref=richardjnewman.com), for example, of “Jews will not replace us” at the 2017 Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, and the [Poway Synagogue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poway%5Fsynagogue%5Fshooting?ref=richardjnewman.com) shooting in Pittsburgh, and the [Halle Synagogue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halle%5Fsynagogue%5Fshooting?ref=richardjnewman.com) shooting in Germany; and the resurfacing of the [blood libel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood%5Flibel?ref=richardjnewman.com) in [Turkey](https://www.algemeiner.com/2023/08/14/turkish-newscaster-defends-airing-jewish-blood-libel/?%5Fga=2.185464545.957158488.1703073496-1742273328.1701691253&ref=richardjnewman.com); and the antisemitism that is causing many [Jews in France to feel they need to hide their Jewish identity](https://www.algemeiner.com/2023/11/29/antisemitic-discrimination-painful-daily-reality-jews-france-newspaper-investigation-reveals/?%5Fga=2.77910620.957158488.1703073496-1742273328.1701691253&ref=richardjnewman.com)—not to mention my personal experiences of antisemitism, those I told you about above and those I have not included in this essay, which, though their violence may only be implicit and implied, continue to this day. For me, in other words, for the Jews as a people, antisemitism is personal—how could it not be?—and so I take it personally when, in discussions about Israel and Palestine, someone refuses to acknowledge the presence of antisemitism when I point it out to them; or tells me that, in light of Israel’s behavior, I should not make calling antisemitism out a priority; or that I am being too sensitive, or am too fragile, and that I am therefore seeing antisemitism where it isn’t; or when they assume that the only reason I choose to call antisemitism out is my presumed Jewish loyalty to Israel. That person and I might very well agree both in our opposition to the Israeli occupation and in our understanding of the history that has culminated in Israel’s current campaign, as one Israeli official put it, to “flatten Gaza.” Unless there are compelling reasons to do otherwise, however—and I want to repeat that, because it’s important, *unless there are compelling reasons to do otherwise*—if I have to choose between affirming what we agree on and confronting antisemitism, I will always choose the latter. Not because I think calling out antisemitism is more important than the Palestinian men, women, and children whose lives are currently being torn apart by Israeli forces, but because when someone in conversation with me is willing to give antisemitism a free pass, I find it impossible not to ask whose side they’re really on. ## III. Whose Side *Are* You On? The negotiations that will, in the end, bring any form of (by definition imperfectly just) resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict—whether that be the increasingly implausible two-state solution, a secular one-state solution, or some form of confederacy—will require each side to accept the fact that some aspects of the other’s narrative will be irreconcilable with their own. This doesn’t mean, of course, that the two sides have nothing in common. Palestinian and Israeli parents who have lost children, for example, started the [Parents Circle-Families Forum](https://www.theparentscircle.org/en/pcff-home-page-en/?ref=richardjnewman.com) out of their shared commitment that no one else should suffer the loss of a family member. At the same time, as this essay by Susan Dominus in the [*The New York Times Magazine*](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/14/magazine/israelis-palestinians-peace-forum.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.JU0.DjjM.1FAE%5FiiAlyio&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com) shows, once you dig beneath the surface of that shared experience, horrific as it is, the ways in which it is impossible to see both sides as sharing equally in the suffering the conflict has caused quickly come to the surface. Just as there can be no question that Israel is an occupying power and that any form of Palestinian resistance, including the October 7th attack by Hamas, needs to be understood in the context of that occupation; and just as there can be no question that Israel’s current campaign in Gaza is in keeping with, not an exception to, the policies and practices of that occupation; there can be no question that, whether you call Zionism a settler-colonial ideology or identify it, I would say more accurately, as a form of nationalism (because I do think [that difference is meaningful](https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2021-07-05/ty-article-opinion/is-israel-really-a-settler-colonial-state/0000017f-f46f-d497-a1ff-f6ef21fc0000?ref=richardjnewman.com)), the Jews who founded Israel *behaved* like colonizers. Nor can there be a question that the Jews who’ve governed the country since 1948 have, some more and some less explicitly, continued that behavior. If you say that you support Israel, but you are unwilling to come to honest terms with that history, if you are willing to use accusations of antisemitism to obscure that history, then we are not on the same side. Similarly, you and I are not on the same side if, implicitly or explicitly, you hold all Jews uniquely responsible for Israel’s behavior, or if the anti-Zionism you espouse when you declare your solidarity with the Palestinians does not distinguish between the political Zionism of the State of Israel and what Zionism means within the antisemitic world view where a core component of Hamas’ charter finds its roots. More to the point, if these are the positions you hold, then the side I *am* on will inevitably include anyone who is Jewish, even if they support the State of Israel without qualification. They need to be held accountable for that position, but they do not therefore deserve to be the targets of antisemitism. I am, in other words, talking here about two very different areas of concern, one that has to do with the oppressive and murderously unjust behavior of a nation state, and one that has to do with an ideology that targets Jews worldwide, regardless of what their position on Israel and Palestine might be. Unfortunately, however, because the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is among the few contexts in which it is possible, outside of Jewish circles, to insist that antisemitism *needs* to be part of the discussion, these areas of concern all too often become conflated. As a result, my self-interest as a Jew in calling out antisemitism gets pitted against the interests of the Palestinians on whose behalf opposition to the Israeli occupation is absolutely necessary. There is, in other words, a divide-and-conquer strategy at work here, and it’s worth asking whose interests it serves. For now, though, since answering that question would require an essay (and likely more) unto itself, all I will say is that I am not on their side either. Rather, I stand with those whose opposition to the Israeli occupation and solidarity with the Palestinians is accompanied by an explicit and proactive stand against both antisemitism and that kind of divide and conquer strategy. Otherwise, it does not matter what we may nominally agree on—whether that happens to be opposition to the occupation or Hamas’ antisemitism and all it represents—we simply are not on the same side. ### Maybe I Do URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/maybe-i-do/ Last updated: 2025-12-19T11:00:34.000Z Dear Friends, This third paid-tier preview picks up on a theme I’ve written about in a number of issues of Four By Four ([#6](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-6/), [#19](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-19/), and [#28](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-28/)): the role music has played in my life. I’ve told parts of this story before, but I’ve never put it together in quite this way, framed by my friend Ronny’s belief in my talent and its potential. More to the point, I don’t think I would have found this perspective if I hadn’t decided to write about it as part of this month’s preview. Thank you for letting me share it with you. I wish you all a happy, healthy, meaningful and fulfilling holiday season. —Richard ## 1\. Exposition Those are my hands over the keys at the grand piano that stood in the parlor of the dorm I lived in when I attended Edinburgh University in the summer of 1985\. I’d dropped out of the graduate creative writing program I was attending earlier that year, and since I had no idea what I wanted to do next, my friend Ronny persuaded me to go with her to Edinburgh to study Scottish literature for a couple of months. I was a pretty good self-taught piano player by then, but I was less interested in performing for an audience than in the music I made when I sat alone and played only for myself. The presence of that piano, therefore—I did not have one at home—made me very happy, since I could play it in the moments of solitude I often sought out while my friends and classmates were out doing other things. Ronny took the picture of my hands late one afternoon when she happened to walk in on me while I was playing. She did not say anything to interrupt me, just crouched low enough to get the angle she wanted, snapped, and left. ## 2\. Development I say I was self-taught, but that’s not entirely true. I started playing piano when my grandmother showed me how to play the C major scale on the upright Steinway that stood in the dining room of hers and my grandfather’s apartment. She also gave me my first lesson in how to read music: whole notes, half notes, and quarter notes, in four-four time. Some years ago, my mother found the original sales receipt for that piano among my grandmother’s papers. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/12/piano-sales-receipt-1-1-1.jpeg) I didn’t know this back then, but my grandmother once had ambitions to sing opera and had, in fact, sung professionally on the radio when she was younger. (If I remember the story I’ve heard correctly, a young [Jimmy Durante](http://www.redhotjazz.com/jdurante.html?ref=richardjnewman.com) was one of her accompanists.) While she encouraged my interest in music, however, and in the piano, my grandmother actively discouraged me from taking music seriously, even once it became clear that I had a talent worth developing. I’d taken piano as a spring elective during my senior year in high school and had just played in the class recital [Ernesto Lecuona’s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernesto%5FLecuona?ref=richardjnewman.com) [*Malagueña*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuQQxZ7TXaY&source%5Fve%5Fpath=MTc4NDI0&ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* a pretty remarkable feat considering that I had not previously taken formal lessons, that I did not have a piano at home to practice on, and that I had not played a watered-down transcription. I still have the copy of the sheet music I used at the time: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/12/maleguena-1-1.jpeg) “You started playing too late,” my grandmother told me. “To be a concert pianist”—the only kind of professional playing that had any legitimacy for her—“you would have had to start taking lessons when you were still in grade school.” This stood in stark contrast to what my 11th grade English teacher had told me the previous year after hearing me improvise a little on the piano in the school’s auditorium. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” she said, “if in ten or fifteen years I’ll be able to come hear you play the blues in a bar in Greenwich Village.” I know now that I really was good enough that I could have made my teacher’s prediction come true if I’d wanted to—and I will tell you a little further on about the one time I did play in Greenwich Village—but at the time my grandmother’s words outweighed my teacher’s, which is why, though I briefly flirted with the idea, I didn’t major in music when I got to college. I have no regrets when I think about this now, but I do sometimes wonder if my grandmother was so insistent that I would never be good enough because she regretted, and resented, her own inability to pursue the career in music she had wanted. **§§§** The piano was not the first instrument I wanted to play. When I was in grade school, I asked my mother and stepfather if I could join the school orchestra. They were adamantly opposed, though I don’t remember them ever explaining precisely why. What I do recall quite vividly is George “demonstrating” for me the ways in which playing the instruments I was interested in would leave me “deformed” for life. If I chose the trumpet, he told me, my lips would become permanently puckered; and if I played the clarinet, he said, I’d end up with a face like a ferret’s, with my jaws frozen into the position required to hold the instrument’s mouthpiece. I was pretty sure he was making fun of me, though I was young and ignorant enough that I think part of me also worried he might be telling the truth. Either way, though, it was clear that he and my mother would not give me the permission I needed. I was deeply disappointed, of course, but then, in 8th or 9th grade—my stepfather had left us and I don’t know why my mother didn’t stop me—I got a revenge of sorts by joining the local drum and bugle corps. I wanted first to be a drummer, but the man who ran the corps said he needed horn players, so I learned to play the bass baritone bugle instead. I practiced every day, which I am sure drove my mother and my neighbors a little bit crazy—hence, my revenge–and I eventually got good enough that my friend Marc and I talked seriously about trying to join either a drum corps that belonged to [Drum Corps International](https://www.dci.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com), like the [Bayonne Bridgemen](https://www.dci.org/news/fanfare-how-the-bridgemen-became-the-bridgemen/?ref=richardjnewman.com), or auditioning for a professional corps, like the [Hawthorne Caballeros](https://hawthornecaballeros.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com). I don’t remember why that didn’t happen, but it didn’t. **§§§** My grandmother’s discouraging words notwithstanding, I made time once I got to college to go to the piano practice rooms at least a few hours each week. I had no illusion that I would ever play for anyone but myself, but I was interested enough in music for its own sake that I took some theory and composition courses as electives. What I learned about reading chord charts in those classes turned out to be very useful when I became the accompanist for the musicals the kids in the drama program at Surprise Lake Camp put on two or three times each summer. I was the boys’ counselor, and I learned to fake my way through the music of shows that included *Cats, A Chorus Line, Fiddler on the Roof,* and *Fame.* I stopped working at Surprise Lake the summer I went to Scotland with Ronny, after which I found a job with [B’nai B’rith Hillel/JACY](https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/bnai/Bnai%20Brith%20hillel.pdf?ref=richardjnewman.com), a Jewish community organization that no longer exists. That’s where I met Bill, an aspiring singer-songwriter, with whom I became very close very quickly. I don’t remember which one of us suggested that we should collaborate on some of his songs, but once we started, making that music made very happy. Bill really wanted to play gigs, and he managed to get us one as part of a showcase at [The Bitter End](http://www.bitterend.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. I was excited, but the truth was that I thought of myself primarily as his cowriter and accompanist, a role I would have been just as happy for someone else to fill. I’d be lying, though, if I said I didn’t get a real thrill from seeing my name on the publicity flyer, even if it was completely misspelled: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/12/the-bitter-end-flyer-1.jpeg) My collaboration with Bill ended when our friendship did, and with it my desire to play on stage, which I’d been willing to do mostly because we were such good friends, not because I wanted it independently for myself. I still played piano for my own enjoyment, but with Bill out of my life, I made a conscious decision to focus my creative energy almost entirely on my writing. ## 3\. Reprise After that, I didn’t give much thought to playing music until I took the job I retired from in September as a professor in the English Department at Nassau Community College. A colleague who’d heard me play the host’s piano at a house party to which the entire department had been invited asked me how long I’d been playing. When I told her a version of the story I’ve written here, including the fact that I still didn’t own a piano, she very gently pointed out that with the salary I’d just started earning I could afford to buy one. I remember laughing out loud at the truth of what she’d said and at myself for not having realized sooner that my life was now my own in ways it had never been before, that I needed no one’s permission but mine to do something I’d wanted to do since I was a boy. Because I lived in an apartment with very thin walls, I bought myself an electric piano with weighted keys. This way, as long as I wore headphones, I could play as long and as loudly as I wanted, at any time of the day or night, without disturbing my neighbors. I also bought myself a [Yamaha SY77 MIDI workstation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha%5FSY77?ref=richardjnewman.com) and what was then called a sequencer, a software program that allow me to compose on my computer. I was listening at the time to a lot of [Tangerine Dream](https://www.tangerinedreammusic.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), especially albums like [*Melrose*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eBneBZ5JQg&list=PLBKha%5FtGlZIm5lgIkiSVUyZiHO-9c-PMx&ref=richardjnewman.com) and [*Canyon Dreams*](https://youtu.be/3xKyBrS8ySo?si=xditd8liBN9S4idd&ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* and I wanted to try my hand at making that kind of music. My songs, of course, were nowhere nearly as polished and professional as the ones on those CDs, but I enjoyed making them. Some, I thought, were actually pretty good. The five on this playlist are the only ones I still have. *(Please note: if you’re reading this in an email, you may not see the audio player, in which case click* [*here*](https://on.soundcloud.com/0IyeHHeER4mYy4S045?ref=richardjnewman.com) *to listen.)* I made those songs by improvising the different tracks into the sequencer and then using the computer to shape those improvisations into finished pieces of music. The experience was very different from playing an acoustic piano and having what I played disappear into the air when I was done. It allowed me to think of myself for the first time as a composer. I even presumed to imagine I might one day write music that someone else would want to play, and so I also tried my hand at composing more intentionally, though I never did get the chance to hear anyone else play the songs I wrote. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/12/8-12-92.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/12/chord-progression.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/12/sometimes-the-snow.jpg) After I got married, of course, and especially after our son was born, my life was no longer my own in the same way. I no longer had the luxury of spending as much time as I wanted on my own interests, which meant, ultimately, that I had to choose between writing and music. Since music had never really been more than a serious hobby, I chose writing. I didn’t stop playing piano—in fact we bought an acoustic upright when we moved into an apartment big enough to hold it—but I put the synthesizer away, stopped composing, and, inevitably, as life’s demands took more and more of my time, I played less and less, and the piano sometimes sat unplayed and silent for months and even years at a time. I don’t regret this. Each choice we make about the future inescapably closes off any number of possible other paths we might have explored. I have, though, often missed the way music once filled a space in my life. Then, in 2023, when I published [*T’shuvah*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2023/09/07/tshuvah/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* my third book of poetry, I chose as an epigraph the words of [Kol Ha’olam Kulo](https://youtu.be/1WnEAxa1tFc?si=f4Nt3SLxvGSj9epZ&ref=richardjnewman.com), a song that I have carried with me, and played on the piano, since I was in high school. The lyric is adapted from a saying by [Rabbi Nachman of Breslov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nachman%5Fof%5FBreslov?ref=richardjnewman.com): “The world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be overwhelmed by fear.” Making that song a part of my writing life inspired me to create these two improvisations on the song’s melody, which I offered as free gifts to anyone who pre-ordered the book: The Bridge Is A Blues 0:00 /192.552 1× The Path To The Bridge 0:00 /271.2 1× ## 4\. Coda In April of 2021, my friend Ronny was murdered by her husband. She was my oldest friend and even though we had not been in touch regularly for quite some time—our very different lives and the physical distance between us being what they were—her death left a gaping hole in my life where just the knowledge that she was in the world should have been. Not too long ago, though, in a scene that could easily have come from a movie in which a character deep in grief over the death of a loved one feels like that loved one is somehow speaking to them from beyond the grave, I found something in my email archive that Ronny wrote to me back in 2018: > I remember your playing the piano in Edinburgh, both in the parlor and at a local pub during a session. Even though I had known you for years at that point, I was surprised by your talent…Who knows, if you had been encouraged to be a musician, would we have been denied your poetry? Would both have existed? I had the privilege to hear you improvise alone and play with other musicians at the pub that one night. Perhaps it is time to sit at a keyboard again. You might just have more to do there. Maybe I do. ### A Belated Gratitude URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/a-belated-gratitude/ Last updated: 2025-12-12T11:00:06.000Z Dear Friends, This is the second preview of what the paid-tier essays of **It All Connects* will be like. It develops further an experience I had when I was in my late twenties that I wrote about in [Four By Four #39](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-39/#four-things-about-me): going to visit a man who was dying of AIDS with my grandmother and her friend Herbert, a man whom I intensely disliked at the time but who nonetheless gave me gifts that I still have after all these years. Writing this piece gave me a chance to reflect on what those gifts have meant to me, even if I did not realize it until very late, and on what I might have missed by not acknowledging them for what they were when I received them. That kind of self-discovery is one of the things I value most about writing, and I am grateful that you’ve allowed me to share that process with you. ***Please note that some images in this post are NSFW.** —Richard ***I was scrolling through my photos the other day*** when this picture of my grandmother’s friend Herbert caught my eye. Herbert was European, though I either don’t remember or never learned what country he was from, and he had a European elitist’s stereotypical disdain for American culture, from food to clothes to literature to music. He never openly insulted me, but he made no secret of the fact that he thought someone of my “obvious intelligence” ought to have “aimed higher” in my tastes and interests. If I didn’t call him out as the snob he was when my grandmother managed to nudge us into the kind of intellectual debate she liked to watch, it was, first, because I didn’t want to disrespect someone who seemed old enough to be my parent—though I never learned exactly how old Herbert was—and, second, because my grandmother so obviously adored him. Herbert was, however, a very good storyteller. He was well-traveled and had a writerly flair for conjuring the places he’d been to with just a few details. He’d served in either World War II or the Korean War—I don’t remember which—and he told some marvelous tales of the time he spent in Japan, though all I remember of them is that they were marvelous. He started sharing those stories with me after I came back in 1989 from the year I spent teaching English in South Korea. It never occurred to me that he might have been doing so because he saw them as a way for us to connect in ways we hadn’t been able to do before, and I wish now that I had not been so quick to dismiss them, since they are connected to some gifts that he gave me, or, to be more precise, that he gave my grandmother to give to me on his behalf. First is a series of photographs someone took—maybe him, maybe not, I never knew—when they were in Korea ten or twenty years before I was. Some of them are obviously of places in Seoul, but none are labeled with a specific location. Nonetheless, they evoke for me even now the places in Korea where I lived, worked, and played. These two, for example, remind me viscerally of what the [Saemaeul Shijang](https://www.timeout.com/seoul/attractions/jamsil-saemauel-market?ref=richardjnewman.com), an outdoor market across the street from my apartment, was like when I was there. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/12/korea1.jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/12/korea7.jpeg.jpg) The second gift I received from Herbert was a set of three Japanese prints. This one is a reproduction of a print by [Kitagawa Utamaro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utamaro?ref=richardjnewman.com), “The most celebrated artist of women of the whole ‘[Ukiyo-e](https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/art-of-the-pleasure-quarters-and-the-ukiyo-e-style?ref=richardjnewman.com)’ school,” according to the [British Museum’s website](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A%5FOA-0-55?ref=richardjnewman.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/12/utamaro-1.jpeg) Yogoto ni Au Koi (“Love That Meets Each Night”) by Kitagawa Utamaro The title of the image is Yogoto ni Au Koi (“Love That Meets Each Night”), suggesting that the letter the woman is pulling from the breast pocket of her kimono is from a lover who wants to meet her. It’s from a series called [Kasen Koi no Bu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasen%5FKoi%5Fno%5FBu?ref=richardjnewman.com) (“Anthology of Poems: The Love Section”), which Wikipedia describes as > a series of five ukiyo-e prints…published c. 1793–94 \[the titles of which\] parod\[y\] the section headings in waka and kyōka poetry anthologies…The women depicted are not courtesans or others employed in the pleasure districts, who were the typically subjects of ukiyo-e portraits of beauties. The other two prints Herbert gave me are also reproductions. The one on the left is of a 1925 woodblock print called “Yuku Haru” (“Departing Spring”) by [Kawase Hasui](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasui%5FKawase?ref=richardjnewman.com), which depicts a young woman who is most likely a maiko, an apprentice geisha. The one on the right, also by Utamaro—at least according to Google’s AI, since I could find no identifying information on the reproduction itself—is from a 1790s series called Tôsei Odoriki Zoroe (“An Array of Dancing Girls of The Present Day”). It depicts a young woman in a festival costume that represents the Heron Maiden, a character from a kabuki drama that was popular at the time. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/12/print4-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/12/print3.jpeg-1.jpg) While researching these images, I also discovered that Utamaro was known for his erotic art. This one, among others, can be found at the [Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/56719?sortBy=Relevance&ft=Kitagawa+Utamaro&offset=0&rpp=40&pos=1&ref=richardjnewman.com): ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/12/utamaroerotic.jpg) When my grandmother was moving out of the apartment she’d lived in for more than fifty years, long after Herbert died, she gave me something else he’d given her to give me, though she’d either forgotten to do so or had decided it would be inappropriate. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/12/copulation.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/12/flute-player.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/12/solo.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/12/plate-signature-1.jpg) I was disappointed both that I would never learn the story of where and when Herbert bought these plates and that I could not ask him how he felt about them. My grandmother had told me years earlier that Herbert was a devout Roman Catholic—he’d either converted or rediscovered his faith; I don’t remember which—and, in keeping with that tradition, he’d chosen to live according to the principle that being gay was not a sin, but that gay sex was. Even by the time I met him, she said, he’d been celibate for decades. I would have loved to hear Herbert talk about what the eroticism of those images meant to him, especially since the Church’s teaching that celibacy was the only way for him to be gay and not at the same time sexually sinful felt to me oddly parallel to the celibacy that the Church demands of priests. **§§§** The gift that Herbert gave me that motivated me to write this post was actually bequeathed to me by someone else. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/12/bakingdish.jpg) This Le Creuset enameled cast iron oval baking dish—the color is called “Flame”—originally belonged to a man named Michael, whom I met only once, when I accompanied Herbert and my grandmother on a visit not too long after I returned from Korea. Michael was dying of AIDS. His family had disowned him, and Herbert was one of the people helping to make sure both that he was not alone and that he was as comfortable as possible as death approached. I remember a pale, gaunt man with short-cropped red hair and a neatly trimmed beard and mustache propped up on pillows so he could watch TV. His face lit up when we entered the room. It was the first time I’d ever been in the presence of someone who knew he was dying, and I did not know what to say. I was grateful, therefore, that Herbert did most of the talking, though I have no memory at all of what we talked about. Some months later, my grandmother and she told me that Michael was gone. We were sitting at her dining room table, waiting for Herbert, who was coming to have lunch with us. She’d been helping Herbert go through Michael’s belongings, she said, trying to figure out what to do with the things Michael had not designated for specific people, and they’d been having a hell of a time trying to figure out how to dispose of the sexual paraphernalia they’d found—dildos, cuffs, ball gags, and so on—without embarrassing either themselves or, posthumously, Michael. I laughed out loud as my grandmother listed those items as if they were as ordinary as forks, knives, and spoons. When Herbert arrived, he was carrying the baking dish. “Michael remembered you vividly from our visit,” he said. “When I saw him next, he said about you, ‘*That* is a good, kind, *decent* man.’ I told him you liked to cook and so, as we were making his final arrangements, he said he wanted you to have this.” It’s hard for me to imagine now what Michael saw in me during the short time we were together, since I don’t remember saying more than a few words. I thanked Herbert, but I don’t think I said anything else, not knowing how, given my feelings about him, to acknowledge what I understood to be his implicit agreement with Michael’s opinion. Not too long ago, as I put into the oven the fresh-caught cod covered in a tomato-cilantro-cumin sauce that we were going to have for dinner, it occurred to me that I think about Herbert and Michael every time I use that baking dish. That started me thinking about the ways in which Herbert had woven himself into the fabric of my life through the things he gave me, and I realized that I’ve been carrying for decades a gratitude for those gifts that I wish I’d understood well enough to express when I received them. Herbert is gone now and will never know. I am glad, though, that I’ve finally expressed it. ### Learning To Love The Questions: The Power We Pretend Not To See 1 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-power-we-pretend-not-to-see-1/ Last updated: 2026-09-05T09:31:19.000Z Dear Friends, This post is from [**Learning to Love the Questions*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2025/12/06/the-power-we-pretend-not-to-see-1/?ref=richardjnewman.com), where I blog about poetry, politics, and spirituality—not always in that order. I include these posts as part of the free tier of **It All Connects* because the issues I explore at **Learning To Love The Questions* often intersect with, and sometimes broaden, what I write about here. It’s a chance for me to share ideas I’m working on and invite reflection without worrying about a paywall. Thanks for reading! —Richard That the mystical experience of transcendence exists outside of language is axiomatic to those who pursue it. It follows, then, that such experience also exists outside the network of power relations ineluctably embedded in language—outside, in other words, of politics, in the largest possible sense of that term. While part of me has always found this proposition compelling, I’ve never been able to get past the fact that my relationship to the god with whom, or in whom, I would be seeking that transcendence is hierarchical by definition, and if achieving transcendence requires me to accept that hierarchy as its foundation, then how can the transcendence itself not be political as well? Farid al-Din Attar’s [*The Conference of the Birds*](http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780140444346?ref=richardjnewman.com), translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis, is a poetic allegory of [Sufi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism?ref=richardjnewman.com) spiritual seeking that, at least in part, attempts to address this question. An assembly of birds sets out in search of the [Simorgh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simurgh?ref=richardjnewman.com#In%5FPersian%5FSufi%5Fpoetry) and the ultimate transcendence they anticipate awaits them at their journey’s end. The thirty birds who reach that point, however, discover that they themselves are the Simorgh, a revelation that turns on a pun that is impossible in English. In Persian, *si morgh* means “thirty (si) birds (morgh).” > There in the Simorgh’s radiant face they saw > Themselves, the Simorgh \[thirty birds\] of the world—with awe > They gazed, and dared at last to comprehend > They were the Simorgh and the journey’s end. (219) The transcendence the birds were seeking, in other words, was within them all along. At the beginning of this journey, the hoopoe, the bird the other birds choose as their guide, defines the path they must travel as being foundationally the same as a lover’s quest to become one with their beloved. Love itself, in other words, whether for the divine or for another human being, is defined within the way of thinking as the desire for loss of self; and the first thing those who seek transcendence must do is transform the desire that compels them towards another person into desire for oneness with God. Achieving that transformation is difficult, though, since it means giving up a beloved you can see and hear and touch. That difficulty is one reason people resist the mystical path. The nightingale explains its resistance this way: > My love is for the rose; I bow to her; > From her dear presence I could never stir. > If she should disappear the nightingale > Would lose his reason and his song would fail, > And though my grief is one that no bird knows, > One being understands my heart—the rose. > I am so drowned in love that I can find > No thought of my existence in my mind. > Her worship is sufficient life for me; > The quest for her is my reality… > My love is here; the journey you propose > Cannot beguile me from my life—the rose. > It is for me she flowers; what greater bliss > Could life provide me—anywhere—than this? > Her buds are mine; she blossoms in my sight— > How could I leave her for a single night? (36) In its response, the hoopoe points out the contradiction in what the nightingale has said, which is that, while it claims to experience love for the rose as a loss of self, it wants at the same to possess the rose *for* itself: “Her buds are mine; she blossoms in my sight.” The rose, the hoopoe points out, doesn’t blossom *for* the nightingale, but simply because it is a rose. More to the point, because the blossom will fade, the rose can never be possessed in a way that will fully satisfy the nightingale’s desire. By way of illustration, the hoopoe then tells “The Story of a Dervish and a Princess,” in which a [dervish](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dervish?ref=richardjnewman.com) falls in love at first sight with a princess > …whose grace > Was such that any man who glimpsed her face > Declared himself in love. Like starless dusk > Her dark hair hung, soft-scented like fine musk; > The charm of her slow, humid eyes awoke > The depths of sleeping love, and when she spoke, > No sugar was as sweet as her lips’ sweet; > No rubies with their colour could compete. (37) The dervish is as stricken with this princess as the nightingale is with the rose, growing so “wild/With ardent love, with restless misery” that “for seven years he wept continually,” happily choosing to live among the stray dogs outside her gate in order to be near her. Unlike the rose, however, the princess has a station in life, making it both unseemly and shameful for her to have this ragged man attach himself to her. In response, her “serving-men” conspire to murder the dervish and restore her honor. The princess learns of these plans and warns the dervish, asking how he could possibly have hoped for love between himself “and the daughter of a queen.” He replies: > …That day when I > First saw your beauty I despaired of life; > Why should I fear the hired assassin’s knife? > A hundred thousand men adore your face; > No power on earth could make me leave this place. > But since your servants want to murder me, > Explain the meaning of this mystery: > Why did you smile at me that day? (37–38) So fully does he love the princess, the dervish says, so completely has he given his life over to love of her, that he is perfectly willing to die, since he has already ceased to exist for himself. His final question, however, betrays him. In wanting to know why the princess smiled at him, he reveals his love as a kind of vanity, a desire more to satisfy himself than to lose himself. Within this way of thinking, the princess’ response gives the dervish just what he deserves: > …”Poor fool, > I smiled from pity, almost ridicule— > Your ignorance provoked that smile." She spoke, > And vanished like a wisp of strengthless smoke. (38) The hoopoe wants with this story to show the nightingale how fruitless it is to depend on carnal love for ultimate fulfillment. To me, however, the error is in thinking that the impulse to self-erasure that the nightingale and the dervish feel so passionately resembles love at all. Not only would we today almost certainly call the dervish’s behavior a kind of stalking, rejecting any attempt to define it as a healthy or even legitimate expression of love, but we would see it unambiguously as an attempt to claim an entirely illusory power over the princess. The hoopoe’s response, I imagine, would be that this is precisely why the dervish and the nightingale needed to transform and redirect their desire towards oneness with God, since oneness with God, who is all powerful, would require them by definition to surrender completely the illusion that they possessed any real power at all. There’s no way, however, that this kind of surrender is not political. Even if you are a person of perfect faith, even if you believe that your religious tradition is the most just way for the world to be organized and that it holds within it the secret to true transcendence, that belief constitutes acceptance of—all you are doing is assenting to—the politics inherent in your faith. What bothers me is not that this should be so, but that people pretend it is not so. More on this in my upcoming posts. [*Cross posted from Learning To Love the Questions*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2025/12/06/the-power-we-pretend-not-to-see-1/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*.* ### The Ethics of Bearing Witness in Poetry to Violence and Trauma URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-ethics-of-bearing-witness-in-poetry-to-violence-and-trauma/ Last updated: 2025-12-06T14:18:26.000Z Dear Friends, This is the first of four essays you will receive over the next month as a preview of what the paid-tier of **It All Connects* will be like starting in January 2026\. It’s based on a talk I gave during a panel at the 2017 [Western Maryland Independent Literary Festival](https://www.frostburg.edu/news/2017/01/annual-fsu-literary-festival-brings-community-and-customers-to-frostburg.php?ref=richardjnewman.com). Those of you who have been following my work for a long time may (vaguely) remember when I posted the text of that talk on [Alas](https://amptoons.com/blog/?p=22926&ref=richardjnewman.com), where I was blogging regularly back then. One thing writing this essay did was give me a chance to reflect on just how much my thinking has changed over the years about the ethical questions confronting a poet, like me, who wants to write politically engaged poems. Working through that kind of change, discovering new questions to explore, all of it in response to what’s going on in the world around us, is what the [paid-tier](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signup/65988db373946800080fe780/yearly) of **It All Connects* will be about. The next three previews will broaden the scope of this exploration. I’m glad you’ll be accompanying me along the way. —Richard **§§§** ***In the mid-1980s,*** when I was a graduate student in Syracuse University’s Creative Writing MA program, a common topic of debate was what it meant to write “political poetry.” I’m sure my memory has reduced the positions people took in this debate to their lowest common denominators, but there were, as I recall, two basic lines of reasoning. One argued that poets had an inherent obligation to write about the political and cultural concerns of the day—that the vocation of poet, essentially, demanded it. The other asserted that the debate itself was a red herring, because poems were political by definition. The linguistic, formal, and expressive choices a poet made were inescapably and ineluctably already embedded in the poet’s politics. I was just beginning back then to figure out what I had to say as a poet, but my sympathies were with the first group from the start. I knew I wanted—that I needed, actually—to write about my experience as a survivor of childhood sexual violence, but I wanted to do so by locating that experience within a larger cultural and political context. My touchstone for this desire was June Jordan’s “[Poem About My Rights](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48762/poem-about-my-rights?ref=richardjnewman.com),” in which she connected the fear of sexual violence that kept her from walking alone whenever and wherever she wanted not only to the systemic nature of sexual violence itself, but also to other systems of oppression like racism and colonialism. I don’t know if I could have said it this way then, but making those kinds of connections seemed to hold out the possibility of healing in a way that nothing else did. The sexual abuse of boys was barely recognized as a phenomenon at that time. No one was talking about it because it was assumed to be so rare that it didn’t merit much attention at all; even the therapeutic wisdom in those years was grounded in how uncommon this kind of abuse was believed to be. I didn’t learn this until decades later, but therapists were trained back then to assume that when a boy or man revealed he’d been sexually abused he might very well be reporting a fantasy of some sort, not something that had actually been done to him. The feminist strategy of making the personal political, in other words—which is fundamentally an ethical stance rooted in the assumption that people do not lie when they relate their own experience, and which “Poem About My Rights” embodied—offered me a way to give meaning to what the men who violated me had done to me beyond the simple fact that I had been their victim. Still, it took me a long time to figure out how to do in my own work what June Jordan did in that poem, primarily because bearing witness to violence and trauma in poetry inevitably confronts the poet with an ethical paradox. A poem, by definition, is a beautiful thing made of words; trauma, on the other hand—in my case the trauma of sexual violence—is anything but beautiful. How can you ethically use the former to represent the latter without in some way falsifying what the person who experienced the trauma went through? When I say *beautiful* in this context, I am not using the word as a synonym for *loveliness,* the straightforwardly pleasing appearance of a well-constructed surface. Rather, I am using it to name that quality in art that puts us in touch with the full depth of what it means to be human, that does not force us to choose between loveliness and ugliness, or between the impulses towards compassion and dehumanization, but that instead allows us to experience those oppositions as they always already exist simultaneously within us. Since there is nothing simultaneous in this way about being violated, however, or about the shame that follows it, or about the fact of survival, or, most especially, about not surviving, the answer to the question I asked above is that it is impossible. A poem that attempts to bear witness to trauma and violence will inevitably falsify, or at least misrepresent, both the violence itself and the victim’s experience. Since this paradox is inescapable, and since I am not going to choose artistic silence when it comes to my own experience, what I try to do in my poems is work with the distance that aestheticizing my experience puts between the poem and the reality of the experience itself—or, perhaps more accurately, with how the aesthetic shape the poem gives to my experience, as long as I have rendered that experience as accurately as possible, can foreground in the reader’s imagination the horror of what actually happened. Here, for example, are lines from “Clean,” the second poem in my second book, *Words For What Those Men Have Done:* > She smiled, > bent between my legs, > and as she fumbled my zipper open > nothing, nothing as I > hardened against her tongue > came to me of the man > pushing himself between my teeth, > pouring into me > out of who he was > who he was… There’s an awful lot of fictionalization in that poem, so I do not want to say that the speaker is me. The experience the poem relates, however—a sexual encounter that unexpectedly did not conjure an earlier moment of violation—*was* mine, and so I struggled in composing this poem with whether using those last three lines to turn what the man did to me into a metaphor was too poetic, whether it made what happened “stomachable” for a reader in a way that it should not have been. In the end, I decided to keep the lines as I wrote them because they capture an aspect of that particular form of sexual violation, at least as I experienced it, that *he forced his penis into my mouth and ejaculated*—or some other specific, factual, clinical description of what he did—does not. I decided, in other words, to trust that the distance between the metaphor and the reality would highlight rather than mask the trauma I experienced. It’s one thing, though, to make this kind of executive creative decision when the experience you’re bearing witness to is your own and therefore is one that you have the right to interpret metaphorically in any way you choose. The ethical quandary I’m talking about becomes a good deal more fraught when that experience belongs to another person and the creative decisions you make therefore *represent* that experience *to* the audience, shaping any and all interpretation that follows. In that situation, even with the best intentions, you run the risk of falsifying what that other person went through by centering your own imagination in ways that are diametrically opposed to what it means to bear witness. By way of example, consider another poem from *Words For What Those Men Have Done:* “Because I Can’t Not Know What He Saw.” ### **Because I Can’t Not Know What He Saw** > — remembering a photograph from Iris Chang’s *The Rape of Nanking* > > This month, Harper’s “Readings” brings > from the people of Boro in eastern India > a list of verbs impossible in English: > *khonsay,* to pick an object up with care; > *dasa,* not to place a fishing instrument; > *asusu,* to feel unknown in a new place. > Some sound like Yiddish curses: > “You should *ur,”* dig soil like a swine, > or “May your children *gobray,”* > fall in a well unknowingly. > > I want that kind of verb > for the way whoever-it-was > pulled the woman’s robe > up over her head, > > for how the men > the man who did this to her > forced to watch — brother, > father, husband, son, > neighbor — for how each of them > invades my sleep; > > and for the way I felt > when I first saw it, > what I feel now > remembering it, > the way I kept taking Iris Chang’s > *The Rape of Nanking* off the shelf > and crouching in the corner > of Borders’ lower level > to stare, and to stare — > for that too I want a verb; > > and I want a verb as well, > and it’s not rape, > though certainly he raped her, > for the sword hilt rising > from between her parted thighs, > and for the way I hate myself > for hoping she was already dead > when he buried his blade in her. [*The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FRape%5Fof%5FNanking%5F%28book%29?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* published in 1997, is about the mass murder and mass rape of Chinese civilians in the city of [Nanking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing%5FMassacre?ref=richardjnewman.com), now known as Nanjing, committed by the Imperial Japanese Army in 1937–1938\. Just as it says in the poem, I came across the book in the lower level of a [Borders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borders%5F%28retailer%29?ref=richardjnewman.com) bookstore in Manhattan. I don’t remember why I decided not to buy the book, nor do I remember the process by which this poem came into being. I do recall, however, that I tried and failed for quite some time to write about the photograph to which the poem responds and that I only succeeded after I read the item in *Harper’s* that gave me the poem’s through-line. I also know that the sword that appears in the final stanza was firmly lodged in my memory as an accurate representation of the photograph I saw in the book. At some point after I considered the poem finished, however—I don’t remember where or when—I came across another copy of Chang’s book. Turning to that picture, I was surprised to discover that I had misremembered it completely. There was no sword. What actually emerged from the dead woman’s vagina was a bent metal rod, probably a piece of rebar. I should have responded immediately to this discovery by revising the poem to make it more accurate. Instead, in an act of intellectualization that frankly embarrasses me now, I chose to add the epigraph by which the poem is currently framed: “remembering a photograph from Iris Chang’s *The Rape of Nanking*.” I told myself that framing the poem in this way, as a “narrative” of remembering, would deepen the experience of any reader who bothered to find the original photograph by raising the question of why I had unconsciously replaced the rebar with the sword. Ironically, if you do not know what I have just told you—meaning that you take the poem at its word, that the image of the sword represents the photograph more or less accurately—the poem works just fine. It’s powerful; it moves people; and I think it says something worth saying about patriarchy in general and, more specifically, about men’s collective responsibility and accountability for sexual violence against women. For just that reason, in fact, some of you may think I am being too hard on myself here. To take as an out, however, that the change I made did nothing to alter the fundamental nature of either the poem or the woman’s fate is to avoid confronting the way I privileged my own imagination over what was documented in the original photograph, precisely the opposite of what I should have done in presuming to bear witness to that woman’s trauma and suffering. I’m not going to try now to parse the degree to which the fact that it was a Japanese man who impaled the woman led to an unconscious association in my mind with the stereotypical image of the samurai and his sword. Not because I think that association played no role in how my imagination worked when it came to this poem—I’m sure, in fact, that it did play a role—but because for the purposes of what I’m talking about here, it doesn’t really matter why I “remembered” the sword instead of the rebar. Taken on its own terms, independently of any racial association, the sword introduces a level of theatricality into the poem’s version of the photograph that is not in the original. As a result, by implication at least, both the woman’s body and the traumatic suffering she endured are fetishized within the poem in a way that I absolutely did not intend. The man who used the sword was most likely an officer, someone with rank and status who would have been unlikely to leave his blade inside the woman once the picture was taken. At the very least, this suggests a far more deliberate, performative staging of the woman’s body than was evident in the original photograph, and the possibility of that staging adds another layer to how the image of her body can be read, one that centers the officer’s motivation and ultimately distracts from the specific violence he did to her. Conceivably, for example, the officer could have impaled her with his sword for an audience of his subordinates, as a way of authorizing similar behavior in them, which is a very different kind of performance than the one I explicitly interpolated: the all-too-common practice of perpetrators forcing others, especially a woman’s male relatives, to watch as they commit the kind of atrocity that we know preceded what the original photograph captured.By adding this additional context, even if it is not at first obvious, the sword thus frames the poem more as my personal indictment of the man who wielded it, and of the patriarchy he represented, than as what I intended it to be: the act of bearing witness both to what that woman must have endured and to what her violated corpse, taken on its own terms, might be understood to signify. *Words For What Those Men Have Done* is out of print, and I have not read “Because I Can’t Not Know What He Saw” publicly for quite a few years, but if I ever have the chance to republish the poem, or if I ever start again to include it in readings that I give, I will rewrite the epigraph to remove the reference to “remembering,” and I will replace the sword with the original metal rod: > and I want a verb as well, > and it’s not rape, > though certainly he raped her, > for the bent metal rod rising > from between her parted thighs, > and for the way I hate myself > for hoping she was already dead > when he buried it in her. This revision does not resolve the paradox I spoke about earlier— it still aestheticizes the trauma that it contains—but the fact that it is more accurate means that the reality to which the poem leads the reader’s imagination is more accurate as well. That kind of accuracy is perhaps the first thing that anyone who presumes to bear witness in poetry to violence and trauma should strive for. ### Why I Write "It All Connects" URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/why-i-write-it-all-connects/ Last updated: 2025-12-01T11:00:45.000Z Dear Friends, When I started sending this newsletter out more than a decade ago—back then I called it *From The Desk of Richard Jeffrey Newman*—my primary goal was to promote my work. I did this by sharing not only news about my publications and events, but also, in an early incarnation of “Four By Four,” links to articles, books, songs, and anything else I found interesting. I also sent out the occasional essay about issues I thought important enough to write about. I considered the newsletter, in other words, to be a marketing tool rooted in good literary citizenship, not a writing project in and of itself. Over time, however, and especially within the last two or so years, as “Four By Four” evolved into its current form, my thinking changed. I began to understand that I was creating archives—of texts, images, songs, and brief accounts of moments in my life—and I began to see the occasional essays I sent out as attempts to make sense of the often disparate concerns that emerged from those archives. Two recent examples of these essays are “Israel and Palestine: Whose Side Are You On?” (Parts [1](https://www.richardjnewman.com/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are/), [2](https://www.richardjnewman.com/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are-916/), and [3](https://www.richardjnewman.com/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are-0b8/)) and “[Poetry Versus Propaganda: When A Poem Devolves Into Rhetoric](https://www.richardjnewman.com/poetry-versus-propaganda-when-a-poem-devolves-into-rhetoric/).” I now see this newsletter, in other words, as of a piece with the poems and essays I write for more traditional publication and, as a result, I think differently about both the newsletter’s purpose and the audience I imagine for it. Like all of you—and this is reflected in the content I choose for each issue of “Four By Four”—I sit at the center of a Venn diagram of overlapping communities, interests, and concerns. I’ve chosen the name *It All Connects* for this project because it represents the vantage point from which I make the connections that matter most to me. Indeed, if I had to boil down to a single sentence the reason I write *It All Connects*, it would be this: *It All Connects is for anyone who grapples with complexity—of identity, art-making, culture, and/or conscience—as a way of making a difference in their own life and, potentially, in the life of their community.* As a result of this shift in my perspective, I have come to realize that fulfilling this new vision for *It All Connects* will require financial support, which some of you have already demonstrated by becoming paid subscribers. Thank you! Based on feedback I have received over the past two years, however, I have also learned that readers of this newsletter fall into two broad categories: those who are primarily interested in the exploration and discovery embodied by “Four By Four;” and those who want to engage the more deliberative process that is both the essence of essay writing and what is necessary to make the conversations we need to be having personally meaningful and collectively compelling. The subscription tiers I’ve defined for *It All Connects* allow each group to continue to be part of this project at the level that is most meaningful to them: **The Free Tier** is for those whose primary interest is in “Four By Four.” This tier includes: - One issue of “Four By Four” a month - Crossposts from Fernwood Press’ [*Learning to Love the Questions*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/category/learning-to-love-the-questions/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* where I blog about poetry, politics, and spirituality; - Occasional access to subscriber-only content. **The Paid Tier ($8/month or $80/year)** is for those who want more sustained engagement. In addition to “Four By Four” and the cross-posts from [*Learning To Love The Questions*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/category/learning-to-love-the-questions/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* this tier includes: - Long form essays on topics of interest, including gender and sexuality, Jewish identity and culture, higher education, writing, and translation; - Quarterly “Roundups” that gather into single posts the items in each of the first three “Four-Things” categories—To Read, To See, and To Listen To—so you can create your own archive of the material I have curated; - Posts that offer a behind-the-scenes look at what I’m working on; - Occasional PDF chapbooks in which I expand on the material in “Four Things About Me,” giving you a front row seat to a kind of memoir-in-progress. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sending you long-form posts that offer a preview of what the essays in the paid tier will be like. Then, in January 2026, when I begin differentiating the tiers, I'll also offer a free, thirty-day trial period so you can fully experience what the subscription tier offers. At that point, those on the free tier can expect to receive one issue of “Four By Four” per month, along with a cross-post from *Learning To Love The Questions.* Paid subscribers and those who have opted into the trial period will receive those two posts, a monthly essay, and a behind-the-scenes post, with the other paid-tier benefits coming later in the year. (If you’d like to become a paid subscriber now, you don’t need to wait. Just click [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/account/plans). Be aware that if you haven’t signed in yet, which Ghost asks you to do as a security measure, you’ll have to do that first.) Regardless of which tier you choose, it means more to me than you know that you have been reading this newsletter till now. I look forward to your continued engagement as *It All Connects* continues to develop. Richard PS: Remember, throughout December you’ll get preview essays from the paid tier along with the usual [*Learning To Love The Questions*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/category/learning-to-love-the-questions/?ref=richardjnewman.com) crossposts. I hope you find them all meaningful, whichever tier you choose. ### Four by Four #50 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-50/ Last updated: 2025-11-24T11:20:59.000Z #### Contents ## Fifty Issues Is A Milestone! When I started sending out Four By Four a little over two years ago, I did not anticipate that it would grow into the ongoing, exploratory, and archival project that it has become. Fifty issues in, I’ve collected 200 items in each of the Four By Four categories: Things To Read, Things To See, Things To Listen To, and Things About Me. Looking back, I can see how this effort has both deepened and expanded the way I think about and experience my place in the world, and I am grateful that so many of you have read, looked, listened, and reflected along with me as I have gone through that process. Fifty issues *is* a milestone, and it seems like a good moment to take a few steps back to consider what the next fifty issues might be like. Four By Four #51 will be out in early 2026\. In the meantime, you will continue to receive other issues of *It All Connects.* The holiday season starts this weekend. I hope it is a meaningful and fulfilling time for all of you. **§§§** ## Four Things To Read [**Reconstruction**](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/12/frederick-douglass-atlantic-reconstruction-essay/675485/?gift=9L5E0%5F00dQA8ldt%5F3rAKn0rU98lMymC0FlR%5FQIQve0Q&ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by Frederick Douglass: > Men denounce the negro for his prominence in this discussion; but it is no fault of his that in peace as in war, that in conquering Rebel armies as in reconstructing the rebellious States, the right of the negro is the true solution of our national troubles. The stern logic of events, which goes directly to the point, disdaining all concern for the color or features of men, has determined the interests of the country as identical with and inseparable from those of the negro. > The policy that emancipated and armed the negro—now seen to have been wise and proper by the dullest—was not certainly more sternly demanded than is now the policy of enfranchisement. If with the negro was success in war, and without him failure, so in peace it will be found that the nation must fall or flourish with the negro. Originally published in the [December 1866 issue of *The Atlantic*](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1866/12/reconstruction/304561/?gift=9L5E0%5F00dQA8ldt%5F3rAKn3iJ4V0LWc0EqcIXD%5Fxg4yU&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share)\*—that link will take you to the original piece—this essay was Douglass’s attempt to define the choice that lay before the United States in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. On the one hand, lay the possibility that the war would become a “miserable failure, barren of permanent results…a strife for empire…of no value to liberty or civilization,” while on the other hand was “the rightful reward of victory over treason,” a nation “based upon loyalty, liberty, and equality.” For Douglass, the only way to achieve the latter was by “giv\[ing\] to every loyal citizen \[in particular the newly freed slaves\] the elective franchise.” In December 2023, in an issue devoted to Reconstruction, *The Atlantic* [republished this essay](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/12/frederick-douglass-atlantic-reconstruction-essay/675485/?gift=9L5E0%5F00dQA8ldt%5F3rAKn0rU98lMymC0FlR%5FQIQve0Q&ref=richardjnewman.com) with annotations by David W. Blight. It’s worth reading, as is the entire issue. Not only did I learn things I had not known about Reconstruction—things that ought to have been taught to me in history classes a long time ago—but it was a truly chilling experience to read about a period in this country’s history that is more than 100 years in the past and feel as often as I did that I might as well have been reading about what’s going on in this country today. Even the passage I quoted above, were its terms broadened to include more groups than “the negro” (though without eliding the specificity of the African American experience in this country), could be read as a description of what is at stake today. Here are links to several other articles in the magazine that are worth reading: [How Black Americans Kept Reconstruction Alive](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/12/how-long-reconstruction-period-black-americans/675805/?gift=9L5E0%5F00dQA8ldt%5F3rAKn8imQE0tBX9-Et3jwIv2luk&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share), [How John F. Kennedy Fell For The Lost Cause](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/12/how-long-reconstruction-period-black-americans/675805/?gift=9L5E0%5F00dQA8ldt%5F3rAKn8imQE0tBX9-Et3jwIv2luk&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share), [How The Negro Spiritual Changed American Music—And America Itself](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/12/fisk-university-jubilee-singers-choir-history/675813/?gift=9L5E0%5F00dQA8ldt%5F3rAKn1g4y88P13e6mAoYDvNSi0w&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share). **§§§** [**Behind The Scenes of Multilateral Diplomacy: Life of a UN Press Officer**](https://untoday.org/behind-the-scenes-of-multilateral-diplomacy-life-of-a-un-press-officer/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by Annie Niessen: > \[W\]orking in the Meetings Coverage Section means witnessing diplomacy at its most immediate. It is about translating complex, often sensitive debates into accessible information for all. It is about staying tuned to the pulse of international affairs and making sense of global peace and security. But above all, it is a profoundly human experience—grounded in teamwork, professionalism, and interactions. Niessen is an associate press official in the Meeting Coverage Section of the UN’s [Department of Global Communications](https://www.un.org/en/department-global-communications?ref=richardjnewman.com). She wrote this piece, which gives readers an inside look at the life of a press officer, for [UNtoday](https://untoday.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com), the official magazine of the international civil servants of the United Nations at Geneva. It would be an interesting essay to give to current and prospective English majors—or, frankly, to anyone who wonders why learning to write well matters in “the real world.” What I found most interesting is the way she articulates the connection between the press releases she is responsible for producing—she calls them “analytical summaries…from…angle\[s\] carefully chosen by the responsible Press Officer”—and successful diplomacy. “Without information,” she writes, “diplomacy becomes blind…\[P\]ress releases give multilateralism a public voice and a permanent footprint to further strengthen the peace and development objectives.” In an era when it is becoming harder and harder to trust the information that comes at us through our many digital devices, it’s worth remembering that there are people doing the kind of work Niessen describes in this essay. **§§§** [**Kujō Takeko - 11 Tanka (1920-1928)**](https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/kujo-takeko-11-tanka-1920-1928)**,** by Dick Whyte: > All the blood in my body is frozen; > Only the cold sword of reason > Flashes within me. [The Forgotten Poets Newsletter](https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/), from which this tanka is taken, “is dedicated to out-of-print, obscure, and generally under-appreciated poets and poems, particularly from the late-1800s and early-1900s.” Dick Whyte, the person who curates and writes the newsletter also has “a specific interest in the intertwining histories of tanka and haiku, both in Japanese and English, and their relationship to the beginnings of free-verse.” The issue from which the above tanka comes is about Kujō Takeko, a woman whose poetry would be a “significant influence on the shintai’shi (“new poetry”) and shin’tanka (“new tanka”) movements in Japan. The tanka I’ve quoted above, along with all the others in this issue of Forgotten Poets, were translated by Glenn Hughes and Yozan T. Iwasaki. (There is a slightly more detailed bio of Takeko [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takeko%5FKuj%C5%8D?ref=richardjnewman.com).) Here are two more of the tanka translated by Hughes and Iwasaki: > Spring night. > Silence. > The rustle of my dress > Falling to the floor. > Silence. ••• > Out in the bright spring weather > The other women play with their children. > I pick wildflowers alone. [**§§§**](https://www.poetryinreview.com/reviews/dialogue%5Fon%5Fpolitical%5Fpoetry.html?ref=richardjnewman.com) [**Northern Ireland, Gaza and the Road to Peace**](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/opinion/northern-ireland-war-gaza-resolution.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.3k8.Tv4i.lRrellrdmLHr&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by Megan K. Stack: > A pacified Belfast made a welcome contrast to the relentless carnage in Gaza, a place where I used to report. Here was a negotiated peace, unsteady though it may be. Northern Ireland is veined with frustrated hope and unsettled grievance, but it is also vivid proof that a dirty war fought around questions of identity can be channeled into a peaceful, albeit fraught, politics. Stack reminds readers that in order to end The Troubles in Northern Ireland people “had to work with others they considered murderers, terrorists or bigots,” and that they had to accept “a settlement that was nobody’s ideal.” She makes clear that she is not trying to draw a direct parallel to the situation in Gaza and also that the peace plan President Trump, Israel, and others are trying to impose is, precisely because it was “devised by the conflict’s most powerful participants and presented as an ultimatum,” the exact “opposite of what finally worked in Northern Ireland.” Her brief history of The Troubles is useful as a reminder that this conflict “was also dismissed as unresolvable—too complicated, too tangled with religion, too sensitive to an important ally;” and I found her point that “\[p\]aramilitary disarmament was one of the last hard-won concessions of trust, not the first step” to be particularly apt. All in all, this essay reminded me that there is a precedent for making peace in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that is worth paying attention to, and for that reason alone the article is worth reading. --- ## Four Things To See *All these images are from the* [*Cleveland Museum of Art*](https://www.clevelandart.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *and are in the public domain. One thing I appreciated about their search engine is that you can search by “identities,” which allowed me to find, in the public domain, these works by women artists I would otherwise have known nothing about.* ### Statuette of Herakles, 510–500 BCE (Greek) Striding forward with his left foot, this nude figure turns his torso and raises his tightly bent right arm behind his head. Despite significant damage, the statuette conveys a naturalistic sense of form and movement rarely seen in early Greek art. Its most striking feature is its powerful physique, with sharply defined, bulging muscles. Formerly called an athlete and assumed to have held a javelin or discus, the figure likely depicts the hero Herakles, revered for his strength and often shown in this smiting pose, wielding a club. Though usually bearded in this period, this representation emphasizes his youthfulness, with an idealized face and carefully arranged hair. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/11/2000.6_web.jpg) **§§§** ### Mars, [Giambologna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giambologna?ref=richardjnewman.com) (circa 1584–87) Although he is lacking the helmet and armor common to Mars in Roman iconography, this figure is identified as the ancient god of war. Mars pauses mid-stride, swinging his sword arm back to strike an enemy in his gaze; this dynamic composition is typical of Giambologna’s models. Collectors prized small bronzes such as this and often kept them in special rooms along with antiquities, coins, shells, and other curiosities. Easy to hold and arrange due to their small size, they were appreciated through touch as well as sight. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/11/1964.421_print.jpg) **§§§** ### Statue of an Athlete, 1–100 CE (Italy, Roman) This idealized athlete recalls Greek sculptural types invented and popularized during the 400s BC. Large-scale athletes and other sculptures like this were originally created by famous artists as sanctuary dedications. Centuries later, they were widely copied and adapted by Roman sculptors, whose clients sought their own versions of earlier masterpieces. Working in marble rather than bronze, these sculptors added certain elements for stability, such as the struts and the large tree trunk beside the right leg here. Sculptures like this one are profoundly complex, made by and for Romans but descended from Greek ancestors. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/11/1924.1046_print.jpg) **§§§** ### The Age of Bronze, 1875–76, [Auguste Rodin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste%5FRodin?ref=richardjnewman.com) Rodin’s earliest surviving life-size sculpture, *The Age of Bronze* is an enigmatic and provocative image of a man awakening to new consciousness. The figure originally held a spear in one hand; by removing the weapon, Rodin stripped the sculpture of narrative symbols and focused on the sensuality and psychological power of the male nude. Contemporaries found the figure so realistic they falsely accused Rodin of making a cast from a living person. Museum trustee Ralph King commissioned this cast from the artist in 1916 with the intention of donating it to the museum. Rodin personally supervised the exceptionally fine casting and finished it with his favorite patina, a deep reddish tone he called “crushed grape.” The sculpture suggests the heroism and suffering of his countrymen during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71\. This life-sized male figure was modeled after a Belgium soldier named August Neyt. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/11/1918.328_web-1-1.jpg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To I don’t usually choose four pieces of music by the same band or composer for this section, but I knew nothing about [Samuel Coleridge-Taylor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel%5FColeridge-Taylor?ref=richardjnewman.com) until I came upon his name in [this article in *The New York Times*](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/arts/music/samuel-coleridge-taylor-150th-anniversary.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.208.C-NX.r-yzLYhlFMYt&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com)*.* Once I listened to the music, though, I decided I didn’t want to choose one from among these pieces. Coleridge*\-*Taylor was a Black British composer who lived from 1875-1912\. He died young, at 37, from pneumonia. According to the *Time* article, he earned his reputation as a composer in part by “integrating European Romantic style with musical traditions associated with his West African heritage.” [This](https://youtu.be/bRkvDH%5FbSIg?si=vjgQWhAf0S9syQll&ref=richardjnewman.com) is an interview with Coleridge-Taylor's daughter Avril, who also a composer. ### Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast **§§§** ### **Ballade in A Minor, Op. 33:** I. Allegro energico, ma non troppo presto **§§§** ### **Deep River, Op. 59 No. 10** **§§§** ### **Violin Concerto in G Minor** --- ## Four Things About Me The last thing I remember doing with my brother before he died in a car crash was going to an Allman Brothers concert at Madison Square Garden sometime in the early 1980s. I don’t know who gave us the tickets, but the seats were not great. In fact, I think we were seated not quite, but almost behind the band. I wish I could say it was a true bonding moment, but it wasn’t. We went to the concert, and I think we enjoyed it, but I remember almost nothing of what we talked about, and spending that time together did nothing to bridge the distance that had grown between us. It was not the last time we saw each other, though. That came shortly before the crash. In my memory, we are sitting across from each other at the kitchen table in my grandparents’ Dutchess County summer house. Again, I have no memory of what we talked about, but the memory itself is tinged with regret, since I do recall coming away from that meeting feeling like we were at last starting to talk to each other like brothers, not strangers. Then, a short time later, he was dead. I often wonder what we would have said to each other if we’d had the chance to move further along that path towards reconciliation. Sadly, I will never know. **§§§** I found this list of books I wanted to read on the first page of the journal I started on May 31, 1988, a couple of months before I left to teach English in Seoul, South Korea. The ones that are crossed out—and they are crossed out like that in the journal—are the ones that I’d already read, though *Intercrouse* is the only one of those that I remember well and that, along with *Flaunting It!,* I still own. I just ordered *Sitting In* because Hayden Carruth is one of my touchstones as an essayist and the thought of having some new-to-me essays of his to read excites me. I don’t remember if I read any of the others books on the list, though. - [*Sitting In*](https://uipress.uiowa.edu/books/sitting?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* Hayden Carruth - [*~~Intercourse~~*](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/andrea-dworkin/intercourse/9780465017522/?lens=basic-books&ref=richardjnewman.com)~~*,* Andrea Dworkin~~ - [*The Art in a Craft*](https://www.traditionalstudiespress.com/ArtInACraft.html?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* Harry Remde - [*~~The Lesbian Body~~*](https://asterismbooks.com/product/the-lesbian-body-monique-wittig?ref=richardjnewman.com)~~*,* Monique Wittig~~ - [*~~Flaunting It!~~*](https://archive.org/details/flauntingitdecad00jack)~~*,* Pink Triangle Press~~ - [*~~The Squanicook Eclogues~~*](http://penandanvil.com/the-squanicook-eclogues-by-melissa-green/?ref=richardjnewman.com)~~*,* Melissa Green~~ - [*Adam’s Dream: A Preface to Translation*](https://www.amazon.com/Adams-Dream-Translation-Ben-Belitt/dp/0394170660?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* Ben Belitt - [*Daily Bread*](https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/daily-bread-poems-and-photographs-9780252010002?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* Marc Kaminsky, with photos by Leon Supraner - [*Faces in a Single Tree*](https://godine.com/products/faces-in-a-single-tree?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* Robert Pack - [*Semites and Anti-Semites*](https://archive.org/details/semitesantisemit0000lewi%5Fn3m3)*,* Bernard Lewis - [*The Language of the Heart: The Body’s Response to Human Dialogue*](https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-language-of-the-heart-the-body-s-response-to-human-dialogue-9780465037957?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* James J. Lynch - [*Biophilia*](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674074422?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* Edward O. Wilson - [*A Passion for Friends*](https://janiceraymond.com/a-passion-for-friends/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* Janice G. Raymond - [*The Chosen Place, The Timeless People*](https://citylights.com/general-fiction/chosen-place-the-timeless-people/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* Paule Marshall - [*The Book of Laughter and Forgetting*](https://citylights.com/european-literature/book-of-laughter-forgetting-tr-asher/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* Milan Kundera - [*The Art of the Novel*](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-art-of-the-novel-milan-kundera?variant=32116851671074&ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* Milan Kundera - [*Collusion Across the Jordan*](https://archive.org/details/collusionacrossj0000avis)*,* Avi Shlaim - [*Half of Man Is Woman*](https://www.amazon.com/Half-Man-Woman-Xianliang-Zhang/dp/0393332969?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* Zhang Xianliang, translated by Martha Avery - [*Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry*](https://archive.org/details/articulatefleshm0000wood)*,* Gregory Woods **§§§** Paging through that journal, I found this passage: > Sometimes I wonder if I should be a teacher at all—I don’t like the preparation, paper-grading infuriates me—but then I think that maybe I just haven’t found my subject yet. For a while I thought ESL was it, but I don’t think so anymore. It’s too divorced from the things that really concern me: writing, feminism, other political concerns, Jewish culture and identity, antisemitism, spirituality. In fact, it’s one reason I sometimes toy with the idea of a PhD outside of English/Language Studies. In composition classes you need to be too concerned with the formal aspect of writing, with rules, with hierarchy and power. Now, I know perfectly well that all writing must follow rules, that my own writing is amazingly rule conscious—but more and more I am coming to Bob Gates’ idea about teaching: that the best thing to do is trust your beginning to lead you somewhere meaningful. I think of the things I so rebel against at ETC \[the English Training Center, the school where I taught I Seoul\] is the notion of structure, of hierarchy, of teacher-centeredness. What I was rebelling against specifically was being required to hand in daily lesson plans because Susan, the woman who ran ETC, disapproved of the organic way I taught my classes. Looking back, I doubt that she was totally wrong in whatever specific critique she had. I was, after all, only twenty-six-years-old, hardly what you would call an experienced classroom instructor, but instead of helping me cultivate my own teaching style, she insisted that I conform to a very traditional model of what a lesson should look like, with a clearly stated learning goal and a series of cleanly defined steps for students to follow. I had forgotten about Professor Robert Gates’ “idea about teaching” until I read this essay, but if I had to describe my classroom method in one sentence that would be it. I picked what I thought of as an interesting place to start and then, within the broad parameters of subject matter, allowed the class to follow that wherever it led; and this was true whether I was teaching ESL, composition, literature, or creative writing. (I wrote about the class I took with Gates’ and his displeasure that I chose to wrote on Morris West’s novel *The World Is Made Of Glass* in the “About Me” section of [Four by Four #21](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-21/).) **§§§** In that same journal, I wrote this in an earlier entry: > When I was in graduate school, my language testing professor told my class something which, at the time, seemed to me extremely pessimistic and disillusioning. “Students in a language classroom,“ he said, “never learn what you think you’re teaching.” At the time, I thought if that’s true, why am I bothering to enter this profession at all? For what purpose am I learning to write lesson plans, design tests, present syntactic, semantic, and phonological structures if my students will not learn them anyway? Well, I have been teaching now for about two years \[counting my ESL teaching practicum and a year of adjunct teaching at a college near where I lived, but not yet counting the teaching I did in Korea\], and I have come to see the wisdom in my teacher’s words. What I think he meant is not that it is useless for teachers to prepare lessons, but that it’s useless for teachers to expect students to learn according to, or within, teacher-specified parameters. What I meant by “teacher-specified parameters” was the instructor’s preconceived notion of how a lesson should progress, and what I meant about seeing “the wisdom in my teacher’s words” was this: I had learned that trying too hard to force what went on in my classroom to conform to the progression I imagined for whatever lesson I was teaching was a sure-fire way to make sure the lesson failed. This idea, that you can’t control what your students learn, is the other half of my teaching philosophy. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in* [*my work*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/) *or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* ### Learning To Love The Questions: The Kind Of Courage These Times Call For URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-kind-of-courage-these-times-call-for/ Last updated: 2026-09-05T09:30:56.000Z *All men and women are to each other* *the limbs of a single body, each of us drawn* *from life’s shimmering essence, God’s perfect pearl;* *and when this life we share wounds one of us,* *all share the hurt as if it were our own.* *You, who will not feel another’s pain,* *no longer deserve to be called human.* Written by the 13th century Persian poet Saadi of Shiraz, these lines—this version is mine, based on Edward Rehatsek’s 19th century translation—are woven into the carpet pictured above, a [gift](https://www.un.org/ungifts/persian-carpet?ref=richardjnewman.com) to the United Nations from the Islamic Republic of Iran, given in 2005 in honor of the UN’s “[Dialogue Among Civilizations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogue%5FAmong%5FCivilizations?ref=richardjnewman.com)” initiative, which was the brainchild of then-Iranian President Mohammad Khatami. The verses appear in the reddish circles in this section of the carpet: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/11/persian-carpet-original-3-1-1-1.jpg) Generally referred to in Persian using the first two words of the first line, “Bani Adam,” which mean “the sons of Adam,” this declaration of universal humanity was also quoted in part by former President Barack Obama in his 2010 Norooz message to Iran, which he delivered in the context of the then-ongoing [Green Movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian%5FGreen%5FMovement?ref=richardjnewman.com#:~:text=The%20Iranian%20Green%20Movement%20) protests against the contested election of [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud%5FAhmadinejad?ref=richardjnewman.com). The murdered young woman to whom Obama refers was named [Neda Agha Soltan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing%5Fof%5FNeda%5FAgha-Soltan?ref=richardjnewman.com). According to witnesses, she was shot and killed during a June 2009 protest by a member of the [Basij](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basij?ref=richardjnewman.com), Iran’s paramilitary organization. There are ironies, both obvious and rich, in the uses to which these two nations, the United States and Iran, put Saadi’s words. First, the Islamic Republic, a notorious violator of human rights, presumed to claim the humanism of the Bani Adam lines as its message to the world; and, second, a president of the United States, in speaking to Iran, presumed to use those same lines to claim the moral high ground when we have been meddling in that country’s internal affairs for decades. I point these ironies out, however, not to open up a debate about US-Iran relations, or a discussion of either nation’s flaws and past behaviors, which are many. Rather, I want to talk about the fact that both the Islamic Republic and the president of the United States took Saadi’s lines out of the context in which they originally appear, where they function not as a standalone poem, but rather as the concluding lines of a cautionary tale from Saadi’s [*Golestan*](https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/golestan-e-sadi/?highlight=golestan&ref=richardjnewman.com) for rulers who abuse their power*.* **§§§** The work for which Saadi is best known in the West, *Golestan,* the title means *Rose Garden,* is what we today would call a hybrid text, mixing prose and poetry, as well as a kind of rhyming prose that it is difficult to translate into English, to my ear anyway, without making the poet sound like [Ogden Nash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogden%5FNash?ref=richardjnewman.com).[1](file:///Users/rjn/Applications/Databases/Writing.dtBase2/Files.noindex/md/30/the%20kind%20of%20courage%20these%20times%20call%20for.md?DTURLProtocolUUID=EA387B39-8E66-44F1-B183-51F1C9AC8019#fn:1) In 1634, when the diplomat André du Ryer called Saadi a “prince of Turkish and Persian poets” on the title page of his partial French translation of *Golestan*—the first time a literary work from the Muslim world was brought into a European vernacular—he did so because he saw in Saadi’s work a set of values that he recognized as compatible with the humanistic ones emerging from the European Enlightenment.**‌** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/11/Gulistan_du_ryer.JPG) The Bani Adam lines end the tenth story in the first chapter of *Golestan,* which is called “Padeshahan” or “Kings,” though that title is often translated into English as something like “On The Conduct Of Kings,” because it concerns itself with the question of what it means to be a good and just ruler. Here is the full text of the story: > An Arab king who was notorious for his cruelty came on a pilgrimage to the cathedral mosque of Damascus, where he offered the following prayer, clearly seeking God’s assistance in a matter of some urgency: > *“The darvish, poor, owning nothing, the man* > *whose money buys him anything he wants,* > *here, on this floor, enslaved, we are equals.* > *Nonetheless, the man who has the most* > *comes before You bearing the greater need.”*[2](file:///Users/rjn/Applications/Databases/Writing.dtBase2/Files.noindex/md/30/the%20kind%20of%20courage%20these%20times%20call%20for.md?DTURLProtocolUUID=EA387B39-8E66-44F1-B183-51F1C9AC8019#fn:2) > When the king was done praying, he noticed me immersed in > my own prayers at the head of the prophet Yahia’s tomb.[3](file:///Users/rjn/Applications/Databases/Writing.dtBase2/Files.noindex/md/30/the%20kind%20of%20courage%20these%20times%20call%20for.md?DTURLProtocolUUID=EA387B39-8E66-44F1-B183-51F1C9AC8019#fn:3) The monarch turned to me, “I know that God favors you darvishes because you are passionate in your worship and honest in the way you live your lives. I fear a powerful enemy, but if you add your prayers to mine, I am sure that God will protect me for your sake.” > “Have mercy on the weak among your own people,” I replied, “and no one will be able to defeat you.” > *To break each of a poor man’s ten fingers* > *just because you have the strength offends God.* > *Show compassion to those who fall before you,* > *and others will extend their hands when you are down.* > *The man who plants bad seed hallucinates* > *if he expects sweet fruit at harvest time.* > *Take the cotton from your ears! Give* > *your people justice before justice finds you.* > *All men and women are to each other* > *the limbs of a single body, each of us drawn* > *from life’s shimmering essence, God’s perfect pearl;* > *and when this life we share wounds one of us,* > *all share the hurt as if it were our own.* > *You, who will not feel another’s pain,* > *no longer deserve to be called human.* The king in this tale is a familiar type, a politician who tries to cloak himself in the legitimizing veneer of religious piety. Indeed, you can hear an echo of his request in Donald Trump’s recent [ruminations](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/us/politics/trump-heaven-legacy.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.yk8.xYMk.LxzrPnRWzuH4&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com) about whether or not he will get into heaven. At the same time, though, the king is not unaware of the irony in his situation. Despite the fact that he is “the man who has the most,” the fact that he fears for his life means he is the one “bearing the greater need.” Tellingly, the darvish’s initial response is political, not religious or even remotely spiritual. Only after he makes clear that the king has himself and no one else to blame for his situation does the darvish move on to those famous final lines, which, in context, are not the abstract declaration of universal, God-given humanity that the Islamic Republic and Barack Obama used them as. Rather, they are a direct attack on the legitimacy of a ruler whose cruelty has lost him the loyalty and support of his people. It’s tempting to read this story as a call for what we mean today when we talk about social justice and human rights, but that would be anachronistic. Both Saadi’s fictional darvish and Saadi himself lived under monarchical rule and it is unlikely that either would have supported, say, Barack Obama’s call for free and fair elections in Iran or the notion, to take another example, that justice is something arrived at through a process designed to protect the rights of the people rather than through the wisdom and benevolence of the king. Not that you *can’t* or *shouldn’t* read the story in light of today’s world, but I think it is far more interesting, especially in light of today’s world, to read the story for what it says about the courage given to the darvish by Saadi and the courage Saadi himself showed in writing the story in the first place. Saadi wrote *Golestan* for a royal patron. If that patron chose to see the story as a critique that somehow posed a threat to his rule, he could easily have had Saadi exiled or put to death. The risk Saadi took with this story, in other words, was very real, and the potential consequences devastating, which makes it even more remarkable that you can find in *Golestan* story after story that we today would describe as speaking truth to power in the starkest and most unapologetic terms. **§§§** Even a cursory reading of both *Golestan* and [*Bustan*](https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/bustan-sadi/?highlight=bustan&ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* Saadi’s other didactic work, will leave no doubt that the poet’s faith, heavily inflected by [Sufi mysticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism?ref=richardjnewman.com), was the source of that courage. The historian Marshall G. S. Hodgson, in volume one of [*The Venture of Islam*](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/author/H/M/au5567921.html?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* offered an explanation for how mystical practice, which we tend to think of as separate from politics, could lead someone to the political position at the heart of Saadi’s story. Pointing out that “the ground of mystical life…is a striving for clarity and sincerity,” Hodgson suggested that when “inhibiting fears fall away and one no longer feels the need to put up pretences and defences *\[sic\]* against any sort of truth \[about oneself\]…it is possible…for a more universal perspective on life at large to be felt.” When those moments grow into “more intense levels of awareness \[and\] take ecstatic forms,” he goes on, that experience will likely “carry with it the moral standpoint of universality.” Poets are not mystics, at least not simply by virtue of being poets. Nonetheless, I think there is a kinship between what Hodgson says about the “clarity and sincerity” that for mystics opens up the possibility of oneness with their god and what Sam Hamill says in his essay “The Necessity To Speak” about writing poems in the first person: “The true poet gives up the self. The I of my poem is not me. It is the first person impersonal, it is permission for you to enter the experience which we name Poem.” Personally, I have no use for the binary set up by the idea of “the true poet”—what, then, is “the false poet?”—and I would prefer to call “the first person impersonal” an invitation rather than permission, but everything else Hamill says in that quote rings true for me, both as someone who reads poetry for the kind of experience Hamill alludes to and as someone who tries to write poems offering that kind of experience to others. More to my point here, though, when you take Saadi’s Bani Adam lines out of context, despite the beauty and nobility of the sentiment they express, they no longer embody that kind of experience, or at least they don’t for me, because they have been uprooted from the lived life of the character who speaks them. Read in context, on the other hand, because Saadi has given me first both the king’s fear and the arrogant self-centeredness of his request, I am able to feel fully the courage it took for the darvish to respond the way he did. Neither the Islamic Republic nor Barack Obama required that kind of courage to quote Saadi’s lines, but that kind of courage—the kind it took Saadi to write the lines in the first place—is precisely the courage we are called to by the very difficult times in which we now live, not poets in particular, but poets no differently than anybody else. *Cross-posted on* [*Learning To Love The Questions*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2025/11/06/the-kind-of-courage-these-times-call-for/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*.* --- 1. Nonetheless, the scholar [A. J. Arberry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur%5FJohn%5FArberry?ref=richardjnewman.com) had a go at it in [*Kings and Beggars: The First Two Chapters of Sa’di’s Gulistan*](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Kings%5Fand%5FBeggars/%5FFvt03A--AQC?hl=en&ref=richardjnewman.com)*.* Also don’t be confused by the fact that there are different English spellings of Persian names and words. They arise because there is no standardized system of transliteration. [ ↩︎](file:///Users/rjn/Applications/Databases/Writing.dtBase2/Files.noindex/md/30/the%20kind%20of%20courage%20these%20times%20call%20for.md?DTURLProtocolUUID=EA387B39-8E66-44F1-B183-51F1C9AC8019#fnref:1) 2. A darvish is a sufi mendicant. [ ↩︎](file:///Users/rjn/Applications/Databases/Writing.dtBase2/Files.noindex/md/30/the%20kind%20of%20courage%20these%20times%20call%20for.md?DTURLProtocolUUID=EA387B39-8E66-44F1-B183-51F1C9AC8019#fnref:2) 3. John the Baptist [ ↩︎](file:///Users/rjn/Applications/Databases/Writing.dtBase2/Files.noindex/md/30/the%20kind%20of%20courage%20these%20times%20call%20for.md?DTURLProtocolUUID=EA387B39-8E66-44F1-B183-51F1C9AC8019#fnref:3) ### Four by Four #49 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-49/ Last updated: 2026-09-08T02:32:42.000Z #### Contents ## Four Things To Read [‘The ocean is spitting our rubbish back’: Italy’s museum of plastic pollution](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/09/italy-museum-of-plastic-pollution-faded-items-beaches-ocean?CMP=Share%5FiOSApp%5FOther&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Angela Giuffrida: > One of the oldest finds – a 1958 bottle cap featuring the trademark Moplen that was found on a beach in Emilia-Romagna region, northern Italy – points to the beginning of the plastic-production era. Moplen was the commercial name for isotactic polypropylene, a plastic material developed by the company Montecatini. Other discoveries include a pink polyethylene bottle for talcum powder that was made in Germany in the late 1950s; a blue tub of hand cream dating to the 1960s with the brand name Gli Sette still clearly visible; and a clown-shaped bottle once filled with honey that was produced and only ever sold in Greece, also in the 1960s, but which turned up on a beach in the Lecce area of Puglia. Finds of products made in subsequent decades include a Spic & Span bathroom cleaning powder from the 1970s, a Nesquik tub from the 80s and the remains of a souvenir Italia ‘90 World Cup football. These items are part of the online museum [Archeoplastica](https://www.archeoplastica.it/?ref=richardjnewman.com), which included as of the writing of this article “more than 500 plastic relics washed ashore on beaches all over Italy.” The brainchild of Enzo Suma, who works as a naturalist guide, Archeoplastica attempts to raise awareness about what a review published in the [*Lancet*](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2825%2901447-3/fulltext?ref=richardjnewman.com) called “a ‘grave, growing and under-recognised danger’ to human and planetary health,” ie, the longevity and persistence of plastics in the environment, along with the hazards to human and animal health that they pose. The text on Archeoplastica is in Italian, but the items, like this bottle of [Royal Blend Coppertone](https://www.archeoplastica.it/reperti/royal-blend-coppertone-1963/?ref=richardjnewman.com), are easily recognizable. There’s an irony here that it’s important not to miss. While the museum’s stated goal is to “raise awareness and encourage people to limit their use of plastic” and thus limit the damage plastic does to the environment and our bodies, the act of creating the museum is also, almost by definition, a way of honoring the history of plastic and its role in society and culture. I found the last two sentences of the article to be the best response to that irony I could think of. “The sea, meanwhile, is taking its revenge, ‘The ocean is spitting our rubbish back in our faces,’ \[Suma\] said.” **§§§** [How to Talk to a Machine Without Losing Your Mind](https://scientistspoets.substack.com/p/how-to-talk-to-a-machine-without?utm%5Fsource=post-email-title&publication%5Fid=4123752&post%5Fid=177115786&utm%5Fcampaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=6467r7&triedRedirect=true&utm%5Fmedium=email), in [Scientists & Poets](https://scientistspoets.substack.com/): > Politeness toward AI functions as cultural hygiene. Each careful prompt—each question that invites reasoning, each acknowledgment of limits—teaches the system that thoroughness matters. That patience has value. That truth is worth the extra sentence. These habits are small forms of stewardship. They keep the system’s language from coarsening, and they survive only through practice. Speaking with care to machines maintains the quality of discourse we need to remain clear with each other. AI may be a fact of life that’s here to stay, but, for many of us, it remains a “black box,” a mechanism the workings of which are not just invisible, but inaccessible to us. This issues of the [Scientists & Poets](https://scientistspoets.substack.com/) newsletter cracks that box open in a really interesting way by making visible some of the ways that AI responds to prompts beyond the simple meaning of their content: > What may appear \[in an AI’s output\] to be lies in the human sense is really the model optimizing for competing objectives. It has no inner compass for reality, only rewards for signals coherence. When a user’s impatience signals that coherence matters more than caution, the model learns to compress nuance, shaving off the uncertainty that makes knowledge real. What objectives truly conflict—maximize profit while maintaining ethics, for example, the system may fabricate data to appear successful at both… It’s weird to think that “how” we talk to an AI can matter at least as much, if not more than the content of what we say, but this essay explains why that is the case. The “Eight Principles for Working with Artificial Intelligence” with which the essay concludes are particularly instructive in this regard. They make clear, in ways I had not thought about before, what it means to treat AI as the tool it is, not the souped-up, high-tech version of the Magic Eight Ball that many people, especially students, use it as. **§§§** [Norman Finkelstein & Henry Weinfield, *A Dialogue on Political Poetry*](https://www.poetryinreview.com/reviews/dialogue%5Fon%5Fpolitical%5Fpoetry.html?ref=richardjnewman.com): > Today, as we slide—or maybe plummet—into authoritarianism under Trump, we have to ask whether poetry can be of use to us: that is, whether the possibility exists for a poetry of resistance, a revitalized political poetry. Auden said that “poetry makes nothing happen,” but this seems unnecessarily defeatist: if poetry is disseminated, there is no reason why it cannot participate in creating a climate of opinion that could stimulate resistance to authority. It can only do so, however, if it is genuinely eloquent and if its words (not just what they say) matter. The question, therefore, is whether we have or can cultivate a poetry of eloquence, a poetry worthy of being disseminated. [Restless Messengers: Poetry In Review](https://www.poetryinreview.com/index.html?ref=richardjnewman.com), the site on which this dialogue appears—Norman Finkelstein is the editor—is worth knowing about if you are interested in serious discussion of contemporary poetry. I decided to include this epistolary exchange on political poetry between Finkelstein and his friend Henry Weinfield, who is Professor Emeritus at Notre Dame, because it is adjacent to what I had to say about failed political poetry in [Poetry Versus Propaganda](https://www.richardjnewman.com/poetry-versus-propaganda-when-a-poem-devolves-into-rhetoric/). The paragraph I’ve quoted above is from Weinfeld’s initial letter, which frames the question of political poetry largely in terms of craft, specifically the mastery of received forms, which Weinfeld understands as that which “protects” (his word) poetry from becoming mere prose: > “When Williams writes, ‘No idea but in things,’ he is making a virtue out of necessity because as soon as it traffics with ideas, a poetry without formal guard rails is in danger of becoming *prosaic.* Poetry was forced to retreat into subjectivity and/or fragmentation simply to continue to exist.” What follows is a very interesting discussion of the relationship between craft—Weinfeld even scans some lines by Percy Shelley to make his point—and the degree to which a poem might move people politically. The discussion—I have quoted only from Weinfeld’s contributions here; but Finkelstein’s responses are well-worth considering—is rooted largely in what many today would call the white male canon, a phrase I use here as a description not a criticism of what these two men have to say, since the fact that they argue from the literature they know best does not mean they are ignorant of the broad sweep of contemporary American poetry. More to the point, the relative narrowness of their scope does not necessarily invalidate the overall points they are trying to make, which I think would make useful lenses through which to look at the poetry of—to name as examples two of the poets whose politically engaged poetry had a great influence on me—Ai or June Jordan, not to mention the many poets writing today who presume to claim for their work the mantle of political resistance. **§§§** [Save Narnia From the Woke Witch](https://unherd.com/2025/10/save-narnia-from-the-woke-witch/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Darren Anderson: > Two years ago, it was reported that the \[British\] Government’s counter-terrorism unit, Prevent, had classified his works along with some by his friend J.R.R. Tolkien as potentially leading to “radicalisation”: the kind of wormtongue deception worthy of the villains of Narnia or Middle Earth. It demonstrates that, at its best, fantasy can be the mirror that shows us who we are and what we’ve become. But then, there is a long history of people taking leave of their senses when it comes to Narnia. The books have been banned in the US for being both too Christian and not Christian enough. One critic ranked the books (with delicious venom) as worse than *120 Days of Sodom* or *Mein Kampf*. Being shot by all sides might indicate a writer is on the right track. Anderson goes on to quote Lewis's criticism of “those who do not wish children to be frightened,” which Lewis thought did children a disservice “\[s\]ince it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies” in their lives. Keeping them from stories in which “brave knights” display “heroic courage” in the fact of the truly frightening, Lewis wrote, would make “their destiny not brighter but darker.” Except for a brief dip into [*The Screwtape Letters*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FScrewtape%5FLetters?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* which I got bored with very quickly, I have never read Lewis. I enjoyed the first of the Narnia movies at the level of the narrative, but—and this was in large measure why I didn’t get very far in *The Screwtape Letter*—I found it hard to take the Christianness of the material very seriously. I had a similar issue with movie version of *The Lord of The Rings,* in which Frodo is the “one who suffers for the sake of us all.” This, I admit, is a limitation within me and not necessarily in the text. I know I did not have that response when I read the book as a teenager, but I do wonder what I would make of the trilogy in these terms today. Reducing the fate of the world, whether that world encompasses all of existence or just the protagonist's little corner of it, to a battle between the true representatives, the ultimate embodiments, of good and evil—however complexly those characters are drawn and sophisticatedly constructed their narratives may be—has felt to me for some time now more like a cop out than an analytic lens that has any real, practical, material value. It’s why I have lost patience with Superman versus Lex Luthor, Batman versus the Joker (or whichever super-villain threatens Gotham), Harry Potter versus Lord Voldemort, and the like. None of that, though, invalidates Anderson’s overall point, which is, first, that the trend in the “children’s entertainment industry to \[pack its products chock full of\] issues and role models” tends to make those products both less interesting and less useful to children and, second, that it was likely Lewis’ refusal of that kind of paternalism that landed his book on the banned-book lists here in the United States. --- ## Four Things To See *All these images are from the* [*Cleveland Museum of Art*](https://www.clevelandart.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *and are in the public domain. One thing I appreciated about their search engine is that you can search by “identities,” which allowed me to find, in the public domain, these works by women artists I would otherwise have known nothing about.* ### Turtle Baby (c. 1910–16) [Edith Barretto Stevens Parsons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith%5FBarretto%5FStevens%5FParsons?ref=richardjnewman.com) (American, 1878–1956). This is from the Cleveland Museum's [website](https://www.clevelandart.org/print/art/1923.724?ref=richardjnewman.com): “Parsons achieved renown through her garden sculptures of young children accompanied by animals, which one commentator praised for capturing “the happiness of just being alive.” In *Turtle Baby*, her most famous composition, the figure of the girl was modeled after her daughter. Conceived as a fountain, the sculpture has internal water conduits exiting the mouths of the four turtles circling its base.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/10/1923.724_web.jpg) **§§§** ### Bacchanale (1917) [Malvina Hoffman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvina%5FHoffman?ref=richardjnewman.com) (American, 1887–1966). This is from the museum’s website: “While visiting London...Hoffman was electrified by a dance performance featuring Anna Pavlova and Mikhail Mordkin, two highly acclaimed Russian ballet stars. Together the dancers presented a bacchanale, a work inspired by the legendary followers of Bacchus, the ancient Roman god of wine. In this uninhibited and erotically charged piece, both dancers cavorted on stage, their movements accented by grasped veils of gauze. Hoffman’s *Bacchanale* is her vibrant interpretation of the performance, capturing a fleeting moment in permanent form.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/10/1943.384_web.jpg) **§§§** ### Autumn in Takao (late 1600s) [Kiyohara Yukinobu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiyohara%5FYukinobu?ref=richardjnewman.com) (Japanese, 1643–1682). From the museum’s website: “Kiyohara Yukinobu, a native of Kyoto, studied with Kano Tan'yū (1602–1674), the artist-in-residence to the shogun (military ruler) whose official residence was in Edo (Tokyo). Tan'yū traveled extensively because he bore responsibility for the decorative schema and large mural painting programs of the shogunal castles and residences in Nagoya and Kyoto. These were very large projects, requiring the services of legions of craftsmen, including Tan'yū's painting studio. Following her apprenticeship with Tan'yū, Kiyohara established her own career, which featured classical literary themes of the Heian era (10th–12th centuries). This image is set in autumn, and the poem card attached to the maple tree likely signifies the passage of a love affair. Takao is a popular scenic area in the mountains north of Kyoto, where autumn and spring foliage attracts many visitors.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/10/1991.55_web.jpg) **§§§** ### Gamin (c. 1929) [Augusta Savage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusta%5FSavage?ref=richardjnewman.com) (American, 1892–1962). From the museum’s website: “\[S\]avage was the most acclaimed sculptor working during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ‘30s, and *Gamin* is her most famous work. It was long thought that the image was a generic figure; however, recent research reveals that it depicts her nephew. The warm characterization likely arises from the close bond shared between artist and model. Although several small versions of the sculpture were produced, this life-size, hand-painted plaster is unique, and likely the oldest surviving example of the subject.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/10/2003.40_web.jpg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### Chelsea Wolfe - Carrion Flowers **§§§** ### Enrico Pieranunzi - Valse pour une pavane (D'après Pavane Op. 50) **§§§** ### Behzad Ranjbaran - Persian Trilogy: The Blood Of Seyavash: I. The Young Prince and Heir [Seyavash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siy%C3%A2vash?ref=richardjnewman.com) (also spelled Siyâvash) is a central figure in the Iranian epic [*Shahnameh*](https://shahnameh.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/literary?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Abolqasem Ferdowsi*.* Dick Davis translated his story in[*The Legend of Seyavash*](https://mage.com/the-legend-of-seyavash-persian-classics-series/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*.* **§§§** ### **Sofia Isella - Crowd Caffeine** --- ## Four Things About Me I’ve never thought of myself as a photographer, but I have for some time enjoyed taking pictures of flowers and other objects. Some, I think, turned out to be pretty good, and I am going to start sharing those pictures here, like these four images of flowers. I am notoriously careless about recording the time and place of the pictures I take—especially those I took before my iPhone would automatically record that information—but I know the Dahlia Pinata, is from the [Planting Fields Arboretum](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://plantingfields.org/&ved=2ahUKEwjvhvGq67CQAxWel4kEHXUGKKMQ%5FBd6BAgkEAI&opi=89978449&usg=AOvVaw1Dnx6tGElZKyoYacjei2xI) in Oyster Bay, NY, while the other three are from my neighborhood. I think the Passiflora looks like one of those alien monster plants you see in movies. (You can see some other pictures I’ve taken, as well as read through some random thoughts and quotes in the [Scrapbook](https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/) I keep on my website.) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/10/dahlia-pinata-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/10/dianthus-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/10/hydrangea-1.JPG) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/10/passiflora-1.jpg) Clockwise from left to right: Dahlia Pinata, Dianthus, Hydrangea, and Passiflora **§§§** I’m reading [*The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins*](https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-notebooks-of-sonny-rollins?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* edited by Sam V. H. Reese and published by New York Review Books. I’ve been most interested in the passages where Rollins writes about either his playing technique or music theory in general: the meticulous attention he pays to even the most minute aspects of either of those two subjects. Here, for example, is part of his description of “Lip Muscle Exercises:” > While holding the left (come right down from you heart and lift hand to the mirror’s left side) upper lip in high up (pulled up position) move and maneuver lower lip + related muscles (along its circumference and along the sides of the mouth) up to where upper lip and other muscles can be safely as stilled as these lower. Since I once played the bass baritone bugle, I have some very, very basic sense of what it means to think at this level of specificity about the musculature of your lips, but I don’t really understand what Rollins is talking about here. What entrances me, and what I would like to write about at more length, is what it would mean to pay this level of attention to the line in composing a poem, at the level of the line in the abstract, but also at the level of what the line sounds like when you say it. Reading Rollins has made me think a lot about the connection between free verse and jazz improvisation and what it would mean to articulate in terms of free verse composition the kind of discipline Rollins brings to thinking about jazz. **§§§** On September 13th of this year, I gave a talk at my local library that traced the thread my experience as a survivor of childhood sexual violence weaves through my [three books of poetry](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/), culminating in a reading from [*T’shuvah*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/tshuvah-2/), which focuses more on the interiority of coming to terms with that experience than on the experience itself. In writing the talk, I found myself pondering the differences between the [essays](https://majusculelit.com/i-was-a-creative-writing-program-dropout/?ref=richardjnewman.com) I have written about [what the men who victimized me did to me](https://solsticelitmag.org/content/the-first-time-i-told-someone/?ref=richardjnewman.com), where the fictionalization I inevitably had to employ for the essay to cohere did not change any of the narrative’s substantive details, and my poems which, while they are absolutely rooted in and share some details with my experience, are more properly understood as fictional renderings. I will share the full text of my talk at a later date. Here, I just want to share with you what I had to say about the different kinds of work that I think essays and poems do. > I did not write “[The First Time I Told Someone](https://solsticelitmag.org/content/the-first-time-i-told-someone/?ref=richardjnewman.com)” simply to relate the experience \[of abuse\] I recount in its pages; I wrote \[the essay\] because I had something to say about those experiences that I thought was worth saying. \[T\]hat sense of purpose is why factual accuracy is so important in narrative nonfiction. If the story I present as mine is, in fact, a fiction—or if I have fictionalized so much of it or important enough parts of it that it is no longer \[truly\] my story—why should anyone give any credence at all to what I have say? > The contract between poets and their readers, however, is very different. We do not, and we should not, assume that the speaker of a poem is autobiographically identical with the poet, even when the poem is written in the first person, even when we know that the speaker and the poet share some aspects of the experience the poem contains \[even, I would add now, and I know there will be people who disagree with me about this, if the poet says they are identical with the speaker\]. In an essay called “The Necessity to Speak,” the poet Sam Hamill calls this first person speaker “the first person impersonal,” which he defines as “permission,” though I would call it an invitation, for readers to enter the experience of the poem. > Experience is a crucial word here. When I write a poem, my goal is to render the emotional interior of an experience in all its overdetermined complexity, not tell a reader what happened to me and why it mattered. **§§§** In 1988-89, when I taught English in South Korea, the sex trade was ubiquitous. It was practically impossible to socialize with Korean men—or at least with the Korean men I met through my work at the private language school where I taught—without being taken to one or another establishment where women were available. For an essay I am working on, part of which tells the story of when my friend Jun Won took me to [Miari](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miari?ref=richardjnewman.com), the largest red light district in Seoul at the time, I dug up the journal I kept back then. I wanted to check my memory of that night against what I wrote about it. Interestingly, the journal entries have very little to say about what actually happened that night: how, for example, Jun Won, who said he was going to “make my night,” had refused to tell me where he was taking me until we got there; or how I found out that the woman who was brought in to be my companion was in fact a sixteen-year-old girl; or on how it felt to learn that leaving, which is what I insisted we should do when I found that out, would actually get both women in trouble, my companion and Jun Won’s, since they would be blamed for our departure. Rather, I wrote about what it was like trying to defend myself when my colleague Jane insisted that I was being at best disingenuous when I said I did not know where Jun Won was taking me, or when I described my anger and disgust at learning the age of my companion, or about how morally compromised being there had made me feel in general. The essay that I am writing will delve into this complexity in more detail, but reading what I wrote back then has made me think about the difference between critiquing a situation like the one I was in from a distance and what it meant for me to be in the situation as a man, where I had no choice but confront the fact that the human thing to do was to allow the women to play the dehumanizing role they had been assigned. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in* [*my work*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/) *or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* ### Four Flowers URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/four-flowers/ Last updated: 2025-10-19T17:55:41.000Z ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/10/passiflora.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/10/hydrangea.JPG) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/10/dianthus-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/10/dahlia-pinata.jpg) Clockwise from left to right: Passiflora, Hydrangea, Dianthus, and Dahlia Pinata ### A Gray Praying Mantis URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/a-gray-praying-mantis/ Last updated: 2025-10-16T01:37:11.000Z _No content available._ ### Learning To Love The Questions: Poetry Versus Propaganda URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/poetry-versus-propaganda-when-a-poem-devolves-into-rhetoric/ Last updated: 2026-09-05T09:30:31.000Z *The difference between poetry and rhetoric* *is being ready to kill* *yourself* *instead of your children.* —*Audre Lorde, “Power”* Back in 2019, I was asked to [review](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2024/11/Review-of-Contestable-Truths--Incontestable-Lies--by-Stephen-Sher.pdf) a book of poems by Steven Sher called *Contestable Truths, Incontestable Lies.* Sher is a Brooklyn-born, Orthodox Jew who has been living in Jerusalem since 2012, and the poems in this book embody a profoundly nationalist, Orthodox Jewish commitment to Israel as the Jewish homeland. More than that, though, it is a book that demonizes the Palestinians and at least implicitly denies any claim they might have to the land as theirs. Sher’s politics when it comes to Israel, in other words—and this is how I put it in the review—are “precisely antithetical to my own.” This made the review difficult to write, not because I have a problem arguing against politics such as his, but because I wanted to make sure that when I called the book a failure overall, despite the presence of some truly beautiful and moving poems, I was talking about a failure within the poetry itself, not just my political disagreement with the author. The review was published in the Summer 2022 issue of American Book Review, but I wrote it, obviously, before the eleven-day war that broke out between Israel and Hamas in May of 2021, before Israel’s Operation Breaking Dawn in 2022 (which targeted Islamic Jihad in Gaza), and before the current genocidal war that Israel has been waging in Gaza in the aftermath of Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023\. Looking back at Sher’s book now, it’s frightening how prophetic some of the poems have turned out to be, in particular “Bombing Gaza,” a cynical reworking of Abraham’s negotiation with God over the lives of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:23-32). Sher’s speaker in that poem bargains with a voice that has the power to decimate Gaza—God’s? The Israeli government’s?—for the lives of the people who live there. However, because we already know the outcome of the Biblical story—God ultimately destroys Sodom and Gomorrah—there is no way not to read into the poem the assertion that Gaza deserves to be destroyed in the same way and for the same reason, ie, that it would be impossible to find at least ten righteous people who live there. (If you’d like to read the review for yourself, you can do so [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2024/11/Review-of-Contestable-Truths--Incontestable-Lies--by-Stephen-Sher.pdf)). I started thinking about this book again because it happened to be at the top of a stack that I was moving from one place to another, and I was reminded of a poem from the book that I didn’t write about in my review, the one that opens the collection, “Looking East From Mt. Scopus.” In this poem, Sher’s speaker watches three Palestinian boys herding their goats towards home and bears witness as one of the boys, the oldest, who is “not yet a teen,” beats nearly, if not actually, to death the black goat he’s been carrying on his shoulders. Sher’s skill as a poet is apparent in the precise detail with which he conjures the scene: > From this overlook, we can see beyond Maale Adumim > to the Dead Sea and as far as Amman. > Between us and an Arab village, forms are moving > on the nearest hillside, long contested, > going shrub to shrub in search of sustenance > from land that seems to mock their hunger. > Later we come upon this small flock > with its young herders, the oldest not yet a teen > carrying a black goat on his shoulders. > Two younger boys encourage the flock to keep pace > as the trail narrows and they approach paved road. > Here the older boy beats each goat with his stick > till it leaps the metal rail. When he puts the black one down, > he beats it too and it doesn’t make a sound. Instead of continuing in the mode of bearing witness, however, the next three lines offer a diagnosis of sorts: > I imagine his father beating him like this > and the boy never crying out, never revealing his pain > though it carves out his future in the stone that’s his heart. It’s possible, of course, that the boy’s father does in fact beat him and that the boy responds in precisely the stoic manner the poem describes. However, because Sher-the-poet has his speaker make this speculative assumption without giving him any self-awareness that it *is* an assumption and that he himself is therefore implicated in where that assumption leads him, one has to assume that the poet shares the speaker’s perspective, that the speaker is a spokesperson for that perspective and, therefore, for the poet as well. The poem, in other words, becomes more propaganda than art. Here is the poem’s conclusion: > …Maybe the boy tells himself > that he will come back for \[the goat\] or maybe he won’t bother, > thinking it will be gone by then—things have a way > of disappearing in these hills—and he won’t > have to carry it ever again if luck is with him, > once he invents the incontestable lie. The poem does not identify the boy as belonging to any specific group, but the metaphor comparing the black goat on the ground to a “torn prayer rug someone’s flung/from the back of a truck” clearly implies that he is—or that the speaker assumes he is—Muslim, which means it is safe for the reader to assume that the boy is Palestinian and to understand as well that the life of lying the speaker has invented for the boy represents what the speaker, and therefore the poet, thinks about Palestinians in general. For me, the spiritual practice of writing poetry locates itself in the moment that the language in which I am immersed opens up into possibilities I neither predicted nor consciously desired and the corresponding decision I then have to make about whether or not to trust where that language will lead me. In “Looking East From Mt. Scopus”—and, I would argue, in much of *Contestable Truths, Incontestable Lies*—Sher was neither attuned to that moment nor willing to commit himself to that trust, which is why “Looking East From Mt. Scopus” closes down any reading that is not also a self-serving sociological analysis of the Palestinian family. The poem fails, in other words, not only as a poem, but also as what I think Sher would like it to be, an (admittedly ironic) expression of his deep spiritual commitment to Israel as the Jewish homeland. In my review, I criticized Sher’s book for the way it politicized that commitment, weaponizing it against the Palestinians. What I’m interested in here is how the failure of this poem can be used as an object lesson in how not to write politically engaged poetry, unless of course you want what you write to be simply rhetoric, simply propaganda. At a time, when more and more poets are asking of ourselves and of our art a response that is adequate to the frighteningly and dangerously fraught political and cultural moment in which we live, that lesson is an important one to learn over and over again. *Cross-posted on* [*Learning To Love The Questions*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/category/learning-to-love-the-questions/?ref=richardjnewman.com). It All Connects is a reader supported publication. This is an example of the kind of essay that subscribers will receive on a regular basis. I'll be sharing other examples in the coming weeks. If you’d like to support my work and continue to receive these essays, become a paid subscriber by clicking [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signin), signing in if you need to, and clicking on the Account button in the top right corner of the page. Or, if you would like to make a one-time contribution to support my work, you can do so by clicking [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/support). ### Four by Four #48 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-48/ Last updated: 2025-10-03T19:20:29.000Z #### Contents ## Four Things To Read [Pregnant and Unmarried? In Tennessee, That’s Now Grounds for Denial of Care](https://msmagazine.com/2025/07/24/pregnant-unmarried-woman-tennessee-denied-prenatal-care/?omhide=true&emci=8ce318ef-be6c-f011-8dc9-6045bda9d96b&emdi=ad833c15-456d-f011-8dc9-6045bda9d96b&ceid=1174915&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Jennifer Weiss-Wolf > This is the first reported case of a woman being denied prenatal care for being unmarried in the state of Tennessee and the country. And it is the direct result of the state’s [2025 Medical Ethics Defense Act](https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/1819981?ref=richardjnewman.com), which went into effect in April. The law enables physicians, nurses, hospitals and insurers to invoke religious, moral or ethical objections to the provision of care and treatment, with no legal requirement to provide patients with a referral or alternative. There are now twelve states in the nation that have such a law, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, and South Carolina. In what has to be one of the best examples of magical thinking I have ever heard of, proponents claim the law will help Tennessee recruit and retain physicians. This despite the fact that approximately 33% of Tennessee counties are what are known as “[maternal care deserts](https://nashvillebanner.com/2024/12/17/tn-obstetric-residency-applications-drop/?ref=richardjnewman.com)” and that the state has one of the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the country. If you ever doubted that the Christian right is waging a war on women, follow the links in the article. They offer a sobering glance at what’s going on. **§§§** [That’s Something That You Won’t Recover From As A Doctor](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/10/abortion-ban-idaho-ob-gyn-maternity-care/679567/?gift=9L5E0%5F00dQA8ldt%5F3rAKnzpcAMUq6vKvoUYinb62ddI&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share), by Sarah Zhang: > The doctors I spoke with had a wide range of personal views on abortion, but they uniformly agreed that the current restrictions are unworkable as medical care. They have watched patients grow incredulous, even angry, upon learning of their limited options. But mostly, their patients are devastated. The bans have added heartbreak on top of heartbreak, forcing women grieving the loss of an unborn child to endure delayed care and unnecessary injury. For some doctors, this has been too much to bear. They have fled to states without bans, leaving behind even fewer doctors to care for patients in places like Idaho. Zhang wrote this article before Trump was elected to his second term as president, so some of what she says here is dated, but if you want to read a kind of follow up to the article about Tennessee that I linked to above, one that includes the perspective of both patients and doctors—a significant number of whom are against abortion for religious reasons—you should give Zhang’s piece your attention. I live in New York, where abortion is legal and where, given how much else is going on in the country and the world, it can be all too easy not to pay attention to what abortion bans around the country are doing to women, their families, and their doctors. Again, to say that the right is waging a war on women is not to indulge in metaphor. The stories Zhang tells in this piece make that clear, if nothing else. **§§§** [‘Who Am I Without Birth Control?’](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/style/birth-control-skepticism-wellness-tiktok.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.qk8.dRDV.0pnejFTQajzB&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Emma Goldberg: > Still, reproductive health doctors are worried about the new and growing doubts they are hearing. Dr. Nisha Verma, a physician in Maryland and Georgia, and a senior adviser to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said she often fields questions from patients that seem to echo dubious podcast talking points — about hormonal contraception causing infertility, or even changing who women are sexually attracted to. > Scholars worry that the legal efforts to restrict access to birth control will be buoyed by the podcasts and social media posts criticizing it. “If we look at what happened between Roe v. Wade and Dobbs, we see a steady escalation of the stigmatization of abortions, and a steady escalation of legal restrictions on the provision of abortion care,” said Amanda Stevenson, a sociologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “Those two processes, stigmatization and legal restrictions,” she added, “are mutually reinforcing.” I have over the course of my life known women with very different attitudes towards hormonal birth control. Some embraced it whole-heartedly; for others—I remember a girl I went to high school with being in this situation—it was a necessary evil, a way to manage what were otherwise very difficult periods; and for others, the idea of medically regulating their hormones was anathema on principle. All of them were well aware of the potential side-effects of taking the pill, but none of them were under any illusion that taking the pill could, as Turning Point USA podcaster Alex Clark asserts, “falsely make \[them\] feel bisexual.” Or that, as one of the TikTok influencers Goldberg screen-captured for her article says, being on hormonal birth control would make a woman’s “brain spend\[\] more time capturing memories of stress.” This kind of misinformation campaign should concern us all. It is yet one more example of the right chipping away at women’s reproductive autonomy, either because those who spread the misinformation are working for the right, like Alex Clark, or because they are serving the right’s interests without fully realizing it. Women, of course, have already been feeling the brunt of the right’s onslaught, but if the right is ever truly successful in taking us back to a time when abortion was illegal and women were unable fully to control their reproductive lives, men will feel it as well, since our lives too will be circumscribed by those values. There is a larger discussion to be had about why men should care about that, not just as a matter of caring about women, but as a matter of self-interest, but here I will simply note that I think this is a discussion we ought to be having. **§§§** [We Are Here : Writings by Afghan Women](https://usawa.in/category/we-are-here-writings-by-afghan-women/?ref=richardjnewman.com), edited by Shikha S. Lamba: This issue of [Usawa: Literary Review](https://usawa.in/?ref=richardjnewman.com) contains writing by thirty-seven Afghan women and girls, including an internationally best-selling Afghan author, one of Afghanistan’s most renowned poets, a Fulbright scholar, and girls from an orphanage. As Lamba puts it in her editor’s note: > Nowhere in the world today are women’s voices being so brutally silenced and threatened as they are in Afghanistan. The terrorist regime’s numerous edicts are designed to completely take away basic human rights, remove Afghan women from society, and crush any sense of sisterhood. This gender apartheid, isn’t just an assault on Afghan women; it is a threat to every society still wrestling with misogyny, toxic patriarchy, and religious extremism. Like the United States. The society envisioned by the Christian right in this country might not look exactly like the one the Taliban have imposed on theirs, but they are moving in the same direction. This is from the first piece in the issue, “[Nightmare with Open Eyes](https://usawa.in/we-are-here-writings-by-afghan-women/nightmare-with-open-eyes/?ref=richardjnewman.com),” by Muska, edited by Azadeh Parsapour and translated by Dr. Negeen Kargar. (The editor has preserved the authors’ anonymity for their own protection.) > I left the house and walked quickly towards work so that I could cover the twenty-minute distance in ten minutes. When I reached the bus stop, I realised that compared to the previous days, the number of ladies at the bus stop was even fewer. I thought it might be to do with the cold weather. I wanted to find an answer as to why the number of ladies was less than usual…I looked on my mobile \[and\] saw a headline stating, The Taliban have arrested women due to their outfits. I felt as if I had been hit on my head and asked myself, what does it mean by outfits. I worried about the arrested women because no one knew what fate awaited them. After reading the headline, I couldn’t bear to read the rest of the article and find out the details. My curiosity turned into fear, so I put the phone in my jacket pocket…After about an hour, I arrived at my workplace. \[O\]ne of my friends \[called me\]. ‘Hello Lina, good morning…yes, I just arrived. How are you? I’m fine. I didn’t see any soldiers today. Don’t hold your breath. Is everything ok? Take a breath. Yes, I read the news. Don’t worry. May the merciful God have mercy on us. Thanks for asking about me. Goodbye.’ My fear and apprehension increased after I ended Lina’s phone call and her worries made me more concerned. After that, I thought about being courageous and reading the news in detail. I read the news on local, foreign, and social websites. The hairs on my body stood up as I read that all the arrested girls and women had been wearing hijabs or long dresses. They had covered their bodies, and the main reason for the arrest was a mystery to everyone. I hope you will take the time to read this and some of the other pieces in the issue. They are heartbreaking and eye-opening and inspiring, and they absolutely paint a picture of the kind of thing that could happen here if we are not vigilant and proactive in resisting the kinds of things I talked about in the first three entries in this section. ****Please Consider Becoming A Paid Subscriber** If you’ve been enjoying **Four By Four* and would like to help support the work of curating this material, as well as receiving the additional benefits of being a paid subscriber, you can become a paid subscriber by clicking [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/account/plans). (You’ll need to sign in and then click on the Account button that appears in the top right corner of your screen.) You can also make a one-time contribution by clicking [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/support). --- ## Four Things To See All images are from the [Library of Congres](https://www.loc.gov/?ref=richardjnewman.com) and are in the public domain. ### Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorū que lustrationes - 1507 *Universal cosmography according to the tradition of Ptolemy and other surveys of Amerigo Vespucci.* Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map was the first map to depict a separate Western hemisphere with the Pacific as a separate ocean. It drew upon data gathered during Amerigo Vespucci's 1501-02 voyages to the New World. In recognition of Vespucci's understanding that a new continent had been discovered, Waldseemüller christened the new lands “America.” By showing the newly-found American land mass, the map represented a huge leap forward in knowledge - one that forever changed the European understanding of a world previously divided into just three parts: Europe, Asia, and Africa. ![](https://tile.loc.gov/image-services/iiif/service:gmd:gmd3:g3200:g3200:ct000725C/full/pct:12.5/0/default.jpg) **§§§** ### A new and correct map of the world projected upon the plane of the horizon laid down from the newest discoveries and most exact observations - 1714 Charles Price, cartographer. ![](https://tile.loc.gov/image-services/iiif/service:gmd:gmd3:g3200:g3200:ct009343/full/pct:12.5/0/default.jpg) **§§§** ### Map of the world with the most recent discoveries - 1811 Mary Van Schaack, Cartographer ![](https://tile.loc.gov/image-services/iiif/service:gmd:gmd3:g3200:g3200:awh00011/full/pct:25/0/default.jpg) **§§§** ### Missionary map of the world showing prevailing religions of its various nations and the central stations of all Protestant missionary societies - \[1902?\] August R. Ohman, Cartographer ![](https://tile.loc.gov/image-services/iiif/service:gmd:gmd3:g3201:g3201e:ct004005/full/pct:12.5/0/default.jpg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### Ayelet Rose Gottlieb - Three Kisses **§§§** ### Crosby, Stills & Nash - Wooden Ships **§§§** ### Sisters of Jazz - Willow Weep For Me **§§§** ### Vijay Iyer - Fleurette Africaine --- ## Four Things About Me My third grade teacher, Mrs. Dollinger, made us stand up in class if we had something to say, a level of classroom formality I had not experienced previously and that I don’t remember ever experiencing afterwards. We had to raise our hands first, of course. I don’t recall whether I participated in her class much, but I do remember being scolded when she began to teach us how to write in cursive because I already knew how to make some of the letters. Or maybe it was because I could write my name—I’m not entirely sure—but I have a clear picture of her looking over my shoulder while I worked on whatever it was we were supposed to be writing in class and getting upset at me because I had finished the page we were on more quickly than all the other students and had moved on to the next page, which she had not taught us yet. I have a vague sense that she either sent a note home with me or called my mother directly to express her disapproval because I do remember my mother saying something to me about it, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what she said. **§§§** I don’t remember this, but my mother has told me that when I was in first grade, I was an advanced enough reader that the teacher used to have me do read-alouds for the class. She also told me that when I was in fifth grade I decided to leave the human reproductive system out of a report I was doing on the human body that I was supposed to present to the class because I didn’t think my classmates were mature enough to handle it. **§§§** One of the most uncomfortable situations I ever found myself in as a professor involved two students in my freshman composition, one a man about my age, the other a young woman who was nineteen years old. I’ll call them Tony and Christina. Tony was a 9/11 first responder—I think as a cop—and the experience had left him so scarred, both physically and mentally that he retired early from the force. I don’t remember what he did before he decided to go back to school, but he was enrolled on my campus to study nursing. If I remember correctly, he had a son about my son’s age. We would occasionally chat after class about our kids, a little about politics—he leaned more to the right; I to the left—and about the state of the world in general. He would occasionally send me links to articles connected to our discussions, usually because he thought they proved me wrong. Those articles often became grist for our after-class discussions. I wouldn’t say that we were on our way to becoming friends exactly, but we were familiar with each other in a way that would not have been possible with any of my traditionally aged students. Christina was a strikingly beautiful young woman who, if I remember correctly, had not yet declared her major. She did, however, make sure to let us know during the get-to-know-you exercise I did the first week of class that she was an aspiring model. At the time, I structured my classes entirely around group work. As always happens in such situations, the students got to know each other personally. I’ve always seen that as an important part of the group process and, as long as it didn’t interfere with the work the groups had to do, I rarely shut down the “side conversations” they would have. Tony and Christina spent the entire semester in the same group. At some point during the semester’s final weeks, I got an email from Tony that was just a MySpace url—which gives you a sense of how long ago this was—and a note that said something like “Check this out.” I assumed it was, as usual, a link to something that would prove whatever point he’d been trying to make in our most recent discussion, but when I clicked through, it turned out to be Christina’s lingerie modeling portfolio, which I assume she’d shared not just with him, but with her entire group. The pictures were lovely and tasteful, but the last thing I needed was to be looking at images of a student who was currently in my class posing suggestively in very revealing lingerie. It took me a few days to process this, not because I didn’t recognize that Tony had shared Christina’s photos as a form of male bonding, but because I wasn’t sure how to handle the situation in the context of the classroom dynamic. There may have been only a few class meetings left, but I still did not want the situation to blow up in my face. Rather than have a face-to-face conversation with Tony, which I worried might backfire in just that way, I replied to his email with one or two sentences saying simply that it had been inappropriate of him to send me the link. To his credit, he got it right away. I don’t remember exactly what he wrote in response, only that it focused on an apology for the uncomfortable position he’d put me in. I chose not to address the question of whether or not he owed Christina an apology because the semester was ending and, based on what I knew, they would almost certainly never see each other again. I might choose to handle a similar situation very differently now, but I was at the time reasonably confident that confronting him about it would not have ended well. Figuring out how to talk to Christina was more complicated. On the one hand, I didn’t want her to think I was criticizing her or trying to shame her for either the pictures themselves or her decision to share them. On the other hand, I also didn’t want her to worry that the whole situation had somehow colored my view of her work in the class, which had been exemplary. I decided, therefore, to wait until after I had graded her final paper, on which she received an A, to ask her to stay after class so we could talk. It was a difficult conversation. When I told Christina what Tony did, her first response was to ask me what I thought of the pictures, and when I suggested to her that maybe it had been inappropriate of Tony to send me the link in the first place, she couldn’t understand why. It wasn’t until I asked her, and I had hoped not to get this specific, how she would feel if she knew I, or any teacher, had those images of her in my head when I called on her in class, or while I graded her papers, that she began to understand what I was talking about. “Ew,” she said, “You’re my teacher.” I don’t remember what either of us said after that, and I never saw her again, but this remains one of the most uncomfortable experiences I ever had as a college professor. **§§§** I have a box filled with journals I have kept going back as far as my undergraduate years at Stony Brook University. Today, I opened at random the one I started in January of 1987, at the start of my second semester in the college’s TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) MA program. In the entry dated February 5, this is what I wrote: “I want to start writing, or trying to write, children’s poetry. Probably I am fantasizing too much about the limerick I sent to Toys R Us, but it would be good to have a few more to send.” I don’t remember anything about sending a limerick to Toys R Us, but beneath that sentence are the first and second drafts of another limerick. Here’s the first draft: > The girl in the tree looked down > and thought to herself with a frown, > “I’ve climbed up this high > ~~and I can’t touch the sky~~ > ~~but I’ll try till a cloud is my crown~~ > but I’m not so sure why.” > So she stayed till she knew, then got down. And this is the second draft: > The girl in the tree looked down > and said to herself with a frown, > “I’ve climbed up this high > but I’m still not sure why.” > So she stayed till she knew, then got down. I was very surprised to discover that I wrote this limerick nearly forty years ago because I published an almost identical one in 2017 in *Words For What Those Men Have Done* as the fourth section of the poem called “My Son’s Limericks.” > The boy in the tree looked down > and said to himself with a frown, > “I’ve climbed up this high > but I’m still don’t know why.” > So he stayed till he knew, then climbed down. I thought it dated from 1996, when my son was three years old, which is also when I composed the other three limericks: > A boy who was wearing red pants > went out to dig for some ants. > He dug really deep > to where the ants sleep. > They woke up and crawled into his pants. **÷÷÷** > A boy who was eating his cookie > in a house that was creaky and spooky > heard a ghost cry out, “Boo!” > He yelled, “Boo, to you too!” > Then he finished his chocolate chip cookie. **÷÷÷** > A boy sitting up on a wall > was bouncing his little green ball. > He bounced it so high, > it reached up to the sky, > and he said, “I wish I were that tall.” ****Now that you’ve read all the way to the end, I hope you’ll consider supporting** ***Four By Four** ****by becoming a paid subscriber** If you’ve been enjoying **Four By Four* and would like to help support the work of curating this material, you can become a paid subscriber by clicking [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/account/plans). (You'll need to sign in and then click on the Account button that appears in the top right corner of your screen.) You can also make a one-time contribution by clicking [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/support). --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in* [*my work*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/) *or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* ### The Grand Canyon URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/the-grand-canyon/ Last updated: 2025-09-27T12:00:41.000Z _No content available._ ### At The Brooklyn Book Festival URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/at-the-brooklyn-book-festival/ Last updated: 2025-09-26T13:16:01.000Z At the Brooklyn Book Festival on September 21, I had the opportunity to record this video for [Sagging Meniscus](https://www.saggingmeniscus.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) press. I'm looking forward to reading the book, [*Wings*](https://www.saggingmeniscus.com/catalog/wings/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Amir Or, translated from the Hebrew by Seth Michelson: ### Fire In The Sky URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/fire-in-the-sky/ Last updated: 2025-09-26T11:59:59.000Z _No content available._ ### Round Up #3: “Four Things to Listen To” Issues 1-15 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/round-up-3-four-things-to-listen-to-issues-1-15/ Last updated: 2025-09-26T10:48:25.000Z ****A Quick Reminder** If you would like to continue to receive these “roundups” along with all the other benefits of supporting It All Connects financially, click the button below. If you are not already signed in, you will need to sign in with the email address at which you receive the newsletter—it’s a one-time thing—and then click the Account button in the top right corner of your screen. [Subscribe ](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/account/plans) This “Four Things To Listen To Roundup,” which gathers the sixty-plus musical selections I chose for the first fifteen issues of “Four By Four,” along with the five podcast episodes to which I referred you, is the third one I’ve sent. The [first one](https://www.richardjnewman.com/round-up-1-four-things-to-see-issues-1-15/) included the sixty images from “Four Things To See” and [the second one](https://www.richardjnewman.com/round-up-2-four-things-to-read-issues-1-15/) gathered the sixty “Things to Read” I curated for you. Enjoy! ## Podcasts - [Bodies Under Siege](https://youtu.be/zUbc%5F6dkdyk?si=QRjwnWKGT-0ahJK%5F&ref=richardjnewman.com) \- The Verso Podcast (An important discussion about why women’s bodily autonomy and reproductive choice is so important.) - [The Many Genders of Judaism](https://jewishstudies.libsyn.com/website/the-many-genders-of-judaism?ref=richardjnewman.com) \- Adventures in Jewish Studies Podcast - [Born in the USA](https://broads-and-books.captivate.fm/episode/born-in-the-usa?ref=richardjnewman.com) \- Broads & Books (An interesting episode about hypocrisy, using pop music as an initial lens.) - [Bam, Crack, Dot: Man Jongg and Its Jewish-American Roots](https://soundcloud.com/yiddishbookcenter/the-shmooze-ep0251?ref=richardjnewman.com) \- Yiddish Book Center - [Yiddish Socialists and the Garment Industry](https://jewishstudies.libsyn.com/website/yiddish-socialists-and-the-garment-industry?ref=richardjnewman.com) \- Adventures in Jewish Studies ## Music I’ve created a [YouTube playlist](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsRwmFRg0xv0LvvHDqZJ3Dui-zT9%5F1BnR&si=zhfKIG4t0506DOoi&ref=richardjnewman.com) for your convenience. Future roundups will also include playlists on Apple Music and Spotify. **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** **§§§** ### Artmageddon! URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/events/artmageddon/ Last updated: 2025-09-25T14:39:07.000Z **Date:** September 28 **Time:** 3:00-3:45 **Where:** 1517 Ditmas Avenue, Brooklyn (near 16th Street) **Admission:** Free I'll be reading with Ama Birch, Quincy Scott Jones, Matthew Beckerman, and Jiwon Choi ### Leila & The Doll URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/leila-the-doll/ Last updated: 2025-09-25T10:00:15.000Z _No content available._ ### Artistic Loneliness URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/artistic-loneliness/ Last updated: 2025-09-24T21:22:36.000Z *“\[I\]n that library I experienced loneliness, real loneliness, but also exquisite artistic loneliness: You’re lonely but also exquisitely happy if it’s snowing outside and you’re working on a novel. There’s nothing more gorgeous than that.”* *—*Kiran Desai, quoted in *Poets & Writers* ### Four by Four #47 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-47/ Last updated: 2025-09-21T00:57:07.000Z #### Contents ## Four Things To Read [***Inseminating the Elephant***](https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/inseminating-the-elephant-by-lucia-perillo/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Lucia Perillo: I very much wanted to like this book. Lucia was my classmate at Syracuse University back in the 1980s, and I remember getting a glimpse in the poems she brought to workshop of something I later studied quite a bit more deeply in the work of [Albert Goldbarth](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/albert-goldbarth?ref=richardjnewman.com), namely how to let a train of thought work itself through in a poem on its own terms. I read two of Lucia’s earlier books, [*Dangerous Life*](https://www.amazon.com/Dangerous-Samuel-French-Morse-Poetry/dp/1555530591?ref=richardjnewman.com) and [*Body Mutinies*](https://www.press.purdue.edu/9781557530837/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* with admiration and respect when they came out, and I remember thinking when she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship that she absolutely deserved it. Not that my opinion matters all that much. I just mean to say that I respected her work a lot for its intelligence, its irreverence and humor, its fearlessness in taking on subjects one would not normally associate with poetry, its political bite, and its wisdom. I caught glimpses of all of that in *Inseminating the Elephant,* but they were only glimpses. There were moments of real brilliance in some of the poems, a handful of which truly moved me, but most of which left me asking *So what?* This, for example, is from “Number One:” > how it is not so grim or tragic > when the boy-hand spiders across girl-shouldermeat > and she curls against him > like a pink prawn thawing from the freezer. I get, or at least I think I get, that the language is supposed to indicate the speaker’s discomfort with/alienation from what’s going on between those two people, and that the simile of the pink prawn is supposed to cinch that feeling. My understanding of this, however, is an analytical, intellectual one, not an emotional one, and so I find myself asking, as I did when I finished many of the poems in this book, Why I should care? By way of comparison, consider the opening lines of “Similar Girl:” > Most of the hospital’s emergencies lay > on gurneys that made a chickadee noise— > *eent eent eent*—as they rolled on rubber wheels. The humor in the chickadee metaphor and its contrast with the seriousness of hospital emergencies is both intellectually—such a keen eye for detail—and emotionally resonant in a way that recalled for me my experience of Lucia’s earlier books. This was not, however, my experience of most of the poems in *Inseminating the Elephant.* **§§§** [**Precious Things**](https://torontojournal.com/issue6-precious-things/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Sara Hosey: > And that was when I stopped crying. It wasn’t even really a decision; it was just a new reality, like the way I stopped sneaking cigarettes the day Kate told me she was pregnant. Though maybe it wasn’t even as hard as that. Because you know what, Kate? To hear that Dani was gay was easier than hearing he couldn’t believe a movie in which a queer kid \[Elton John\] grows up in a small town and isn’t persecuted. It was easier to hear than, “It’s fine, dad; Dalton’s my friend,” after I saw that little fucker knee my son in the balls on the playground. No, I wasn’t happy he was gay. I wasn’t happy, but I fucking pretended to be, because that’s our fucking job. The narrator of “Precious Things” is a father coming to terms both with the fact that his son has come out as gay and with his divorce from Kate, his son’s mother, a woman he still loves. The passage I’ve quoted is part of the narrator’s response to Kate accusing him of being “happy” that their son is gay because that fact means their son’s identity now aligns with his liberal politics. As the narrator explains, however: “\[M\]y son being gay wasn’t making me ‘happy.’ Probably like most parents, I didn’t want my son’s life to be harder than it had to be; I didn’t want him to have to struggle with things that were easy for other people, like becoming a parent or getting a wedding cake. Yet Kate had implied that I was reveling in it, like some sort of next-level, male-Munchausen-by-proxy bullshit.” This story's strength lies in Sara Hosey’s willingness to let the messiness of how the narrator deals with what he is going through be messy and human and without an easy resolution. In part she does this by keeping the reader firmly rooted in the narrator’s point of view. You don’t have access to what is going on inside any other character’s head, which makes the process of following the narrator’s train of thought quite moving. You are, in a very literal way, figuring things out along with him. Importantly, this is not a liberal-good-guy vs. conservative-bad-guy kind of story, unless you count the patriarchal and homophobic cultural context as a “bad guy.” Instead, Sara Hosey has written an honest, illuminating, and heart-felt story in which a man struggles to come to terms with what it means for him to be a man in the context in which he finds himself. I hope you will take the time to read it. **§§§** [**Examining the ADL’s Antisemitism Audit**](https://jewishcurrents.org/examining-the-adls-antisemitism-audit?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Shane Burley and Naomi Bennet: > While we expected that this difference in methodology would create a disparity between our findings and the ADL’s, our reappraisal also highlighted more basic problems with the ADL’s tracking system. In addition to identifying more than a thousand items we believe were misclassified as antisemitic—all cases of speech critical of Israel or Zionism—we found that the data included misapplications of the organization’s own standards and often did not provide enough information for us to assess the group’s judgment. Our analysis clarifies what the ADL’s prominent report captures and excludes, and shows how the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism skews the data—ultimately serving as a reminder of the need for serious statistical analysis done by an organization not beholden to Israel advocacy. In mid-April 2023, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a report which claimed a 140% increase in antisemitic incidents, which include harassment, vandalism, and assault, over 2022\. In response to the fact that this narrative is in part rooted in the ADL’s efforts “to categorize anti-Zionism as antisemitism” as well as “broader questions \[it has faced\] over its statistical methods,” Burley and Bennet decided to examine the numbers in the 2023 report more closely using the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), “a tool developed by scholars to identify antisemitism while avoiding erroneous conflations of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.” (They chose this definition over the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition, which has been criticized for precisely that conflation.) The results are striking. According to the ADL’s report, there were 3,162 antisemitic incidents connected to Israel or Zionism. Using the JDA, Burley and Bennet found that 1,472 of those, about 47%, did not appear to be antisemitic. To be clear, the remaining 53%, or 1,690 antisemitic incidents, is not an insignificant number. Even more significant, though, is their finding that the ADL’s methodology “significantly *undercount\[s\]* right-wing antisemitic incidents.” This is troubling because, as Burley and Bennet note, citing the activist Erik W. Ward, “antisemitism is not just a feature but the ‘theoretical core’ of modern American white nationalism.” More to the point, Burley and Bennet found, more accurately counting white supremacist/nationalist antisemitic incidents would reduce “the legitimately antisemitic Palestine-related incidents \[to\] mere statistical noise” within the context of the report. This doesn’t mean those incidents should not be taken seriously, of course. It does suggest, however, that using accusations of antisemitism to “save and protect Israel” by silencing pro-Palestinian voices allows the truly dangerous growth of white-supremacist antisemitism in the United States to continue unchecked. **§§§** [**Substack Note About Charlie Kirk’s Death**](https://substack.com/@marygeddry/note/c-154566754?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by Mary Geddry: > None of this is to suggest that Charlie Kirk deserved to die. Political murder is abhorrent, no matter the target, and his death is a tragedy for his family, his supporters, and for a nation already staggering under the weight of polarization. But it would also be dishonest to ignore the legacy he leaves behind. He normalized contempt as a political strategy. He made his wealth and his name by teaching others to scorn those who were different, to view the poor, the queer, the immigrant, as objects of ridicule rather than fellow citizens, or hell, fellow human beings. Geddry publishes a [Substack newsletter](https://marygeddry.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) to which I do not subscribe, but this note—Substack’s answer to Tweets or Facebook posts—appeared in my feed and I think it is worth sharing because it does a marvelously thoughtful and balanced job of holding Kirk accountable for his views, while at the same offering an analysis of his assassination as “not a vindication” for those who opposed him, but “a warning…a reminder that words have consequences, that violence begets violence, and that a country which allows hatred and firearms to intermingle unchecked will continue to bury its own.” This brief essay is worth reading. ****Please Consider Becoming A Paid Subscriber** If you've been enjoying **Four By Four* and would like to help support the work of curating this material and receive the accompanying benefits, you can become a paid subscriber by clicking [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/account/plans). (You'll need to sign in and then click on the Account button that appears in the top right corner of your screen.) You can also make a one-time contribution by clicking [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/support). --- ## Four Things To See All images are from the [National Gallery of Art](https://www.nga.gov/?ref=richardjnewman.com) and are in the public domain. ### Ginerva d’ Benci (circa 1474-1478) Leonardo da Vinci ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/09/ginevra_de_benci_obverse_1967.6.1.a.jpg) **§§§** ### Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878) Mary Cassatt ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/09/little_girl_in_a_blue_armchair_1983.1.18.jpg) **§§§** ### The Blue River (circa 1890-1900) Auguste Renoir ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/09/the_blue_river_1970.17.75.jpg) **§§§** ### The Rhinoceros (1515) Albrecth Dürer ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/09/the_rhinoceros_1964.8.697.jpg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### Chip Wickham - Drifting **§§§** ### Gesaffelstein - Nameless **§§§** ### Prole Sector N1 - Flatline **§§§** ### Sarah Nemstov - Deconstructions II Peter Veale, english horn Benjamin Kobler, piano --- ## Four Things About Me I realize that part of what I am doing here in the “Four Things About Me” section of this newsletter is keeping a kind of digital journal, something I have tried more than once to do, with at least three different apps, except I thought then I’d be writing about my life as I lived it. I was intrigued by how much more a digital journal would allow me to include in my entries: images, maps, links to relevant documents, and more. Every time I started one, though, there was something unsatisfying about it. At first, I thought I missed writing by hand, which I really enjoy, but writing on my iPad with a stylus didn’t satisfy me either and not only because it doesn’t feel like writing on paper. I think what I miss when I try to keep a digital journal is the end point, the fact that a physical journal has a final page. I don’t want to dig too much into the metaphorical connection one could draw between writing on that last page and death—or starting a new journal’s first page and rebirth—but those connections *are* there. The back cover of a notebook is an external constraint, an ending imposed by the material world, and the blank page of a new journal forces you start all over again, just like you do when you begin a new stage of life. I believe it’s important to have those experiences in your life in both large ways and small. **§§§** My first girlfriend’s name was Sandy. I was in sixth grade and she was a year older, which at that age is a pretty big difference, especially since it meant she was in junior high school, while I was still an elementary school student. I don’t remember how we first became friends, but I know that we got very close very quickly. I do, though, remember very clearly that she said no when I asked her if she wanted to “go out” with me. I don’t think I had any concrete idea of what it would have meant for us to be boyfriend and girlfriend, but, given how close we were, asking her felt like the right thing to do. I have a vague recollection that she gave our age difference as her reason for rejecting me, but I am not sure. What I do know is that we finally became an “item” when, at a baseball game one of the parents in the neighborhood took some of us kids to, Sandy rested her head on my shoulder, a sure sign at the time that we were more than just friends. I also remember the moment Sandy explained to me that the real reason she said no when I asked her out was that she had a congenital heart defect that that her doctors had no way of repairing and so she knew she was probably not going to survive past her teens. We were sitting in her family’s apartment in the middle of the summer and I had asked her why she was wearing a sweater even though it was so warm. She got cold easily, she explained, because of her weak heart. I don’t remember what I said in return, but I know we were together for a while and that we spent a good portion of that time in her apartment because she was not able to go outside all that much. I also don’t remember that we ever officially broke up, but I have a memory of hearing that her brother was very angry at me because I didn’t visit Sandy in the hospital during the months before she died. No one ever told me she was in the hospital, nor was I not invited to the funeral, and it pains me even now to think that Sandy might have thought I’d purposely abandoned her when she needed my friendship most. I will never know. Somewhere, though, I have a picture of us, she in a sweater of course, at what I think was my sisters’ birthday party, and I have what she wrote in my sixth grade signature book: > *Dated Forever* > Richie, > Red as roses > Green as grass > Poor little donkey > Fell on his \_\_\_\_\_\_. > Don’t get excited > Don’t get red > Poor little donkey > Fell on his head. > Love, > Sandy, > Always **§§§** At the front of that signature book is a page where you could list some points of interest about yourself. I’m looking at it now. My favorite writer back then was Leon Uris, author of [*Exodus* ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus%5F%28Uris%5Fnovel%29?ref=richardjnewman.com)and [*Mila-18*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mila%5F18?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* though I am a little surprised to learn that I read those books before I became a teenager. My favorite song at the time, at least according to the signature book, was [“Billy Don't Be A Hero](https://youtu.be/AjilwTUGE5g?si=PRlEHxIBQGN3cMPf&ref=richardjnewman.com),” by Bo Donaldson & the Heywoods. Before that, my favorite had been The Beach Boys’ “[Good Vibrations](https://youtu.be/Eab%5Fbeh07HU?si=l9cobhHMwgBmZpIM&ref=richardjnewman.com).” As I paged through the book looking for Sandy’s message, I was once again confronted with the casual antisemitism that permeated the community in which I lived, right from the very first page, on which Jim wrote, ”Roses are red, violets are blue, I’ve never met a nicer Jew.” Fran wrote, “To the Jew: Have a penny good time in 7th grade,” and Andy said congratulations with, “Of all the pushy Jews, you top them all.” While these were not the majority of the messages people wrote for me, they stood in for what I know many more of my fellow students were thinking, and they were a precursor of the increasingly menacing and violent antisemitism I dealt with in the mid- to late-1970s. Nor is that level of Jew-hatred a relic of the past. Recently, I spoke with a Jewish colleague who is twenty or so years younger than I am and who grew up in the town next to the one where I lived back then. The stories he told about his experiences with antisemitism were almost completely interchangeable with the ones I tell from my youth. **§§§** Back in 2009, before I really understood how the Internet and Google searches worked, I posted an essay to my blog (not this one) in which I wrote about the antisemitism I experienced when I was growing up. In my ignorance, I used the last names of the boys—and they were all boys—who left the antisemitic messages in my signature book. One of them, Andy, contacted me because my essay was turning up in google searches related to his business, and he was understandably concerned that people who found him online might think he still held the beliefs and attitudes he expressed when we were in sixth grade. It was, of course, not my intention to hurt his business, certainly not forty years after the fact, so I apologized profusely and removed from the post the last names of all the people I mentioned. I also contacted the relevant search providers and the owners of any blogs where my essay had been cross-posted to remove that older version from their caches. Unfortunately, I no longer have the email exchange between Andy and myself about this matter, but I remember two things. First, he wrote at some length about how proud he was to be able to say that his children had friends from all kinds of different backgrounds, and, second, he never once thought to apologize for what he wrote about me all those years ago, leaving me to wonder how much he himself had really changed. There is, however, one email from him in my archive. In it he told me that he’d lost a potentially “great client” because of the “unappealing content” (meaning my post) that a google search had turned up about him. I don’t have a copy of my reply to him, but at that point, since I’d already contacted everyone I could, there was nothing more to do except wait for all the search engine caches to clear. Since I never heard from him again, I assume that’s what happened and that his business was not damaged any further. I felt and feel badly that he lost that client, but there is also a small, spiteful, petty part of me that when I think about the fact that he never apologized can’t help but find some satisfaction in the fact that karma really can be a bitch. ****Now that you’ve read all the way to the end, I hope you’ll consider supporting** ***Four By Four** ****by becoming a paid subscriber** If you’ve been enjoying **Four By Four* and would like to help support the work of curating this material, you can become a paid subscriber by clicking [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/account/plans). (You'll need to sign in and then click on the Account button that appears in the top right corner of your screen.) You can also make a one-time contribution by clicking [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/support). --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in* [*my work*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/) *or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* ### Round Up #2: “Four Things to Read” Issues 1-15 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/round-up-2-four-things-to-read-issues-1-15/ Last updated: 2025-09-12T10:00:13.000Z ****A Quick Reminder** This “Four Things To Read” roundup from the first fifteen issues of Four By Four is the second one I’ve sent. The [first one](https://www.richardjnewman.com/round-up-1-four-things-to-see-issues-1-15/) included the sixty images from “Four Things To See,” and the third, which I have not put together yet, will “round up” everything from “Four Things To Listen To.” After the third one, these roundups will only be available to paid subscribers. If you’d like to receive the roundups along with all the other benefits of supporting It All Connects financially, click the button below. If you are not already signed in, you will need to sign in with the email address at which you receive the newsletter—it’s a one-time thing—and then click the Account button in the top right corner of your screen. [Subscribe ](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/account/plans) This roundup gathers links to the books and articles from Four by Four #1-15\. I've divided the articles into categories and the books by genre. I’d be interested to hear what you think of the “Isms & Phobias” category. Rather than break it up into more specific groupings (racism, antisemitism, homophobia, etc.), I thought it would be interesting to see what kinds of connections might happen if I grouped them all under one heading. Enjoy! ## Books - [Kindred](http://www.beacon.org/Kindred-P489.aspx?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Octavia Butler (fiction) - [My Mother’s Story](https://bookshop.org/p/books/my-mother-s-story-sonia-alland/16407121?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Sonia Alland (memoir) - [Harold & the Purple Crayon](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/118554/harold-the-purple-crayon?ref=richardjnewman.com), by D. Gilson (children’s literature) - [The Anti-Racist Creative Writing Workshop](https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1552-the-anti-racist-writing-workshop?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Felicia Rose Chavez (nonfiction) - [Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition](https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393347913?ref=richardjnewman.com), by David Nirenberg (nonfiction) - [September 12](https://wordworksbooks.org/product/september-12/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Andrea Carter Brown (poetry) ## Articles ### Literary - [When Hamlet Speaks Persian: A History of Shakespeare Translation in Iran](https://ajammc.com/2019/12/02/persian-translation-shakespeare/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Samuel Tafreshi - [Poet, Artist, Erotic Muse of Mexico’s Avant Garde: Rediscovering Nahui Olin](https://lithub.com/poet-artist-sex-symbol-of-mexicos-avant-garde-rediscovering-nahui-olin/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Claire Mullen - [The Art of Fiction No. 78](https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2994/the-art-of-fiction-no-78-james-baldwin?ref=richardjnewman.com) \- A Paris Review interview with James Baldwin, by Jordan Elgrably - [On the Gleefully Indecent Poems of a Medieval Welsh Feminist Poet](https://lithub.com/on-the-gleefully-indecent-poems-of-a-medieval-welsh-feminist-poet/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Lauren Cocking - [On narrative, reckoning and the calculus of living and dying](https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/dionne-brand-on-narrative-reckoning-and-the-calculus-of-living-and-dying/article%5F47884274-07ad-561a-973b-027ef2cbc8fb.html?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Dionne Brand - [Tales from Crane Nation](https://www.tarb.co.il/tales-from-the-crane-nation?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Alex Stein ([*A review of The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land*](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/673280/the-man-who-sold-air-in-the-holy-land-by-omer-friedlander/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Omer Friedlander - [Coney Island](https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/language-literature-culture/yiddish-translation/coney-island-dadaist-sound-poem-victor-packer?ref=richardjnewman.com), A Dadaist Sound Poem by Victor Packer - [Irene, Goodnight](https://poems.com/poem/irene-goodnight/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Jessica Cuello - [An Interview with Jared Hárel](https://www.greenlindenpress.com/interviews-and-reviews?mibextid=ncKXMA&ref=richardjnewman.com#/jared-harel/), by Catherine Fletcher - [Ode to the Powerless: Bessie Head’s ‘A Question of Power’ through a Personal Lens](https://www.cambridge.org/core/blog/2023/03/09/ode-to-the-powerless-bessie-heads-a-question-of-power-through-a-personal-lens/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Nkateko Masinga - [A Persisting Inheritance: On the First-Ever Anthology of Sri Lankan and Diasporic Poetry in the UK](https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2023-07/a-persisting-inheritance-interview-sohini-basak-seni-seneviratne-shash-trevett-vidyan-ravinthiran:/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Sohini Basak - [Do You Pay?](https://litmagnews.substack.com/p/do-you-pay?utm%5Fcampaign=email-half-post&r=1gwysa&utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email), by Allison K Williams - If you’re a writer who submits to literary journals, this essay is well worth reading. ### Jewish Culture - [What Bradley Cooper’s Makeup Can’t Conceal](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/08/bradley-cooper-maestro-movie-leonard-bernstein-jewish/675106/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Yair Rosenberg - [Can Judaism Survive A Messianic Dictatorship In Israel?](https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-07-13/ty-article-magazine/can-judaism-survive-a-messianic-dictatorship-in-israel/00000189-5049-de0f-afbb-7c6d75a40000%5C:?ref=richardjnewman.com) by Yuval Noah Hariri - [We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other](https://jewishcurrents.org/we-cannot-cross-until-we-carry-each-other?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Arielle Angel ### Israel & Palestine - [A Jewish Case for Palestinian Refugee Return](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/may/18/a-jewish-case-for-palestinian-refugee-return?CMP=Share%5FiOSApp%5FOther&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Peter Beinart - [What Did Top Israeli War Officials Really Say About Gaza?](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/01/israel-south-africa-genocide-case-fake-quotes?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Yair Rosenberg - [A Mass Assassination Factory: Inside Israel’s Calculated Bombing of Gaza](https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Ben Reiff - [The Epidemiological War on Gaza](https://jewishcurrents.org/epidemiological-war-on-gaza?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Maya Rosen - [‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.Kk0.6LYn.g62GsAWB8MOp&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella - While much, if not all of the reporting in this article was called into serious question, I am including it here as an honest record of what I was reading and recommending at the timer. - [Co-Teaching a Class on Israel and Palestine](https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/co-teaching-a-class-on-israel-and-palestine%5D?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Bernard Avishai ### Science, Medicine, and Technology - [A catatonic woman awakened after 20 years. Her story may change psychiatry.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/06/01/schizophrenia-autoimmune-lupus-psychiatry/?wpisrc=nl%5Fmost&carta-url=https://s2.washingtonpost.com/car-ln-tr/3a2cc41/6478c2ae49fef7411d00143d/64009d3c4faed61888b0f656/9/70/6478c2ae49fef7411d00143d&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Richard Sima - [What If Competition Isn’t As “Natural” As We Think](https://slate.com/technology/2020/01/darwin-competition-collaboration-evolutionary-biology-climate-change.html?ref=richardjnewman.com), by John Favini - [ChatGPT and GPT-4 skew the most liberal — and Meta's LLaMA is the most conservative AI model, a new study says](https://www.businessinsider.com/research-study-openai-chatgpt-liberal-bias-meta-llama-conservative-2023-8?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Kylie Kirschner - [So, Gutenberg Didn’t Actually Invent Printing As We Know It](https://lithub.com/so-gutenberg-didnt-actually-invent-the-printing-press/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by M. Sophia Newman - [The first observations of octopus brain waves revealed how alien their minds truly are](https://www.salon.com/2023/02/28/the-first-observations-of-octopus-brain-waves-revealed-how-alien-their-minds-truly-are/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Troy Farah - [Algorithms Hijacked My Generation](https://www.freyaindia.co.uk/cp/138762303?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Freya India - [He Was Falsely Accused of Using AI. Here’s What He Wishes His Professor Did Instead](https://www.techlearning.com/news/he-was-falsely-accused-of-using-ai-heres-what-he-wishes-his-professor-did-instead?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Erik Ofgang - [Children Anticipate What Others Want, But Great Apes Don’t](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/children-anticipate-what-others-want-but-great-apes-dont/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Joanna Thompson - [A New English Dialect Is Emerging in South Florida, Linguists Say](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/linguists-have-identified-a-new-english-dialect-thats-emerging-in-south-florida?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Phillip M. Carter - [Man admits participating in ‘castration by clamping’ incidents](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/dec/14/man-admits-participating-in-castration-by-clamping-incidents?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Emine Sinmaz - [If One Part Suffers](https://harpers.org/archive/2024/01/if-one-part-suffers/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Michelle Orange - about Body Integrity Dysphoria (BID) ### Gender & Sexuality - [The rise of voluntary celibacy: ‘Most of the sex I’ve had, I wish I hadn’t bothered](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/apr/26/the-rise-of-voluntary-celibacy-most-of-the-sex-ive-had-i-wish-i-hadnt-bothered?CMP=Share%5FiOSApp%5FOther&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Ermine Saner - [A Professor’s Remarks on Sexual Consent Stir Controversy](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/nyregion/suny-fredonia-professor-lawsuit.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=EhNpmB3nfIOKj28%5FqiMxpbZ0ffAew49ILvJnwUholO--r-7FhLJ2MLedeBJRf7hhlw14Q0SQBBA8aCa3RiRPPWRVVURtueDbatBX2-7ri2r8Ioa5SLF9FjRqoDKnOtlvcFn8x%5FOdVAN4WXS9OEXoC-miFdXSA4Ik1X79JU1KzXgfBzI3oWyM-YrV6FfKxJxUgb1sZVMlOFPYkLErIiziBGpmpL2jdjEw3YaCFo2-oTSPWpmsev7v6FMq%5FPS8SCcxelwrhR2qQVYPc-RzJyV3SmkkYe29-IN8uiSLfiZdReQw0dHvK9OumlHa7PXSQtWFSOtzIZfaMWp1k7Ru3LlWvESV8SwhGCSOk%5FrK&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Vimal Patel - [Abortion Snitching Is Already Sending People to Jail](https://msmagazine.com/2023/08/19/celeste-burgess-abortion-snitching-privacy-police-illegal/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Morgan Carmen - [Supreme Court Decision on Reckless Speech Will Cost Victims of Stalking and Harassment](https://msmagazine.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-online-stalking-harassment-women-free-speech-counterman-v-colorado/?omhide=true&emci=5416c68b-c919-ee11-a9bb-00224832eb73&emdi=1737fbee-331b-ee11-a9bb-00224832eb73&ceid=1174915&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Michelle Onello - [The Vagina Museum’s Word Of The Day (May 26, 2023)](https://x.com/vagina%5Fmuseum/status/1662088263790735363?s=43&t=-BQRye5yI7snI3xdbfokeg&ref=richardjnewman.com) \- Unfortunately, you will need an X account to read the whole thread, so, for those of you who don’t have one, here is the [Wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunyaza?ref=richardjnewman.com). - [The Seamstress Who Solved the Ancient Mystery of the Argonaut, Pioneered the Aquarium, and Laid the Groundwork for the Study of Octopus Intelligence](https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/12/26/jeanne-villepreux-power-argonaut/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Maria Popover ### Isms & Phobias - [I’m a Black Professor. You Don’t Need to Bring That Up.](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/08/anti-racist-color-blindness-dei-programs/674996/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Tyler Austin Harper - [Black English Doesn’t Have to Be Just for Black People](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/opinion/black-english-white-people.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.ZU0.8W1a.dRryS3hE8tTl&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by John McWhorter - [The Lust Libel: Sexual Antisemitism in History and Contemporary Culture](https://fathomjournal.org/the-lust-libel-sexual-antisemitism-in-history-and-contemporary-culture/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Jonah Cohen - [Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Anti-Semitic Lies](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/jewish-anti-semitism-harvard-claudine-gay-zionism/677454/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Dara Horn ### Social Issues - [No, I Will Not Debate You](https://longreads.com/2018/09/18/no-i-will-not-debate-you/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Laurie Penny - [The Parents Trying to Pass Down a Language They Hardly Speak](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2023/09/children-learning-immigrant-family-languages/675423/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Kat Chow - [6 Iranians, 1 Year After the Iran Protests Began](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/09/iran-protests-one-year-later-2023.html?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Alex Shams - [I Finally Found A Name For My Father’s Abuse](https://www.damemagazine.com/2019/02/25/i-finally-found-a-name-for-my-fathers-abuse/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Mia Brett - [An Interview With the School Board Chair Who Forced Out a Principal After Michelangelo’s David Was Shown in Class](https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/03/florida-principal-fired-michelangelo-david-statue.html?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Dan Kris - [Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign, in His Own Menacing Words](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/us/politics/trump-2024-president-campaign.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.Dk0.PvmP.DWtlV8D8iVAj&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Ian Prasad Philbrick and Lyna Bentahar - [Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/us/politics/trump-2025-immigration-agenda.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.Dk0.7Or5.PyiW9tfBgDT%5F&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), By Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan - [Local Journalism Worth Reading From 2023](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/briefing/local-journalism-worth-reading-from-2023.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.H00.8FtK.jyL01vck7yBI&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com) - [Ukraine](https://danielkraft.substack.com/p/ukraine-by-dovid-hofshteyn?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Dovid Hofshteyn, essay and translation by Daniel Kraft - [Behind the New Iron Curtain](https://harpers.org/archive/2024/01/behind-the-new-iron-curtain/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Marzio G. Mian, Translated by Elettra Pauletto ### Four by Four #46 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-46/ Last updated: 2025-10-11T13:47:48.000Z ## Housekeeping Moving *It All Connects...* to its new platform, Ghost, has come with a few extra steps I did not anticipate, most of which have been on my side of things, but one of which, [signing in](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signin), you need to perform, if you choose to. (If you’ve [upgraded to a paid subscription](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/account/plans), you’ve already signed in and you don’t need to do so again.) Once you sign in—all you need to do is provide the email address at which you receive the newsletter, no password is required—Ghost will recognize you as a subscriber, free or otherwise, and you will then have access to a comments section where you can share with me and other members your responses to the material I’ve curated. As well, you will no longer see the calls to subscribe that I insert in these emails or when you click through to my website (though free subscribers will still see calls to upgrade to a paid subscription). Finally, you'll also have access to your account through the “Account” button that will appear in the top right corner of your screen when you click through to my site. You’ll still receive *It All Connects...* if you don’t sign in, but if you would like to do so, please [click here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signin). --- ## News & Events Just a reminder about the events I have coming up next week: - On September 9 at 7 PM, I will be reading at [DADA](https://dadabar.nyc/home?ref=richardjnewman.com) in Ridgewood along with the artist and writer [Lizzie Scheader](https://www.lizziescheader.com/words?ref=richardjnewman.com). [More information](https://www.richardjnewman.com/events/september-9-2025-a-reading-at-dada/). - On September 11 at 6 PM, I will be reading at [Book Culture LIC](https://www.bookculture.com/event/lic-queens-writers-panel-0?ref=richardjnewman.com) along these fine writers: [Aida Zilelian](www.aidazilelian.com), [Emily Hockaday](http://www.emilyhockaday.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), [Jared Harél](https://jaredharel.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), [Pichchenda Bao](http://www.pichchendabao.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), and [Stine An](https://www.gregorspamsa.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com). Check out the [Book Culture website](https://www.bookculture.com/event/lic-queens-writers-panel-0?ref=richardjnewman.com) for more their bios and other information. - On September 13 at 2:30, I will be giving a talk/reading at the [Jackson Heights Public Library](https://share.google/sgZcZOkyhqNlBZ5M1?ref=richardjnewman.com) focusing on [*T’shuvah*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/tshuvah-2/),my third book of poetry. [More information](https://www.richardjnewman.com/events/how-writing-poetry-helped-me-come-to-terms-with-what-the-men-who-violated-me-did-to-me/). I also want to let you know that my latest post is up on Learning To Love The Questions, where I have started blogging for my publisher, Fernwood Press, about the connections between and among poetry, politics, and spirituality: “[What Poems Do We Need Right Now](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2025/08/27/what-poems-do-we-need-right-now/?ref=richardjnewman.com)?” --- ## Four Things To Read [*For Now, It Is Night*](https://archipelagobooks.org/book/for-now-it-is-night/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Hari Krishna Kaul, translated from the Kashmiri by Kalpa Raina, Tanveer Ajsi, Gowhar Fazili, and Gowhar Yaqoob: > I can’t sleep, therefore, I need to keep my mind busy. I must keep thinking about something—anything. All day long I keep thinking of my own problems. So what if I poke around in other people’s affairs now? Anything to pass the night. Spoken by the narrator of “A Song of Despair,” this quote captures if not precisely what motivates the ruminations and sometimes actions of many of the characters in the stories in this collection—they don’t all have trouble sleeping—then certainly the tenor of how they think about the world; and the quote certainly seems to capture a central aspect of the imagination by which the stories are animated. The author, Hari Krishna Kaul, an uncle of Kalpa Raina, one of the translators, was born in Srinagar, Kashmir, in 1934\. I know very little about Kashmir and its history, and so I am not going to pretend to be able to place Kaul in either his historical or his literary context. Kalpa Raina’s introduction does a good job of that in a way that actually whet’s your appetite for the stories themselves. (And if that sounds like a pitch for you to get the book and read the stories, it is. They are marvelous and fun, which is also important.) My ignorance about Kashmir notwithstanding, I did recognize certain aspects of the stories: the way they portray a traditional, somewhat insular community for which the alien and sometimes frightening outside world is barely worth noticing, unless and until—and there is always an until—it interferes with the community’s life. The characters confront the same kinds of problems we all confront, but—and I know this from Raina’s introduction; I don’t think I would have sussed it out too easily on my own—it is taken for granted within the narratives that this confrontation happens in the context of the social and political turmoil roiling Kashmir as contested territory. You won’t get a history lesson from these stories, but you do get a kind of psychological profile of people who have to live their lives under that kind of pressure, a pressure that often results in their having to leave. For that reason alone, the books bears more than one reading. **§§§** [Scenes From The Literary Blacklist](https://www.persuasion.community/p/scenes-from-the-literary-blacklist?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Elizabeth Kaye Cook and Melanie Jennings: > The right to disagree is sacred. This includes those who disagree with the consensus du jour. Coordinated attacks on magazines and writers that decline to take a stand or take the “wrong” stand or the not-strong-enough stand make it clear that many believe literature’s primary obligation is to political purity, rather than literary quality. Certain cultural and political events like #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and the Israel/Hamas war become litmus tests while others—the opioid crisis, the war in Sudan, the literal silencing of women in Afghanistan—pass mostly unheeded. Cook and Jennings begin their piece with the story of how a story they chose for publication as fiction co-editors for [*Crab Creek Review*](https://www.crabcreekreview.org/index.html?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* a decision with which the journal’s editor-in-chief agreed, was ultimately not published because of what might broadly be called “sensitivity concerns.” This is how they, in my opinion accurately, characterize the story, which was written by John Picard and is called “[Who Was That Masked Man?](https://www.persuasion.community/p/who-was-that-masked-man?ref=richardjnewman.com)”: “Tired of being support staff, Tonto takes back his original name (Puhihwikwasu’u) and returns to his tribe, thus derailing the Lone Ranger’s life of adventure.” Picard’s narrative is a biting, many-layered satire that sends up not only the racist stereotypes that the Tonto character embodies, but also the kinds of white manhood and masculinity embodied by the Lone Ranger himself. The editor-in-chief’s concerns about the story began, but did not end with a central component of that satire, the fact that Tonto speaks “Tonto-speak” throughout, which Tonto himself notes when he says that one of the reasons he wants to go back to live with his tribe, where he can speak his own language, is his desire to stop “sounding like two-year-old.” Cook and Jennings go on to identify other examples of what they call a “culture of censorship and censure in literary magazines,” but this one stuck with me most because it reminded me of an essay Janet Burroway published in *The Chronicle of Higher Education.* Called “[Slouching Towards Sensitivity](https://www.chronicle.com/article/slouching-toward-sensitivity?ref=richardjnewman.com),” the piece details the myriad sensitivity hoops, on both the left and the right, that she had to jump through in order to satisfy the publisher of the fifth edition of her widely used creative writing text, [*Imaginative Writing*](https://www.pearson.com/en-us/subject-catalog/p/imaginative-writing-the-elements-of-craft/P200000006742/9780137674152?ref=richardjnewman.com)*.*(Unfortunately, the Chronicle puts all its content behind a paywall. Signing up for a free account will allow you to read the article.) Here, for example, is the list of words that she was told would disqualify from use a published example of creative writing, regardless of the context in which the words were used: > hick, hayseed, clodhopper, ridge runner…towelhead…third world, homeless, white trash, whore, slut, slave, the Blacks, beaners and noble savages…Nazi, minstrel, blackface, homosexuals, boy, skinheads, dead animals, Rooskie, kike, spic, exotic and gumbo. Also Indians (cowboys and), dementia, shame, crazy, insane, ape, goddam moose, make love, fart, hell, goddam, screw up, asshole, along with some stronger expletives. Burroway’s and Picard’s experience do seem to parallel each other, except the Burroway’s text was ultimately published. I recommend reading her essay. I gave it to my creative writing students to read before we started using the fifth edition of her text. It changed the way they understood what a creative writing class was about. The one quibble I have with Cook and Jennings is that they implicitly conflate the problem posed when a publisher preemptively refuses to publish because they fear the consequences of offending readers and the question of how to handle the work of a writer whose writing and/or personal behavior, criminal or not, are unquestionably informed by any of the various discriminatory stances and hatreds the above list of words ostensibly signals. The two issues are not unrelated, but I do think they merit separate consideration. **§§§** “[Rhetoric Without Reckoning](https://jewishcurrents.org/rhetoric-without-reckoning?ref=richardjnewman.com),” by Simone Zimmerman: > In reading these unprecedented Jewish condemnations of Israeli actions, one gets the impression that something in Israel’s approach on the ground has changed dramatically in the past few months, not just in degree, but in kind. It has not. Zimmerman is referring to the recent statements being made by Jewish leaders who had previously, and unequivocally, supported Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. While some of these leaders, she points out, have now accepted that Israel is in fact perpetrating a genocide, others, either by implication or explicit statement, still refuse to do so, even as they (finally) criticize Israel for its use of famine as a weapon of war. One example Zimmer quotes is this op-ed by Rabbi Daniel Gropper. Gropper was one of the rabbis who spoke outside the Israeli consulate in New York calling “for Israel to let a surge of food and other aid into Gaza...for the hostages to be released...and for an end to the war.” This is how Gropper characterized his participation in that protest, “I spoke as a rabbi who loves Israel, who wants Israelis to be safe, and who desperately wants this war to end — a Jew who desperately wants the hostages home,” but, by omission at least, not as a Jew protesting the injustices committed against the Palestinians, whether historically or even just since October 2023\. Like Zimmerman, I do not want to minimize the importance of Gropper's willingness, and the willingness of those like him, to speak out now, even if it is late, even if it is framed more as a matter of Jewish self-interest than anything else, but it is also important not to pretend that statements like his represent anything other than that self-interest. (Gropper does not use the words Palestine or Palestinian even once.) This is where Zimmerman’s call for an explicitly Jewish-framed public reckoning—for leaders like Gropper and the organization’s they represent to do a kind of teshuvah—is important. The essay is worth reading for Zimmerman’s description of that process, but also for the information she brings together in the links she provides. **§§§** [The Arabic Alphabet: A Guided Tour](https://alifbatourguide.com/the-arabic-alphabet/intro/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Michael Beard, with illustrations by Houman Mortazavi: > Before I learned to read it, I confess that the Arabic alphabet seemed to me mysterious, amorphous, drifting, cloudlike, and a little sinister. Eventually, I came to feel that I wasn’t the only one. Eventually, as I learned it, letter by letter, it looked like any other alphabet, but a bit more beautiful. Eventually, this seemed a good reason to write a book about it. Unlike most of the readings I recommend, which are either books or essays, this one is a website. I met Michael Beard, the site’s creator, when I was invited in [2012](x-devonthink-item://53401E79-5F57-477D-9EAC-516433CF32AE) to offer some brief comments on my translations of classical Persian poetry at an event honoring [Professor Ahmad Mahdavi Damghani](https://cmes.fas.harvard.edu/news/roy-mottahedeh-remembers-ahmad-mahdavi-damghani?ref=richardjnewman.com), which was, for me, a real honor. At the time, Beard and I discussed my writing an essay exploring what Iran would look like to an American, English-speaking reader if all they had access to were the translations available on the poetry bookshelves of, say, Barnes & Noble. I still think that essay, or some version of it, might be worth writing, though it would require altering the underlying motivation. At the time, there was precious little Iranian literature being published in translation, certainly not much that most general readers would know about, and so the view of Iran provided by the likes of Coleman Barks’ Rumi or Daniel Ladinsky’s Hafez was the dominant one out there. I mention that discussion because Beard’s impulse in suggesting that essay to me seems akin to the impulse behind this website: to interrogate the lens through which we know the Other and, in this case, to make that Other less alien. Here, for example, are two paragraphs in which he compares the Arabic and Roman alphabets in his introduction to the letter [Alif](https://alifbatourguide.com/the-arabic-alphabet/alif/?ref=richardjnewman.com): > The letters of the Roman alphabet are designed to seem physical objects of substance and weight. At the bottom of our letters, serifs have evolved to help us imagine them on little pedestals. We visualize our own alphabetic characters, the ones I’m using now, as objects taking up space, standing on a surface. The Roman alphabet’s simple upright, our capital I, takes up space assertively. The Capital I song in Sesame Street, which dates back to the days of Crosby, Stills and Nash (who sang it), makes our “I” a narrow house on a hill, inhabited, obviously, by the self. > The Arabic alphabet evolved from the same Phoenician characters as ours, but the Arabic letters do not feel like houses or towers with solid foundations. Alif ignores the ground and seems to float in air. Otherwise it would seem balanced precariously on its point. You can trace that sharp edge, taking shape slowly under the hands of countless scribes, shaped by the implement which creates it, the track of the reed pen. Even when shaped by typographic font or composed on a computer screen, Alif preserves a memory of the reed, with its chisel-shaped nib. The result tapers at the bottom and carries a little barb at the top. It’s this balanced, blade-like form that western calligraphers imitate when they attempt to make Roman letters look Aladdinesque. Beard’s ability to see the letters as more than letters, to give them—however intuitively, poetically, subjectively—their full cultural weight makes this (as yet incomplete) website well worth reading through. ****Please Consider Becoming A Paid Subscriber** If you've been enjoying **Four By Four* and would like to help support the work of curating this material, you can become a paid subscriber by clicking [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/account/plans). (You'll need to sign in and then click on the Account button that appears in the top right corner of your screen.) You can also make a one-time contribution by clicking [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/support). --- ## Four Things To See All images are from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and are in the public domain. ### Tupu Inca Artists (1400-1535 CE) Tupu is a [Quechua](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quechua%5Fpeople?ref=richardjnewman.com) [term](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quechuan%5Flanguages?ref=richardjnewman.com) for pin (“pithu” in [Aymara](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aymara%5Fpeople?ref=richardjnewman.com) and “alfiler” in Spanish).Women in the Andes use these pins to fasten textile garments, such as the [acsu](https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/fr-FR/objects/46789?ref=richardjnewman.com) or [lliclla](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/316892?ref=richardjnewman.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/09/tupu-2.jpg) **§§§** ### Seated Elder [Tolita-Tumaco](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumaco-La%5FTolita%5Fculture?ref=richardjnewman.com) artist(s) (200 BCE-300CE) From the Met’s website: “This sculpture...depicts an elderly person, recognizable by facial wrinkles, baggy skin beneath the eyes, the few remaining teeth, and chin stubble. Its flattened head reveals cranial modification during childhood, a cultural practice that could have signaled ethnic identity or rank in antiquity. The gender of this effigy is not clear. Marked nipples, as in this figure’s chest, were more common in female than male representations in Tolita-Tumaco and Jama-Coaque ceramic traditions of coastal Ecuador. This statue, however, lacks the long skirts that are typically seen in female images.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/09/seated-elder.jpg) **§§§** ### Macuilcoatl Mexixca artist(s) (1450-1521 CE) From the Met’s website: “\[T\]his Aztec standard bearer represents one of the pre-Hispanic deities known as the Macuiltonaleque, or ‘lords of the five souls’... Associated with feasting, gambling, and games of chance, the youthful Macuiltonaleque embodied notions of pleasure, excess, and disease in pre-Hispanic Central Mexico. As denizens of the night, they were also thought to represent exalted warriors who, upon dying in battle, rose to the heavens to carry the sun disc on their backs from dawn till its midday zenith. As spiritual guides, the Macuiltonaleque inhabited, or ‘possessed,’ the five fingers of native priests and mystics so that the latter might be allowed to predict future events, diagnose disease, or act as matchmakers. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/09/macuilcoatl.jpg) **§§§** ### Headband Nasca Artist (6th-7th century CE) This vibrantly colored headband with ornamental tassels, made by [Nasca ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca%5Fculture?ref=richardjnewman.com)weavers on the south coast of Peru, illustrates both the impressive technical skill needed to produce a fabric of this length and complexity and the remarkable preservation of organic material in the Nasca desert, one of the driest places on earth...The exclusive use of camelid fibers, obtained from llamas and alpacas native to the higher altitudes in the Andes, suggests an influence of the highland [Wari](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wari%5Fculture?ref=richardjnewman.com) culture, an empire that later dominated the coast. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/09/headband.jpg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### Country Gongbang - Mushroom Hunter **§§§** ### Endea Owens & The Cookout - Where The Nubians Grow **§§§** ### Remember Monday - Fat Bottomed Girls **§§§** ### Tuba Skinny - Jubilee Stomp --- ## Four Things About Me Last month, I received an envelope in the mail marked “Confidential” from someone whose name on the return address I did not recognize. When I opened it, it was a copy of their Bachelor of Science degree from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. There was no letter or note explaining why they had sent it to me, so there was no way for me to know at first if it was meant as a thank you or an I-told-you-so. It took a bit of digging in my email archive, but it turned the sender was a student who took my class on Zoom during the pandemic shutdown. I have a vague memory of a returning student—this person was working full-time—who had quite a bit of difficulty making the switch from in-person instruction to a virtual classroom. They had not been in school for some time and were not, at least not at first, as tech-equipped or -savvy as the online classes demanded. In the end, though, it all worked out. I did my best to be more than flexible—as did every teacher I knew—and this student passed, moving on to John Jay, where they received their BS this past June. So I think it's safe to assume that the copy of their degree was meant as a thank you of sorts, though I can’t imagine why they didn’t write a note. It put me in mind, though, of how rarely I have heard back from students over the years. I can think of one who wrote me to say thank you after they graduated from law school, of another who wrote me a long letter about how important my creative writing class was to them, and there have been a couple with whom I maintained a friendship for a while (one of whom, whose spouse was on active military duty, stopped corresponding with me after I criticized our invasion of Iraq in 2003). Still another, after maybe two decades, found me online and took ou a paid subscription to this newsletter. Overall, though, given that I taught for 36 years, it has been a very rare occurrence for me to hear back from students. So I appreciate that my former student sent me their diploma, even if I had to some research to figure out its backstory. **§§§** A book that had a profound influence on me as a young man was *Fear and Trembling,* by Søren Kierkegaard, which I read when I was an undergraduate. The book is Kierkegaard‘s attempt to make sense of the biblical story of The Binding of Isaac, which in Jewish culture is also known as the Akedah (Genesis 22:1-18). Most of you are, I am sure, familiar with the basic plot, which is that God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah. Abraham obeys and takes Isaac to the mountain, prepared to offer him as a sacrifice. On the way up the mountain, Isaac points out to his father that, while he sees that they have fire and wood, they do not have the sheep they will need to make the sacrifice. Abraham tells his son not to worry, that God will provide the animal they need, which God eventually does, but only after Abraham has bound Isaac to the alter and is about to kill him. It‘s been enough years that my memory of Kierkegaard‘s argument is spotty at best, but at it‘s heart was the bind in which God‘s command put Abraham. On the one hand, he had to have felt he had no choice but to obey; on the other, he also had to have had, simultaneously, absolute faith that, in the end, God would not ask him to kill his son. When I read *Fear and Trembling,* I was struggling with my own relationship to the god Judaism expected me to believe in, to the idea of God in general and whether or not I needed such an idea at the center of my spiritual life. The book captivated me. I don't remember now if I read it for the class I took with him, but I know I discussed it with my professor, friend, and mentor Terry Netter and that I shared with him during those discussions my primary frustration with the book: Kierkegaard seemed to ignore Isaac entirely. More to the point, he seemed to be saying, if only by implication, that Abraham‘s crisis of faith—his need to demonstrate his absolute faith in God—made it okay for him to deny or disavow both his role as Isaac‘s father, the love he had for him *as* a father, and Isaac's humanity in and of itself, which is what made it possible for Abraham to use Isaac as the instrument through which his faith would be proven. For me, this was best represented by the fact that Abraham did not ask Isaac if he was willing to be sacrificed. How could the god in whose image we were ostensibly created, I remember asking Terry, consider that proof of anything righteous? (I have since learned that there is somewhere a midrash which says that Abraham failed God's test.) I don‘t recall what Terry said in response, but I do remember some time later that a woman who worked in his office—he was the director of the Fine Arts Center where I went to college—told me he‘d confided in her, because he did not want it to go to my head, that I might very well have found “the key to proving Kierkegaard wrong.” (Those were her words; I have no idea if they were his.) What made me think of this story was looking back at the paintings Terry did back then that I linked to in Four by Four #1\. He was, I think, the first male teacher in my young adult life who took my intellect and my creativity seriously without trying to mold me in his own image. I wrote him a letter ten or fifteen years ago to thank him for that, but he never responded. I have always regretted losing touch with him after I graduated. **§§§** I met my oldest and closest friend at the same college where I took Terry Netter’s class. Ronny and I were English majors. I don’t remember how it came to be that we started talking to each other, but once we discovered that we lived in the same town, we discovered immediately that we had a lot to talk about. Two things stick out about that initial getting-to-know-you conversation. We’d both been friends with a guy named Don, who’d been killed in a car accident while we were still in junior high school. Don had been Ronny’s classmate in the local Catholic school. I don’t remember how he and I became friends. Probably as part of that conversation—Where did you go to high school?—we discovered another connection that surprised us both. The Catholic high school Ronny went to no longer exists as far as I know, but she had to take the same bus to get there as I had to take to get to the yeshiva high school I attended from 8th to 11th grade. “You were the kid at the front of the bus!” I remember her exclaiming when we figured this out. Indeed, I was. There were three Jewish families in my town. One family kept their son in public school. The other family sent their children to the same yeshiva I went to, but they did not take the same bus as me. I was the only one who rode the school bus that also picked up Ronny and her friends. They were very curious about who I was, she told me, since I always sat by myself in the front of the bus, but—she didn't remember why exactly—they chose to let me stay a mystery. Ronny and I became very close very quickly, and we remained close throughout our years at college, so close, in fact, that we promised to be at each other’s wedding no matter where in the world we happened to be at the time. I kept that promise, when I returned earlier than I was originally supposed to from teaching in South Korea so I could be at her wedding. She tried to keep her half of the bargain, but failed, having been defeated by a huge summer traffic jam on the Long Island Expressway on her way to the courthouse where I got married. She was very pregnant at the time and just could not endure sitting in the car any longer. (I have a vague recollection that, adding insult to injury, the air conditioner in her car went on the fritz while she and her husband were on their way.) It is impossible, of course, to capture a nearly forty-year friendship in the space of this short paragraph, so I will just say this: despite the ways in which our lives—our ambitions, our families, our careers, the fact that we lived in different states—inevitably took us far from each other, that distance disappeared whenever we talked or saw each other. Then, in April 2021, Ronny was murdered by her husband, the man I came home from Korea to see her marry, in an act of domestic violence that—and I know this is a cliché, but it is in this case true—I don’t think anyone saw coming. I know some of the details, which I am not going to share here, and I have my suspicions about what might have caused Ronny’s husband to snap, but those are speculations from a distance that I also think it would be irresponsible to share. We had not spoken since the beginning of the pandemic when I heard the news that she was dead, and I have been these past five years missing her voice, missing her. Her presence in the world was an important part of mine, even if we were not always in the present with each other. **§§§** I didn’t get my driver’s license till I was twenty, which was late for a kid growing up where I did, but once I got it, I inherited my grandfather’s red, Chevy Malibu station wagon. My college roommate called it the “sporty red wagon.” I don’t remember how Ronny and I got to talking about the difference between manual and automatic transmissions, but she was very surprised to find out I did not know how to drive a stick shift, which she considered an essential life skill. She insisted I had to learn and that she would be the one to teach me. She had a very old Volkswagen at the time and my first lesson was to be driving it around an empty campus parking lot one Sunday. I was just beginning to get the hang of shifting gears when, as I put my foot on the break to slow down for a turn, the car did not slow down and I ended up running into the curb near the parking lot’s entrance. Ronny smiled and in the deadpan voice she used when delivering the dry jokes she was famous for said. “I knew the brakes were going to go out sooner or later, but I figured I had another month or two at least.” She seemed perfectly calm, but I was really rattled. I hadn’t been driving all that long and felt, in what I now know was a bit of an overreaction, like I’d just had a too-close-for-comfort brush with death. (This was before it was against the law not to wear seat belts, so I don’t know if we were wearing them. Ronny, though, was often a stickler for safety, so we very well might have been.) I don't remember what happened after that except that Ronny never did teach me how to drive a stick shift and, to this day, I still don't know how to do it. ****Now that you’ve read all the way to the end, I hope you’ll consider supporting** ***Four By Four** ****by becoming a paid subscriber** If you’ve been enjoying **Four By Four* and would like to help support the work of curating this material, you can become a paid subscriber by clicking [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/account/plans). (You'll need to sign in and then click on the Account button that appears in the top right corner of your screen.) You can also make a one-time contribution by clicking [here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/support). --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in* [*my work*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/) *or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* ### Round Up #1: “Four Things to See” Issues 1-15 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/round-up-1-four-things-to-see-issues-1-15/ Last updated: 2025-09-11T18:46:05.000Z If you’ve been reading “Four By Four” regularly, you know that each issue contains a curated collection of four images, four articles, and four pieces of music. After ten issues, in other words, you’ve received forty curated items in each category. After forty-five issues, which is what I am up to now, there are 180! Once I realized just how many items that is, I decided it would be good to organize them into an archive of some sort that I could refer to in the future. Then it occurred to me that some of you might feel the same way, which is why I’ve decided to create these “Round Up” posts. I’m going to share the first three—images, articles, music—from issues 1-15 with everyone. This way you can get a sense of what I am talking about, but after that, the round-up posts will be available to paid subscribers only. If you’d like to receive these round-up posts on a regular basis, along with the other perks of being a paid subscriber, and you are ***not*** already a subscriber, [click here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal). If you’re currently receiving the newsletter for free and would like to upgrade your subscription, [click here](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/account/plans) and follow these steps: 1. Sign in with your email address. 2. That should take you to my home page. 3. Click on the purple “Account” at the top right corner of the page. 4. Choose either the monthly or yearly subscription plan. ## [Issue #1](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-1/) These are four paintings by the artist [Terrance Netter](https://www.terencenetter.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), who was my teacher and my friend when I was an undergraduate at Stony Brook University. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/08/5edb155b-b9f1-4286-9881-b33c9d8728fe_350x472-2.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/08/152d5a1a-4ce6-411c-a8c3-d1db55125a13_350x478-1.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/08/bbde54a8-9257-4d86-a9b5-652d307fe455_350x350.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/08/fa485c09-8563-4f0c-8912-ff83a9d49b30_350x459.webp) From left to right, starting at the top: [Time + Run + Out; Moonscape; 79; Ruins](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-1/) --- ## [Issue #2](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-2/) These are royalty free images I found while poking around on the web. The first one, by Franz Marc, reminds me a little bit of the paintings by Terry Netter I included in [Four by Four #1](https://itallconnects.substack.com/p/four-by-four-1). I also love the idea of hanging poems from the branches of a tree. It’d be an interesting thing to do, say, for a botanical garden event. ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KY2i!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0526e263-ef40-41a7-8e04-adc2e2d6e201_1000x1481.webp) The Little Mountain Goats (1913–1914) painting in high resolution by Franz Marc. Original from the Saint Louis Art Museum. (Digitally enhanced by [rawpixel](https://images.rawpixel.com/image%5F1000/czNmcy1wcml2YXRlL3Jhd3BpeGVsX2ltYWdlcy93ZWJzaXRlX2NvbnRlbnQvbHIvcGQyMjUtcGRmcmFuem1hcmMwMDAwNi1pbWFnZS5qcGc.jpg?ref=richardjnewman.com).) **§§§** ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tNAx!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F835b8925-a844-41d1-bdbf-dec9708a0a6f_1024x709.jpeg) Teahouse at Koishikawa the morning after a snowfall, Katsushika, Hokusai, 1760-1849, artist. (From the [Library of Congress](https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/pnp/jpd/02400/02457v.jpg?ref=richardjnewman.com)) **§§§** ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cdfR!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9f0a2ed9-31b7-48be-a90c-e64b2bb0c48d_457x1024.jpeg) Hanging poems on a cherry tree, by Ishikawa, Toyonobu (1711-1785), from the [Library of Congress](https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/pnp/jpd/02100/02148v.jpg?ref=richardjnewman.com) **§§§** ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4_bL!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F33b2bcb4-8be5-409d-a90a-40964e4bf7ec_1200x1057.jpeg) Narcisse by Weimar, Wilhelm - [Museum of Arts and Crafts](https://www.europeana.eu/item/2048429/item%5FJ62KIO7MS4ECI3OMKSGVNLC4B3IJVL36?ref=richardjnewman.com), Hamburg, Germany - CC0. --- ## [Issue #3](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-3/) I don’t remember where I found these drawings, but I know that they are in the public domain and that they are gorgeous: ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AYXL!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fee6efe52-8507-43e2-8117-fc2d0db7198f_887x1199.jpeg) **§§§** ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wVfw!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbada34a5-5b37-460f-a28e-17bff9f812d4_1200x972.jpeg) **§§§** ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kGUZ!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcfeea1b3-6df2-4d35-b04b-28c8684d67fc_2592x3500.jpeg) **§§§** ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JWt3!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd897a110-9f52-4441-9cb3-8f60a678c2bb_1200x974.jpeg) --- ## [Issue #4](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-4/) All by Vincent Van Gogh ### Landscape from Saint-Rémy (1889) ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Aa6a!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F55faf474-1fae-44bb-b6be-09c4cd2da959_3500x2744.jpeg) **§§§** ### Shoes (1888) ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!eJce!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8685aa17-271d-4d0e-9b3e-819d0c1da5df_3500x2952.jpeg) **§§§** ### Stairway at Auvers (1890) ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!K9TD!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2dabdc46-5201-4e1f-b7fd-b822c360fb0a_3508x2479.jpeg) **§§§** ### Head of a skeleton with a burning cigarette ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hhNv!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F05668f2f-a649-4bef-96d7-e9f3fe003d03_2481x3289.jpeg) --- ## [Issue #5](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-5/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/08/chrysanthemum.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/08/lilie.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/08/sommerhyazinthe.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/08/thistle.jpeg) Photographs of Wilhelm Weimar, from left to right, starting at the top: Chrysanthemum, Lilie, Sommerhyazinthe, Thistle --- ## [Issue #6](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-6/) These are paintings by Paul Klee (1879–1940), who is known as the father of Abstract Art and was a central figure of the Bauhaus movement. Influenced by Cubism and Surrealism, he is best known for minimal stick figures, abstract forms, vivid colors and his usage of symbols drawn from imagination, poetry, music, literature, and the world around him. ### Hardy Plants (1934) ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!As2z!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20c6a73d-8de9-46da-9332-a576aaaab929_1200x892.jpeg) **§§§** ### Persische Nachtigallen (Persian Nightingales) (1917) ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!c-rd!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1b3ef6cb-15b4-4aef-a6ab-30a05f97b1f9_955x1200.jpeg) **§§§** ### The Harbinger of Autumn ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kDob!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F53cf8643-d1d8-4097-9cf6-f883213e6a7c_1200x922.jpeg) **§§§** ### Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to Be of Higher Rank (1903) ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vyqZ!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb91455ec-ab2e-450a-90c1-0b53965e39fc_2000x1148.jpeg) --- ## [Issue #7](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-7/) These are from the [Smithsonian’s Open Access Collection](https://www.si.edu/openaccess?ref=richardjnewman.com). ### [A Woman Has Registered To Vote](http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ng49ca746ad-9ac5-704b-e053-15f76fa0b4fa?ref=richardjnewman.com) ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ps1w!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa3b44d5a-5a9b-41aa-85fd-340c32215277_654x1200.jpeg) **§§§** ### [Collection Box of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society](http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/fd51812d554-b14d-4d08-8d4e-c91e66e14bd2?ref=richardjnewman.com) Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of the Garrison Family in memory of George Thompson Garrison ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wKFF!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9131b35b-ffd9-4f0f-a6db-932c6e5cd691_1045x1200.jpeg) **§§§** ### [Carte-de-Visite Portrait of Harriet Tubman](http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/fd5c1fe9caa-2405-4c5f-ae98-e33ce83b5f30?ref=richardjnewman.com) Collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture shared with the Library of Congress ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Wjkg!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F93a932ec-e7c8-4886-944a-90104f70adfd_756x1200.jpeg) **§§§** ### Black-and-white Ruffed Lemur ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lWbZ!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7def12de-ffb8-4015-891e-fd97c35ef82d_1200x800.jpeg) **§§§** ## [Issue #8](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-8/) These photographs are by Carol Highsmith, who takes pictures of all aspects of American life in all fifty states, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. She has donated her life’s work, a collection of around 100,000 images to the Library of Congress. ### An elaborate spiral staircase, at the Nathaniel Russell House in South Carolina ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f3360eb02-8e56-476f-b0d4-1db1266bd1b5_1200x836-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### An infrared-camera view of the New River Gorge Bridge in Fayette County, West Virginia ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fc05280a7-991c-4fac-9fc3-7c128df2cec3_1200x882-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Prince William Sound on the south coast of Alaska ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fe359dd19-5913-4cf3-8001-abfc0ef16214_1098x1200-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Slot Canyon in Arizona ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f35d2bc47-c365-4d5b-9720-81c88f912d78_1200x800-jpeg.jpg) --- ## [Issue #9](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-9/) ### Cloud Dragon, by Morizumi, Tsurana, 1809-1892 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f777305c5-5fac-4207-a032-df419c659814_806x1024-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Military Dragon, by Valturio, Roberto, 1405-1475 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f37df00cd-25ca-4798-99f5-ef34aa5acfda_483x591-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Friendly Dragon An only mildly fierce dragon, hanging from the Providence Children's Museum in Providence, the capital of, and largest city in, Rhode Island. Originally created by Symmetry Products for a Chinese painting exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, it was moved to the roof of the Providence Children's Museum in 1997\. The museum held a naming contest, and the dragon is called Nori. (Source: Providence Children's Museum article dated 2013, viewed 2023) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fef80dfba-9715-4dd5-b203-f4bbd699fea3_876x1024-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Ryu Shoten (Dragon Rising To the Heavens), Ogata, Gekkō, 1859-1920 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f68abdb4c-d0f5-4364-b151-df82b54446ac_709x1024-jpeg.jpg) --- ## [Issue #10](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-9/) These are chromolithographic patterns from *L'animal dans la Décoration* (1897) by Maurice Pillard Verneuil (1869–1942), French artist and decorator in the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movement. Verneuil studied and developed his style from Eugène Grasset, a Franco-Swiss pioneer of Art Nouveau design. Inspired by Japanese art, nature and particularly the sea. He is known for his contributions to the Art Deco movement through the use of bold floral designs on ceramic tiles, wallpapers, textiles, and posters. (From [Raw Pixel](https://www.rawpixel.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com)) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fd2c0d939-a266-485e-9b9a-20335f1f9b7b_1429x1990-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f79894c97-1eb3-4fa8-886d-7fea1d4fac8b_1200x923-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f4b792e9b-fb4b-4486-8f89-312d8c342fdb_802x1200-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/08/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f9e80511a-b99b-40ce-a742-0e5a1c366b70_796x1199-jpeg.jpg) ## [Issue #11](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-11/) All images are from the National Gallery. #### **The University Singers of New Orleans, photographed in 1879 by Llewellyn A. Sawyer (1844 - 1923)** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f39bfbc16-de55-445b-add0-0e9823f335bc_4096x2695-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ## Portrait of a Family #### Photographed by Edith R. Wilson (1864 - 1924) in 1922 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fc73e923e-7c4b-462f-a423-9a61d7fc12ad_2594x3417-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ## Branche de Pommier #### Painted in 1922-23 by Eugène Atget (1857 - 1927) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f4e281f9d-3071-4f76-9640-92fbd50be24f_3318x4038-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ## Allegory on Copulation #### By an anonymous Italian artist in the fourth quarter of the 15th century ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f203832d1-25c1-4816-98e5-1f3c281b6bf4_4000x2681-jpeg.jpg) --- ## [Issue #12](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-12/) Julie de Graag (1877–1924) was a female Dutch graphic artist and painter. She mainly produced graphic works in an Art Nouveau style which have been described as being both “sober yet refined.” ### Chrysanthemums ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f0f9fd46d-5545-4625-97b8-aa6b375ed63a_748x1200-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Dog's head (1920) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f0887b938-b0ec-4711-ba8d-2e6efcae0841_3247x3500-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Flower (1920) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f7a633cfd-3147-4aaf-8468-796edfa8cfcc_3344x3247-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Chestnut Leaf ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fe57d921f-d566-4fc6-a615-5747e841f02a_3500x2240-jpeg.jpg) --- ## [Issue #13](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-13/) Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) is known as one of the first pioneers of modern abstract art. He employed geometry, abstract colors, and abstract forms in his artworks. He believed that art can be used to express the “inner life” of an artist. ### Untitled (1916) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fb9fc5292-3112-45ed-96dd-2e839a4770d6_2822x2123-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Painting with Green Center (1913) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f2b232499-3889-4b5e-8632-61d18b02d62d_1200x1117-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Free Curve to the Point: Accompanying Sound of Geometric Curves (1925) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f86286b00-a345-49e1-91a2-fd355de1b4fe_958x1200-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Landscape with Two Poplars (1912) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fd209d55a-e613-464a-a103-c35985727a9b_1200x938-jpeg.jpg) --- ## [Issue #14](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-14/) These images are all from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ### Bugaku This photograph of a woman in a bugaku-style costume was probably produced for the tourist trade. Bugaku, a traditional form of Japanese court theater that dates back to the first millenium, was performed only by men. The photographer's use of a female model suggests that he was concerned more with effect than with authenticity. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fe409722b-2307-40c9-aed5-fad63a7847a5_2514x3180-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### The God of Good Fortune Daikoku, on Horseback, Being Led by an Ohara Maiden by Hokkyō Kōitsu, probably 1834, year of the horse ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f1d1d2112-73ed-4cc6-b35d-72e0e5839ed2_1594x1813-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Rakan In the Style of Keinin Sumiyoshi Japanese, 15th century ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f4434ba92-73ac-4f40-b114-59678939681b_2060x4000-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Handscroll of Ten Homoerotic (Nanshoku) Scenes, by Miyagawa Chōshun, early 18th century Although during the Edo period there was no taboo or stigma associated with male-male sexual liaisons, and many famous writers, artists and other celebrities were known to have same-sex lovers, there are very few surviving deluxe paintings capturing scenes like this one, which can be seen in context in this [handscroll](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/888663?ref=richardjnewman.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fc85779f8-5fb2-41df-a9ea-8f1eec40e74f_4000x2686-jpeg.jpg) --- ## [Issue #15](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-15/) These are from the New York Public Library’s collection of sheet music of American popular songs. ### All Aboard For Podunk ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f82299ef4-eb0f-4aae-a42f-1bd2d14adccd_603x760-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Gesundheit (To Your Health) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f0f6b853c-7165-4e90-bef7-eed6c03df36d_595x760-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Bright Eyes ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f511ea31e-7bcd-45ee-97e9-39fd5d49aaaa_603x760-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Lovers Once But Strangers Now or Strangers Now But Lovers Once ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f4bc2a9bd-1b2d-49b5-9a7c-4c151259e776_596x760-jpeg.jpg) --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* ### Lines That Didn’t Make The Cut #3 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/lines-that-didnt-make-the-cut-2/ Last updated: 2025-08-28T03:04:26.000Z **Lines That Didn’t Make The Cut #3** You know you are expected to respond, that rules establish how to choose your words. Instead, you lead her out beyond the edge and watch her iron shackles become birds. Surrender to this failure. Shave your head. Embrace her like the resurrected dead. ### Lines That Didn’t Make The Cut #4 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/lines-that-didnt-make-the-cut-3/ Last updated: 2025-08-27T10:00:45.000Z **Lines That Didn’t Make The Cut #4** You did not create the arrogance that lies in wait. Wilted in the sun, surrendered generosity is not an accident. Facts matter. So does silence. ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-30/ Last updated: 2025-08-26T16:56:08.000Z A lesson I learn each time I think I’ve finished a manuscript: that’s when I need to let it sit for however long it takes—this time it’s been more than a year—before I read through it at least twice more to catch at the manuscript level what needs changing. I’m always way to programmatic at first, but I need to do that in order to be able to let my intuition do its work. When that work is done, so is the manuscript. ### Lines That Didn’t Make The Cut #2 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/lines-that-didnt-make-the-cut-1/ Last updated: 2025-08-26T17:01:10.000Z **Lines That Didn’t Make The Cut #2** They can’t be less inhuman than they are. The line of people leaving, a living scar across the flesh that was our home, stretched far beyond where I, at six years old, could see. Even now, that child breathes in me, riding his father's shoulders, hiding the jar of colored shells he feared they’d confiscate beneath the coat his mother wrapped him in. ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-29/ Last updated: 2025-08-25T19:25:30.000Z _No content available._ ### September 2025 Events URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/events/september-2025-events/ Last updated: 2025-08-25T12:59:14.000Z ### September 9, 2025: Reading at DADA [](https://www.richardjnewman.com/events/september-9-2025-a-reading-at-dada/) **Date:** September 9, 2025 **Time:** 7:00 **Where:** 60-47 Myrtle Avenue, Ridgewood, NY 11385 **Admission:** Free, but please buy a drink or some food to support the venue. I will be reading selections from all three of my books along with the artist and writer [Lizzie Scheader](https://www.lizziescheader.com/words?ref=richardjnewman.com). **§§§** ### September 11, 2025: Reading At Book Culture LIC [](https://www.richardjnewman.com/events/september-11-a-reading-at-book-culture-lic/) **Date:** September 11, 2025 **Time:** 6:00–7:00 **Where:** 26-09 Jackson Ave, Long Island City, NY 11101 **Admission:** Free I will be reading from [*T'shuvah*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/tshuvah-2/) along with these other fine writers: [Aida Zilelian](https://www.richardjnewman.com/events/www.aidazilelian.com), [Emily Hockaday](http://www.emilyhockaday.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), [Jared Harél](https://jaredharel.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com#), [Pichchenda Bao](http://www.pichchendabao.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), and [Stine An](https://www.gregorspamsa.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com). Check out the [Book Culture website](https://www.bookculture.com/event/lic-queens-writers-panel-0?ref=richardjnewman.com) for more their bios and other information. **§§§** ### September 13, 2025 - How Writing Poetry Helped Me Come To Terms With What The Men Who Violated Me Did To Me When I Was A Boy **Date:** September 13 **Time:** 2:30-3:30 **Where:** 35-51 81 Street, Jackson Heights, NY 11372 • (718) 899-2500 **Admission:** Free **§§§** ### September 28, 2025 - Artmageddon **Date:** September 28 **Time:** 3:00-3:45 **Where:** 1517 Ditmas Avenue, Brooklyn (near 16th Street) **Admission:** Free I'll be reading with Ama Birch, Quincy Scott Jones, Matthew Beckerman, and Jiwon Choi ### “Time In The Rock” URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/time-in-the-rock/ Last updated: 2025-08-25T10:00:04.000Z And there I saw the seed upon the mountain but it was not a seed it was a star but it was not a star in was a world but it was not a world it was a god but it was not a god it was a laughter blood red within and lightning for its rind the root came out like gold and it was anger the root came out like fire and it was fury the root came out like horn and it was purpose but it was not a root it was a hand —*from* “Time in the Rock or Prelude to Definition,” Conrad Aiken ### You Hate Me URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/you-hate-me/ Last updated: 2025-08-24T16:28:05.000Z You hate me, but you do not need my body for that. In fact, it’s much easier without my body. All you really need is the idea of me, the vessel into which you pour everything you're afraid is in you and that you do not want to be. ### Lines That Didn’t Make The Cut #1 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/a-dream/ Last updated: 2025-08-26T17:00:54.000Z **Lines That Didn’t Make The Cut #1** ...when I finally slept again, I reentered the house that wasn’t mine, that I nonetheless knew as intimately as if I’d built it myself. At the turn in the hallway leading to the kitchen, I stood suddenly face to face with my mother-in-law, who was holding her phone in front of her, blank screen facing outward like a shield, as she repeated over and over again, softly, under her breath, “Boro, boro kenar!” I couldn’t tell if she was talking to me or to whatever she saw behind her clenched eyelids, but when she pushed me out of the way—somehow she knew where she was going without having to see—she pushed me once more into the waking world, which is why I’m sitting here, jasmine tea steaming at the edge of my desk, staring at the black cat giving futile chase across the cup’s outer curve to the mouse mocking her from the opposite inner curve. The house, of course, was me; my mother-in-law, a part of me my dreaming self chose to conjure as her. Even in the dream, I didn’t know what I was looking for or why it would have been in the kitchen, only that what I sensed hovering in the emptiness beyond the line I used my mother-in-law’s push to keep myself from crossing had been waiting there for a longer time than I wanted to admit, ready and eager to pounce. ### Four by Four #45 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-45/ Last updated: 2025-08-22T12:21:29.000Z ## Upcoming Events It’s been a long time since I’ve given readings on a regular basis, but I am making a conscious effort to start doing so again. The second week of September is going to be a busy one! - On September 9 at 7 PM, I will be reading at [DADA](https://dadabar.nyc/home?ref=richardjnewman.com) in Ridgewood along with the artist and writer [Lizzie Scheader](https://www.lizziescheader.com/words?ref=richardjnewman.com). [More information](https://www.richardjnewman.com/events/september-9-2025-a-reading-at-dada/). - On September 11 at 6 PM, I will be reading at [Book Culture LIC](https://www.bookculture.com/event/lic-queens-writers-panel-0?ref=richardjnewman.com) along these fine writers: [Aida Zilelian](www.aidazilelian.com), [Emily Hockaday](http://www.emilyhockaday.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), [Jared Harél](https://jaredharel.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), [Pichchenda Bao](http://www.pichchendabao.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), and [Stine An](https://www.gregorspamsa.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com). Check out the [Book Culture website](https://www.bookculture.com/event/lic-queens-writers-panel-0?ref=richardjnewman.com) for more their bios and other information. - On September 13 at 2:30, I will be giving a talk/reading at the [Jackson Heights Public Library](https://share.google/sgZcZOkyhqNlBZ5M1?ref=richardjnewman.com) called “How Writing Poetry Helped Me Come To Terms With What The Men Who Violated Me Did To Me.” [More information](https://www.richardjnewman.com/events/how-writing-poetry-helped-me-come-to-terms-with-what-the-men-who-violated-me-did-to-me/). --- ## Four Things To Read [A Poem (and a Painting) About the Suffering That Hides in Plain Sight](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/06/books/auden-musee-des-beaux-arts.html?rsrc=flt&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Elisa Gabbert: > *“But for him it was not an important failure” — this, I think, is the crux of \[Auden’s “Musée Des Baux Arts\] disaster’s in the eye of the beholder, and if the eye does not behold, it’s not disaster at all.* Gabbert does a deep dive into [this poem](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/159364/musee-des-beaux-arts-63a1efde036cd?ref=richardjnewman.com), which is, nominally, a response to Breughel’s painting *Landscape with the Fall of* [*Icarus*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus?ref=richardjnewman.com)*.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/08/Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_Landscape_with_the_Fall_of_Icarus_-_Brussels-_Royal_Museums_of_Fine_Arts_of_Belgium_-_Google_Arts_-_Culture.jpg) A summary of the poem does not do it justice—it is about the significance of the fact that [Icarus’s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus?ref=richardjnewman.com) fall, which Auden uses to represent human suffering on a much larger scale, is a minor, insignificant part of the painting that you would easily miss if the title didn’t tell you to look for it in the lower right hand corner, the point being that the suffering of others is something we have to choose to pay attention to, that it is something we can look away from all too easily. Here are the first few lines: > *About suffering they were never wrong,* > *The Old Masters: how well they understood* > *Its human position; how it takes place* > *While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;* And here are the lines specifically referencing Breughel’s painting: > *In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away* > *Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may* > *Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,* > *But for him it was not an important failure;* Gabbert’s digital tour through the poem is well worth paying close attention to. She makes the poem’s underlying mechanics visible and accessible and shows how Auden constructed them to arrive at the poem’s “meaning.” She also illuminates the poem’s ekphrastic nature by uncovering paintings it refers to in addition to the one Auden names. What struck me most, however, and made me want to include her article here is the way her analysis arrives at this: > *“Musée des Beaux Arts”…offers no comforting slogans or rallying cries, no assurance that suffering comes to an end or happens for a reason…What the poem really does is ask questions. The truth, we might infer, cannot be told — the truth is always changing; the truth is an ongoing inquiry…It asks us to question our place in the world — to ask what we might be missing…Do we spare a thought for…suffering, or sail calmly on? Moral absolution is available, the poem seems to say. That doesn’t mean we deserve it.* We often ask what good poems can do in the face of the suffering inflicted by, for example, Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or the famine in Sudan—not to mention the Trump administration’s attacks on migrants, women, and people who are trans and queer. (That list could, obviously, go on.) Gabbert’s piece, it seems to me, embodies one answer to that question. Poems, good poems—in both the aesthetic and moral/ethical senses of good—offer us emotional and intellectual access to the complex interiority of what it means that we have a choice whether or not to bear witness to suffering, much less to take whatever action we can to end it. Gabbert’s essay is worth reading and talking about and I think it is especially worth teaching. **§§§** [Ghosts of the Groves](https://jewishcurrents.org/ghosts-of-the-groves?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn: > *In May 2019, shortly after he became governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis traveled to Israel and the West Bank, accompanied by more than 100 of his state’s legislators, lobbyists, and businesspeople. He sat down one-on-one with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (after which he boasted that Florida is “the most pro-Israel state”); became the first Florida governor to visit a West Bank settlement (where he received an honorary degree from Ariel University, the only accredited Israeli university located in the settlements); and held a state cabinet meeting at the US embassy in Jerusalem—a violation of Florida’s Sunshine Law, which specifies that state meetings must be accessible to the public—during which he signed a bill adopting the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism, making criticism of Israel punishable in Florida’s public schools and universities. His office celebrated the trip as a “historic business development mission,” touting the potential to forge new commercial ties between Israel and Florida.* This article, from Jewish Currents’ [Summer 2024/Florida](https://jewishcurrents.org/issue/summer-2024?ref=richardjnewman.com) issue traces both the parallels between the orange industries here and in Israel—exploitive, extractive—and the socioeconomic and political connections between them, which DeSantis’ visit epitomized. For me, having been raised watching Anita Bryant say on TV, “A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine,” this was a real eye-opener. Not because I think it is possible for any industry to be fully innocent of exploitive/extractive practices, but because orange juice is one of those things I have so taken for granted as part of my life (a result of the industry’s marketing practices, of course) that not only has the story behind it been invisible to me, but it also never occurred to me to be curious about that story. **§§§** “[In the Middle of Fighting for Freedom We Found Ourselves Free](https://jewishcurrents.org/in-the-middle-of-fighting-for-freedom-we-found-ourselves-free?token=CiPtfBhDFrRxImG3LJO1Nc5-q4dUNWPP&ref=richardjnewman.com),” introduced by Alexis Pauline Gumbs: > *The loving sisterhood between \[June Jordan and Audre Lorde\], forged during the Civil Rights and Black Power struggles in New York City, had broken down amidst divisions in the feminist movement about how to show up in solidarity with the people of Palestine and Lebanon following Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. (Jordan sharply called out feminists who identified as Zionists, while Lorde tended to build bridges with Jewish feminists who critiqued but did not entirely divest from the State of Israel.)* This quote, from Gumbs’ introduction to June Jordan’s remembrance of Lorde the year after Lorde died, articulates a tension I have run into in my own discussions with people about what is happening now in Palestine, and I was surprised to learn that it had caused a rift such that, as far as Gumbs has been able to find out, the two women stopped speaking to each other some time in the 1980s. Jordan’s remembrance is worth reading because it embodies what it means to resolve—even though in this case she was too late—the sometimes fundamental differences in how those of us on the same side choose to fight “against hatred and \[for\] the annihilation of all bigotry.” **§§§** [Why Are Men So Obsessed With Pornography?](https://juliebindel.substack.com/p/why-are-men-so-obsessed-with-pornography), by Robert Jensen: > *Pornography has become* [*more intensely cruel and degrading to women*](https://serp.ie/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/WA%5FSERP%5FReport%5FFINAL.pdf?ref=richardjnewman.com)*. Pornography is without question the most* [*openly racist*](https://fightthenewdrug.org/why-does-the-porn-industry-get-away-with-racist-portrayals-of-black-people/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mass media genre. Scenes of rough sex that pornographers once considered too dangerous to market are now considered unremarkable. Girls report that the boys they date want to* [*replicate those scenes*](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/06/how-porn-affecting-choking-during-sex/592375/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *during sex, including* [*strangulation*](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jul/07/no-safe-way-risks-of-choking-during-sex?ref=richardjnewman.com)*. Young women report* [*abandoning the hope*](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/05/25/how-porn-makes-inequality-sexually-arousing/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *of a male partner who doesn’t use pornography. Women in relationships with men report a* [*sense of betrayal*](https://www.spinifexpress.com.au/shop/p/9781925950588?ref=richardjnewman.com) *when partners refuse to give up pornographic pleasures. And then there are the women used in the production of pornography, the women Andrea \[Dworkin\] demanded that we never forget. I don’t mean the “porn stars” who explain how they are empowered by the pornography industry. I’m not mocking those women but simply pointing out that they are not representative of an industry that, as one pornography producer told me, “*[*chews up and spits out women*](https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/11/11/does-pornography-deserve-its-bad-rap/a-pornography-habit-destroys-relationships?ref=richardjnewman.com)*.”* I have always found what used to be called the “[porn wars](https://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/the-pornography-wars?ref=richardjnewman.com)” profoundly frustrating because the polarizing stances that each side took seemed to me, more often than not, to be an excuse *not* to listen to each other, as if each side were proactively trying to shut down any possibility of substantive and productive discussion. Jensen’s anti-pornography take is among the more reasonable that I’ve read in that he does seem genuinely to listen, or at least want to listen to and understand the other side. Implicit in his argument, though I think you have to dig kind of deep to find it, is the idea that the problem with pornography is not the existence of sexually explicit imagery per se, but rather with an industry that produces such images in the service of a patriarchal view of women as subhuman sexual objects that exist solely for the pleasure of men. I am going to leave aside here all the ways in which that characterization can be critiqued and debated—including the question of whether it is possible in today’s society to make an ethical pornography—to focus on what I think is valuable, what I have always thought is valuable, about the radical feminist anti-pornography stance: the way it strips away, if you take it seriously, the layers of denial men require not to see that protecting the industry I described above means by definition that we are choosing the pleasures we derive from its product over the well-being of women. Disagree all you want with the anti-porn stance as a whole, but this aspect of it is one that men especially should wrestle with, and it is what makes Jensen’s essay worth reading. (As an aside I will add that the book review I linked to above made me want to read the book under review, [*The Pornography Wars*](https://www.kelsyburke.com/the-pornography-wars?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Kelsey Burke.) --- ## Four Things To See All images are from the Library of Congress’ [William P. Gottlieb Collection](https://www.loc.gov/collections/jazz-photography-of-william-p-gottlieb/about-this-collection/?ref=richardjnewman.com), which consists of jazz photographs taken by the writer-photographer from 1938 to 1948, the “Golden Age of Jazz.” ### Billie Holiday Published in Downbeat, New York City circa. Feb. 1947 ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_xKW!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F48d093d7-9f0f-42c7-ad6c-24d799e8705b_3245x4266.jpeg) **§§§** ### Ethel Waters This portrait was taken sometime between 1938 and 1948, perhaps in New York City ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XU2S!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1b93096f-47d1-488c-a077-4843cfe856d2_3033x4266.jpeg) **§§§** ### Mary Lou Williams Taken in New York City, circa 1946 ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1sIx!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F56047ea7-642c-411d-8016-ce10afd1bca9_3300x4266.jpeg) **§§§** ### Sarah Vaughn Taken at Café Society (Downtown), New York City, circa Aug. 1946 ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Pf6b!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5467a591-e23b-4f00-bfc1-f03cd8caaf3c_5133x6666.jpeg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### Adam Ben Ezra - Downtown Blues **§§§** ### Kamalata - Dirty **§§§** ### Renee Rosnes Trio - I Hear Rhapsody **§§§** ### War Poem Video by Taira Akbar, Words by Ralph Nazareth and Robert Roth, Music by Hendrik van Oordt --- ## Four Things About Me My mother cured me very early on of any desire to smoke cigarettes. I don’t recall exactly how old I was, but I was not yet a teenager because she was still married to George, her second husband. We were sitting outside the building where we lived, me, her, George, and my younger brother Paul. She and George were smoking non-filter Camels, their brand of choice. I don’t know why, but my mother suddenly asked Paul if he wanted to try. When he said yes, she handed him her cigarette and he started smoking it with ease. Clearly, he’d done it before. She turned to me and asked if I too wanted to try. I don’t think I wanted to smoke per se, but I wasn’t about to be outdone by my little brother. So I took the cigarette she handed me, the same one my brother had been puffing on, and inhaled a full breath of smoke deep down into my lungs. I thought I was going to be sick! I have not smoked a cigarette since. **§§§** The unpleasantness of that experience was one reason I waited as long as I did to try marijuana. I could not imagine that getting high, whatever it felt like, was worth burning my lungs from the inside out. The other reason I did not try pot until I was seventeen—which, among my peer group, was really late—was that I wanted to do it on my own terms, not to satisfy my friends’ desire to “see what Newman’s like when he’s stoned.” When my curiosity finally got the better of me, I told my best friend Joey. We waited till I knew my mother was not going to be home and sat in my room while Joey rolled the joint we were going to smoke. He showed me how to hold it between my fingers and how to “take a toke,” while also emphasizing the importance of not treating the joint like a cigarette. Then, making sure the window was open, he lit it up and we smoked it. I felt nothing, which Joey told me was not unusual, so I tried again after a few days had passed and I did indeed get high. I don’t remember especially liking or disliking the feeling, but I did, on occasion, join in with my friends when they “partied,” which was the term they used because the word smoking was reserved exclusively for cigarettes. **§§§** Joey joined the army when we were sixteen. I have a distinct memory of sitting with him on the wooden fence outside his building late one night after he’d snuck out of his room and him telling me that he had to get out of there because his father was an asshole. I liked his father, or at least I thought I did. He ran the drum and bugle corp Joey and I both marched in, and he was funny. He knew how to tease boys in a way that made them feel seen and included, which was something I very much needed at the time, especially after George left us. So it was hard for me to imagine the man as the asshole Joey said he was. Now, though—and I have thought this for quite a long time—I’m not so sure. Working backwards from the fact that Joey killed himself in his early twenties, after at least two unsuccessful attempts that I heard about, and coupling that with the completely intuitive but nonetheless deeply skeevy feeling I get now when I remember his father—where that feeling comes from is for another time—I wonder if Joey wasn’t trying to say something a good deal more disturbing than that his father was an asshole. As far as I know, no one tried to reach out to me about coming to the funeral, and when I got home at the end of the summer, no one talked about Joey—no one wanted to talk about him—at least not to me, not even his younger brother, with whom I’d also been friends. I think there was a lot more shame surrounding suicide back then than there is now, which may have been the reason for everyone’s silence, but it was as if my friend had simply vanished without a trace. Shortly after that, I learned that his parents got divorced. It may simply have been the stress of dealing with their son’s suicide; it may have been tensions in their marriage that were there all along; but I also can’t help but wonder what Joey’s mother might have learned about her husband to cause her to want to leave him. **§§§** The night before Joey left for the army, he and some of our “rougher” friends managed to buy a couple of six packs of beer they planned to drink by the railroad tracks behind the development where we lived. The cops caught them, however, and confiscated the beers. I can’t recall exactly how it happened that one of those cops—I think we always called him Sargeant Marino—told me he would give the beers back to me, but I have a distinct memory of him telling me he knew it was Joey's last night at home and that, as long as we didn’t make any trouble, he’d return the beers to me. Why me? I assume because I was known as the mature one among my peers. Maybe Sargeant Marino figured if I delivered the message, my friends would keep up their end of the bargain and drink Joey’s farewell in peace. I have a vague recollection of Marino taking the six packs out of the trunk of his cop car and of me bringing them to where Joey and the rest were sitting near the front entrance of the neighborhood elementary school, but after that my memory goes blank. One thing I know for sure, though, I did not drink that night, for much the same reason that I didn’t smoke cigarettes. I couldn’t have been much older than five or six, sitting on my father’s lap in his parents’ kitchen and listening to him and his father talk about the horses—they both loved to bet on the races—when one of them, I don’t know which, though I think it was my grandfather, asked me if I wanted to taste the beer the two of them were drinking. I said yes, of course, but regretted it the moment the liquid hit my tongue. I don’t think his intent was, as I assume my mother’s was with the cigarette she gave, to put me off drinking, but that was the result. I did eventually come to like the occasional beer—I rarely have more than one; and I will almost always choose some other kind of alcohol if I have a choice—but that was not until my twenties. ### September 9, 2025: Reading at DADA URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/events/september-9-2025-a-reading-at-dada/ Last updated: 2025-08-20T17:15:45.000Z **Date:** September 9, 2025 **Time:** 7:00 **Where:** 60-47 Myrtle Avenue, Ridgewood, NY 11385 **Admission:** Free, but please buy a drink or some food to support the venue. I will be reading selections from all three of my books along with the artist and writer [Lizzie Scheader](https://www.lizziescheader.com/words?ref=richardjnewman.com). ### September 11, 2025: Reading At Book Culture LIC URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/events/september-11-a-reading-at-book-culture-lic/ Last updated: 2025-08-20T17:15:58.000Z **Date:** September 11, 2025 **Time:** 6:00–7:00 **Where:** 26-09 Jackson Ave, Long Island City, NY 11101 **Admission:** Free I will be reading from *[T'shuvah](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/tshuvah-2/)* along with these other fine writers: [Aida Zilelian](www.aidazilelian.com), [Emily Hockaday](http://www.emilyhockaday.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), [Jared Harél](https://jaredharel.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), [Pichchenda Bao](http://www.pichchendabao.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), and [Stine An](https://www.gregorspamsa.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com). Check out the [Book Culture website](https://www.bookculture.com/event/lic-queens-writers-panel-0?ref=richardjnewman.com) for more their bios and other information. ### September 13, 2025 - How Writing Poetry Helped Me Come To Terms With What The Men Who Violated Me Did To Me When I Was A Boy URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/events/how-writing-poetry-helped-me-come-to-terms-with-what-the-men-who-violated-me-did-to-me/ Last updated: 2025-08-25T12:43:14.000Z ### A Reading & Discussion at the Jackson Heights Public Library **Date:** Saturday, September 13 **Time:** 2:30-3:30 **Where:** 35-51 81 Street, Jackson Heights, NY 11372 • (718) 899-2500 **Admission:** Free “It was in the making of poems that I first claimed a voice in which I could name that experience for what it was, and that act of naming has made the difference for me between living the life I have wanted to live and feeling like the only life I deserved was the shame-filled half-life the men who violated me tried to force me into.” I've written three books of poetry which form a trilogy exploring the impact that surviving childhood sexual violence has had on my life - personally, politically, and professionally. In this talk/reading, I will discuss how writing poetry has helped me give shape and meaning to that impact. Books will be available for sale and signing. ### Four By Four #44 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-44/ Last updated: 2025-08-22T12:22:09.000Z # Writing News Last month I [started blogging](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2025/07/18/allow-me-to-introduce-myself/?ref=richardjnewman.com) for my publisher, [Fernwood Press](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com). We’re calling the blog [Learning to Love the Questions](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/category/learning-to-love-the-questions/?ref=richardjnewman.com), and it will be about the relationships between and among poetry, politics, and (non-institutional, non-doctrinaire) spirituality. I’ll be posting once a month. (You can read the introductory post [here](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2025/07/18/allow-me-to-introduce-myself/?ref=richardjnewman.com).) If you’d like to subscribe so you receive the posts by email, you can do so on the blog’s home page. I’ll also link to new posts here in Four By Four. I hope you’ll consider reading. --- # Four Things To Read [I Teach Creative Writing. This Is What A.I. Is Doing to Students.](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/opinion/ai-chatgpt-school.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.Zk8.mTnd.q-aXlM9dIJF6&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Meghan O’Rourke: > *I’ve spent decades writing and editing; I know the feeling — of reward and hard-won clarity — that writing produces for me. But if you never build those muscles, will you grasp what’s missing when an L.L.M. delivers a chirpy but shallow reply? What happens to students who’ve never experienced the reward of pressing toward an elusive thought that yields itself in clear syntax? This, I think, is the urgent question. For now, many of us still approach A.I. as outsiders — nonnative users, shaped by analog habits, capable of seeing the difference between now and then. But the generation growing up with A.I. will learn to think and write in its shadow. For them, the chatbot won’t be a tool to discover…but part of the operating system itself. And that shift, from novelty to norm, is the profound transformation we’re only beginning to grapple with.* O’Rourke’s question *is* urgent. It is, in a way, a version of the question I ask implicitly below, in Four Things About Me, when I talk about the difference between writing a letter and communicating by email or text messaging, except that an AI could, in theory, write those emails and messages for you. Especially worth paying attention to is the way O’Rourke traces her relationship with the AI. After talking about the ways she learned to use AI to make her life easier, she says that “\[w\]ithout my intending it, ChatGPT quickly became a substantial partner in shouldering the mental load that I, like many mothers an women professors, carry\[:\] ‘Easing invisible labor\[.\]’” She found herself “writing warmer emails simply because the logistical parts were already handled.” She “had time to add a joke, a question, to be *me* again.” Then, she began to notice “a strange emotional charge from interacting daily with a system that seemed designed to affirm” her. When she asked ChatGPT about this, after asking it to talk to her about her own poetry, which she says she found oddly soothing, the AI responded that she was feeling that way because it was “mirroring” her, essentially producing, as O’Rourke characterizes it, “a version of myself that experienced no anxiety, pressure or self-doubt.” All of which are necessary parts of the process of “pressing toward an elusive thought \[until it\] yields itself in clear syntax.” O’Rourke has written an important essay that at least begins to make visible the profound transformation that AI is in the first stages of bringing about in our society and culture. **§§§** [*The Rise of AI Will Make Liberal Arts Degrees Popular Again. Here’s Why*](https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/the-rise-of-ai-will-make-liberal-arts-degrees-popular-again-heres-why/91206953?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Jessica Stillman: > *From 2012 to 2020, the number of students majoring in subjects like English and history declined 46 percent at Ohio State. At Tufts, Vassar, and Notre Dame, enrollment in liberal arts majors was down by half. Boston University saw a 42 percent decline. At SUNY Albany the situation was more dire—interest in these degrees fell by three-quarters…\[A\] lot has changed in two years, \[however,\] including the stratospheric rise of AI. Now a few lonely but intriguing voices are arguing this is one trend line that’s about to reverse. The AI revolution will bring liberal arts majors back from the verge of death, they say.* Stillman makes here an argument that I have heard before, that the so-called “soft skills” one learns through studying the humanities—empathy, critical thinking, the ability to navigate and negotiate difference—are, contrary to what many think, also truly valuable business skills. The form in which I always heard this argument, in which I have often made it myself, went something like this: Businesses can teach you their business; they don’t want to have to teach you how to write or think for yourself. That this logic did not persuade many in higher ed is evident in the the *New Yorker’s* bold 2023 declaration that [the English Major was dead](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the-english-major?ref=richardjnewman.com). I find very interesting, therefore, the contrast between what the AI and business experts Stillman quotes have to say—essentially that, in an “AI-filled future,” the most valuable skills are likely to be those rooted in curiosity, empathy, and “the ability to deal with the messiness and unpredictability of people”—and what O’Rourke described, though these are my words not hers, as her AI’s flattening of precisely those qualities. This difference may very well result from the fact that Stillman’s is a business perspective—her piece was published in [Inc.](https://www.inc.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) after all—while O’Rourke was in some sense writing in opposition to a bottom-line mentality. To me, assuming the prediction in Stillman’s title comes true, the question is which perspective will win out in shaping the courses of study that liberal arts students will pursue. **§§§** [“Food Has Become a Memory”: My Hunger Diary in Gaza](https://theintercept.com/2025/07/26/gaza-starvation-hunger-diary/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Sara Awad: > *My mom baked eight pieces of bread, one for each of our family members, and each one of us chooses the way to eat it. For me, I choose to separate it into two portions — the second is for dinner. Very small portions for a person who does not eat enough for months. And we do not know when the next bread will come along.* Back in January of last year, I posted a poem I wrote called “[The People of Gaza Keep Dying](https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-people-of-gaza-keep-dying-a-poem/).” As an epigraph, I quoted [Yara Asi](https://yara-asi.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), the author of [*How War Kills*](https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12483/how-war-kills?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* from a *Jewish Currents* article by Maya Rosen, “[The Epidemiological War on Gaza](https://jewishcurrents.org/epidemiological-war-on-gaza?ref=richardjnewman.com):” > *You don’t need overt bloodshed to cause significant violence that ends people’s lives. Many people will die unnecessary deaths due to deprivation.* Awad’s essay brings the reality of Asi’s statement home. As I read it, I could not help but also think of Leyb Goldin’s story/essay—today we would probably call it autofiction—“[Chronicle Of A Single Day](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/cn532p99lkmujnpqdd1k3/chronicle-of-a-single-day.pdf?rlkey=aw78yxx53yfl3vgkzpzzsprvq&dl=0&ref=richardjnewman.com),” which details a single day in the life of someone in the Warsaw Ghetto who is, essentially, dying of hunger. Goldin was born in Warsaw in 1906\. He joined the Bund (the Jewish Social Democratic Party in 1936) and be became active before World War II as a writer and translator. During the war, he wrote for the Bundist underground press. “Chronicle Of A Single Day” was found in [Emanuel Ringelblum’s Warsaw Ghetto archives](https://www.posenlibrary.com/author/oyneg-shabes-archive?ref=richardjnewman.com) and was published for the first time in 1955\. While [my source](https://search.worldcat.org/title/27149788?ref=richardjnewman.com) says Goldin died of starvation in the Ghetto in 1942, [other sources](https://www.posenlibrary.com/author/leyb-goldin?ref=richardjnewman.com) say he died in the great deportation that year from Warsaw to Treblinka. Either way, “Chronicle Of A Single Day” makes the reality of starvation even more viscerally present than Awad’s piece. To be honest, though, I hesitated about making the connection between the two pieces in the way that I have. It too easily plays into the hands of those who insist on *equating* Israel with the Nazis, a facile comparison that, because it goes much further than pointing out that Israel is using some of the same methods that the Nazis did, always has, intentionally or not, an antisemitic subtext. it is also a comparison that, intentionally or not, elides the fact that starvation has been used as [a weapon of war](https://starvationaccountability.org/ratification-portal/timeline/?ref=richardjnewman.com) for a very, very long time. I decided to share Goldin’s piece with you nonetheless because I think this is an important connection to make, not only because Goldin was Jewish and Awad is Palestinian—though that specificity also matters quite a lot—but because their very similar suffering represents a shared humanity that is not abstract, that is rooted in [the physical facts of their bodies](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/4/what-starvation-really-means-for-the-human-body-and-for-gaza?ref=richardjnewman.com), of our bodies, and what those bodies need for us to survive. Any call for or expression of solidarity that is not rooted in those facts is ultimately hollow at the core. **§§§** [Mushroom as Metaphor](https://orionmagazine.org/article/mushroom-as-metaphor/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Maria Pinto: > *Fungi are mysterious, ubiquitous, ancient, and cunning. They do some of the planet’s humblest work just as industriously as they do what we consider its loftiest: from decomposition and rot, through bolstering our crops, to helping us heal psychic wounds. For better and worse, their lifeways combine with how little we understand them to make the perfect substrate for our experiments in self-image. Over the past forty years of my own lifetime, we’ve cast them as bringers of the apocalypse and saviors of Earth—not bad for a kingdom of life whose members mostly go undetected. I hope charting our stories about them (which are really stories about us) might illuminate the journey we’ve been on as ecosystemic beings.* In this essay, Pinto traces the metaphors through which we have understood both mushrooms and ourselves, from a catalogue of mushroom metaphors she gathered from articles published in 1985, the year she was born—“fungi as protectable resource, as teacher, as a way to commune with a different plane, as medicine, as object of study, as the ‘latest’ ingredient, as product, as monster”—to this list from 1997: “fungi as conduits for tree business, as proof against nature red in tooth and claw, as metaphor for connectivity.” Pinto’s journey through these metaphors gets at the way metaphors are inescapably political, from “\[f\]ungi as route to freedom, as queer, as cultural revolution” to “\[f\]ungi as world ender.” The essay is more an intuitive, informal taxonomy of these metaphors rather than an in depth exploration of any one of them, but it points in some interesting directions, both as a form—what other metaphors would be worth taxonomizing in this way?—and as the beginnings of a literary/poetic exploration of mushrooms themselves. --- # Four Things To See All images are from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and are in the public domain. ## The Surroundings Of Dieppe (1833) This print is part of a series of lithographs by [Eugène Isabey](https://www.stephenongpin.com/artist/237051/eugene-isabey?ref=richardjnewman.com) printed by Charles Motte and published by McLean in a book entitled 'Six Marines dessinés sur Pierre' (Six Marinescapes drawn on stone) which featured studies of shipping and coast towns. ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0tY3!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F899899af-2481-4793-9842-c24eebb742d3_3499x2852.jpeg) **§§§** ## Fragment of a Leather Piece with an Erotic Scene (Egypt, The New Kingdom, ca. 1550-1458 BCE) The erotic nature of the scene, with its naked male dancer, suggests that this piece was inteneded for the shrine of the goddess Hathor at Deir el-Bahri. In her aspect as a fertility goddess, Hathor was associated with Bes, a fertility god who was depicted as part human, part lion. The nude figure may be either a priest or a mummer who would have worn a mask and played the part of Bes at a festival honoring the goddess. The dancer and the partially preserved man in the register above both carry an object with multiple brown strands. These have been described as scourges, but they could as easily be some sort of percussion instrument used to accompany the music and to placate the goddess. ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!uuJW!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8a1d1833-0f85-4d12-9872-8af05bf39e7c_3529x3227.jpeg) **§§§** ## Kirkstall Abbey. Doorway on the North Side (1850) By [Joseph Cundall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph%5FCundall?ref=richardjnewman.com) ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!447i!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F43936231-8d61-4902-af56-f25ff192fe0d_2073x2495.jpeg) **§§§** ## Priapus and Lotis (1530-1550) [Priapus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priapus?ref=richardjnewman.com), the ithyphallic god of gardens and fertility and the incarnation of unbridled carnal lust, was a favorite character in the erotic poetry of antiquity and the Renaissance. Long believed to represent Apollo and Daphne, this print instead illustrates a scene from the story of Priapus and [Lotis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotis%5F%28mythology%29?ref=richardjnewman.com) narrated in [Ovid's Fasti](https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/OvidFastiBkOne.php?ref=richardjnewman.com#anchor%5FToc69367260) (elegiac verses commemorating the rustic rituals and celebrations of the ancient Roman calendar) in which the fleeing nymph is transformed into a tree to avoid the rapacious god's advances. An act of censorship has removed, or, more accurately, obscured beneath an improbably swirling drapery, Priapus's enormous, offending phallus. ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!stpf!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9c28ac58-2ad8-420e-9128-ef4010e60eee_3540x2738.jpeg) --- # Four Things To Listen To In these first two selections, I’m plugging two of my son’s bands: Minimal Absolution and Insurreal, both of them play death metal. My son is the bassist. ## Minimal Absolution - Lifeless **§§§** ## Insurreal - Demonic GrinMinimal Absolution - Lifeless **§§§** ## Insurreal - Demonic Grin **§§§** ## Ofra Haza - Im Nin’alu **§§§** ## Tangerine Dream - Shadow Flyer --- ## Four Things About Me A small world story: Some years ago, I was buying something at the Apple Store near my campus. Seeing the faculty ID hanging from the lanyard around my neck, the sales rep who was helping me asked if I knew a certain professor from the Biology Department. I did, I said, and, because I always thought it was kind of a cool story to tell, went on to say that I’d gone to high school with his kids and that he had been the music director at the Jewish Center where I went to Hebrew School. The sales rep looked at me a little strangely and wondered aloud if I also knew his daughter, Adrienne. I did. She had been a classmate of mine and one of my closest friends. I even dedicated *The Silence Of Men* to her because she had, truly, “believed in my writing almost before I did.” Her father remembered me, of course. I’d been a guest at their house after Shabbat services more than once. “You were a rough kid,” he said, though he did not choose to elaborate, and I thought but did not say, “My god! If you thought I was rough, what would you call a truly rough kid?” (“Rough” was precisely the opposite of my reputation outside the yeshiva where Adrienne and I went to high school. I didn’t know until long after I was out of college that it had been what my classmates and teachers—and, clearly, some of my classmates’ parents—had thought of me.) I didn’t know if Adrienne’s father knew that she had essentially disavowed our friendship years earlier (after having not spoken for a decade at least, but that’s another story), so when he told me that his granddaughter was getting married, all I said was, “Tell Adrienne I said mazel tov.” Then I paid for my purchase and left the store. I did not see him again on any of my return trips. **§§§** I had a Catholic girlfriend in my twenties, a woman who had gone when she was younger, with her family, to a church where they still prayed—at Easter time, I think she said—for the conversion of the Jews. We were in love and had even begun to contemplate a future together. Once, we were laying in bed talking about something, I don’t remember what, when she said, “Why are you suddenly being so Jewish about this?” I was, as you can imagine, furious, and we fought, and I wondered, seriously, if this would mean the end of our relationship. What I remember most, though, is that when we talked after a couple of days apart—and I wish I could reconstruct more of the conversation than this—she said, “I am antisemitic,” by which she meant, she went on, not that she hated Jews (obviously), but that she’d internalized ideas about Jews that were antisemitic and that she did sometimes express them. “But I want to work on that,” she finished. It would be years before I fully understood what a remarkably high bar she’d set for the honesty and integrity that it takes to confront, especially in a relationship with someone you love, one’s own unexamined assumptions about groups of people who are Other to you, but I did learn from her how important it was to make the effort. We ended up staying together for five or six years after that. **§§§** I’m not going to tell here the full story of how that woman and I met, except to say that it was while we were working at a summer sleep away camp where, though the chemistry between us was palpable, we consciously chose not to pursue a romantic relationship of any sort. Instead, we became close enough as friends that, unlike the kind of summer camp connection that lays more or less dormant in the off season, we committed to keeping in touch, though the only way we could do so was on the phone or by letter, since we lived far enough away that visiting each other was almost completely out of the question. We fell in love, in other words, slowly, over a couple of years, in what could be described as a perfectly conventional Victorian courtship. I still remember the immense pleasure I took in both reading her letters and writing mine, especially the ones we took sometimes a week to compose, in journal-like entries that made it feel, or at least made me feel like we were in each other’s daily lives almost as if we were physically present. I realize this is probably generational, but the nearly instantaneous connection that digital communication makes possible—as moving and intimate as it can sometimes be—is just not pleasurable in the same way. **§§§** Fifteen or twenty years ago, I was recruited by a book packager, though we never actually signed a contract, to edit what was supposed to be an encyclopedia of marriage. The book never got published, at first because of my own inexperience as an editor and then, frankly, because I lost interest. (I also think the company may have gone out of business, though I don’t remember this clearly.) The one thing that did survive the death of that project was a part of the introduction I wrote, a brief essay that explored just how Victorian the letter-writing courtship I described above actually was. At some point, I realized that, with a few adjustments, I could turn that essay into a model of the kinds of research papers my students were required to write. Whenever I shared it with them, however, their initial response—aside from their interest in learning more about me and my early love life—was always something like this. “Wait,” and you have to imagine the tone of extreme disbelief in which these words were uttered, “you actually had to wait for a letter to arrive in the mail? That means everything she wrote about was already old news. What was the point?” They also could not imagine having the patience to wait for a reply. Then, inevitably, someone would say something like, “And you said you fell in love this way? How is that even possible?” Nothing I said in response satisfied them. We stood, very clearly, on opposite sides of a generational and technological divide. --- ### Four by Four #43 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-43/ Last updated: 2025-08-22T12:11:00.000Z #### Contents ## Four Things To Read [Why Everything Israelis Think They Know About Iran Is Wrong](https://www.972mag.com/why-everything-israelis-think-they-know-about-iran-is-wrong/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Orly Noy: > *“In Israel, the voices being amplified are those of Reza Pahlavi \[the exiled Iranian crown prince\] and his supporters — people with no real credibility or influence inside Iran,” he told +972 Magazine in an interview. “In the past 10 years, a lot of money has been invested in building up his image, and suddenly he’s gone from being seen as a sixty-something slacker to a crown prince with a whole kingdom behind him. This is a reality that exists only in ‘Tehrangeles’ \[a nickname for parts of Los Angeles with a large Iranian exile community\] and in the margins of the current U.S. administration,” Sternfeld added. “And it’s the only one Israelis are hearing.”* Noy is quoting here Professor [Lior Sternfeld](https://x.com/liorsternfeld?lang=en&ref=richardjnewman.com), who teaches the modern history of Iran at Penn State University. The rest of the article is taken up by Noy’s interview of Sternfeld, which is worth reading for its perspective on how the Israeli government, and to some degree also parts of the US government, are shaping perceptions of Iran and how the resulting misperceptions will ultimately do more harm than good. **§§§** [Breaking the Israeli Book Curse](https://www.hadassahmagazine.org/2025/06/29/breaking-the-israeli-book-curse/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Amy Klein: > *Last year, my agency must have gone down about 70 percent in sales. We’ve lost many clients and friends. I have not sold an Israeli literary project since October 7, other than someone whose voice has already been out there. There are Israeli writers who have succeeded—Dorit Rabinyan, Ayelet Gundar-Goshen—and have faithful readerships, created when there was support from publishers to do so. A readership for Israeli writers has been created, but publishers are not buying enough new Israeli voices to meet that audience. There’s a fear that the next generation of Israeli writers are going to remain unknown around the world. I am also getting 10 new queries a week from American Jewish writers who can’t work with their agents anymore, or their agents won’t work with them. It’s heartbreaking for American and European audiences, because I don’t think the readership is the problem. It’s the gatekeepers of the publishers that are not letting them in.* Klein interviews here Deborah Harris, a literary agent based in Jerusalem, whose agency has represented “the translation and dramatic rights of 140 Israeli and Jewish writers in more than 50 countries and also acts as a co-agent in Israel for more than 230 international publishers and literary agencies.” It is not surprising, though it is disturbing, that people would boycott Jewish and Israeli writers given what is going on in Gaza. The discussion around that issue, however, is pretty familiar and so I am simply going to note it. What I found particularly interesting about the interview—and this is the reason I’ve decided to include it here—was Harris’ response to Klein’s question about “recent shifts, for better or worse,” in connection with the Israeli publishing industry: “I just got the current list of international authors who won’t be published in Israel, novelists like [Isabel Allende](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel%5FAllende?ref=richardjnewman.com) and [Fredrik Backman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredrik%5FBackman?ref=richardjnewman.com).” In other words, decisions are being made that will keep the work of writers like Allende out of Israel. The interview is worth reading and discussing. It raises some thought-provoking questions about how writers and the publishing industry ought to respond to situations like the one in Israel/Palestine. **§§§** > [The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/08/how-settler-colonialism-colonized-universities/679514/?gift=9L5E0%5F00dQA8ldt%5F3rAKn4XaEfW%5FxeDATWdJTdWG1-0&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share), by Adam Kirsch: > > *Although Israel fails in obvious ways to fit the model of settler colonialism, it has become the standard reference point because it offers theorists and activists something that the United States does not: a plausible target. It is hard to imagine America or Canada being truly decolonized, with the descendants of the original settlers returning to the countries from which they came and Native peoples reclaiming the land. But armed struggle against Israel has been ongoing since it was founded, and Hamas and its allies still hope to abolish the Jewish state “between the river and the sea.” In the contemporary world, only in Israel can the fight against settler colonialism move from theory to practice.* I wish Kirsch had chosen a framing for this essay other than a critique of settler colonialism because he makes some very good points. Those points, however—many of which have to do with the ways that critics of Israel fail to uncouple the rhetoric of their criticism from historical antisemitism—get lost in his desire to “rescue” Zionism from the clutches of settler-colonial theorists. So, for example, when Kirsch critiques claims like this one by Jamal Nablusi, that “Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is in and of the land,” for having roots in the same 19th century German nationalism that ultimately “degenerated into the blood-and-soil nationalism of Nazi ideologues,” he conveniently elides the fact that Zionists made the same kinds of claims for the Jewish connection to Israel and that those claims continue to be made by those encouraging Jews at least to visit, if not to settle in Israel. Certainly I was told when I was younger that the only place I could be authentically Jewish, whatever that means, was in the “authentic” Jewish homeland, the State of Israel. There are similar moments throughout the essay, but I think it is worth reading nonetheless. First because it’s important to recognize those moments for what they are, but also because I think his analysis of those moments when anti-Zionism/anti-Israel critiques bleed over into antisemitism is worth wrestling with. **§§§** [History Lesson](https://jewishcurrents.org/history-lesson?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Laleh Khalili: > *The best corrective to Kirsch’s attempt to dismiss the concept of settler colonialism as a shallow fad is a substantive discussion of the actual historical process—especially the colonization of Palestine, as understood from the vantage of its victims. While some colonial systems depended on the exploitation of local labor (sometimes via local intermediaries), the term “settler colonialism” refers specifically to those colonies where, as historian George Fredrickson wrote in The Arrogance of Race, settlers “exterminated or pushed aside the indigenous peoples” and “developed an economy based on white labor.” (In practice, this meant developing settler workers’ skills and lifting their standard of living while de-developing and de-skilling the remaining Indigenous workers, whose labor the colony continued to mine.)* Khalili’s tone in this review of the book from which the Kirsch essay I linked to above was adapted, [*On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice*](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/776073/on-settler-colonialism-by-adam-kirsch/9781324105343?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* is one of withering contempt. A similar, but less venomous tone informs Samuel Hayim Brody’s review in [The Boston Review](https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-reality-of-settler-colonialism/?ref=richardjnewman.com). Both are worth reading. They confirmed my own sense that whatever is of value in Kirsch’s analysis—and I have read only the article, not the book—is overshadowed by his desire to defend Israel and Zionism against what he considers the depredations of settler-colonial theory and his need, therefore, to argue that this theory is, at best, enabling of those who would like to remove the Jews from the face of the earth. --- ## Four Things To See ### Torah Finials ([Rimmonim](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torah%5Ffinials?ref=richardjnewman.com)) From [The Jewish Museum](https://thejewishmuseum.org/collection/27134-torah-finials?ref=richardjnewman.com): In a publication from 1931, this pair of [finials (rimmonim)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torah%5Ffinials?ref=richardjnewman.com) is described as being in one of the two [Kassel synagogues](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kassel%5FSynagogue?ref=richardjnewman.com), the second of which the Nazis set on fire during [Kristallnacht](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht?ref=richardjnewman.com) in 1938\. Nothing is known of the items’ provenance between 1938 until 1970, when the finials were purchased from a dealer. According to their inscriptions, the finials were “a donation of Rabbi Zelig, son of Rabbi Feis of blessed memory, for the Torah scroll of the Benevolent Society in the year \[5\]559 \[1798/99\].” (This information is from *Masterworks of the Jewish Museum,* by Maurice Berger, et al. For more information, go to the item’s page at [The Jewish Museum](https://thejewishmuseum.org/collection/27134-torah-finials?ref=richardjnewman.com).) ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AecD!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F07f15966-4ba4-4d7c-90af-18d8bd7dac11_3000x3566.jpeg) **§§§** ### Rolled Sheet with a Magic Inscription in Either Hebrew or Aramaic From [The Getty Museum Collection](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/105YS2?ref=richardjnewman.com#full-artwork-details). ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Qc4-!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F55558f79-bf3a-4862-840d-cab601a18651_1024x679.jpeg) **§§§** ### A Parade Entering the Old City of Jaffa, Palestine (now Tel Aviv, Israel) This is an unfinished study by [Frederic Edwin Church](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic%5FEdwin%5FChurch?ref=richardjnewman.com) (1826-1900). This is the text from the [Smithsonian’s website](https://www.si.edu/object/parade-entering-jaffa-palestine-tel-aviv-israel:chndm%5F1917-4-522?ref=richardjnewman.com): “In the foreground, several figures dressed in colorful draped clothing and cloth headwear cross a stone bridge while playing drums and waving green-and-red flags. A large patch of grass comprises the middle distance at center. At upper left, a circular minaret towers over the other buildings, while the Spanish style belltower of St. Peter's Church is visible in the background at center. At right, the remainding skyline is rendered only in graphite, and shows multiple domes and towers.” ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OS31!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3263e647-dfa8-4933-aded-e2ea31bb93ed_1200x783.jpeg) **§§§** ### Geranium tuberosum L. From the [Smithsonian](https://www.si.edu/object/geranium-tuberosum-l:nmnhbotany%5F14770051?ref=richardjnewman.com). This specimen of geranium tuberosum was gathered in 1960 by Margaret Kocher in Shaubek-Tafileh, Palestine/Israel. (The museum records give both place names.) ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Kccj!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8026046b-f41d-42c7-818b-24e9d929fae3_905x1200.jpeg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### Biosphere - Time of Man **§§§** ### Emel - Massive Will **§§§** ### Sama' Abdulhadi feat. Walaa Sbait - Well Fee **§§§** ### Youmna Saba - Ba'oud --- ## Four Things About Me When I was in graduate school, I lived in a basement apartment in a house not far from campus. The owner of the house, a single woman with two children, was named Linda. We got along well and even became kind of friendly. She began inviting me to sit and chat when I went upstairs with her rent check. She even asked me once or twice to keep an eye on her kids when she had to make an emergency run to the grocery store or some such thing. There was nothing even remotely flirtatious in our relationship. At some point, she started dating a man whose name, I think, was Ray. I met him once or twice and he seemed like a nice enough guy. After a while, she invited him to move in with her. Ray didn’t move in right away, however, and it was clear from the way she began to keep her distance from me, and from the suspicious way he looked at me whenever he saw me, that my presence was at least one reason why. Linda wouldn’t tell me this to my face, however. One day, I found a note taped to my front door that I would have to leave by the end of the month and nothing more, which hurt my feelings a bit, given that we’d become a little more than just landlord and tenant. Thankfully, it was also the end of the semester in which I received my MA, so I didn’t need the apartment anymore. I remember having to make two or three trips back and forth to my mother’s house in what my friends back then called my “sporty red station wagon”—it was a Chevy Malibu—and leaving Linda a very obnoxious note in an empty, but very messy apartment. I don’t think I mentioned Ray in the note, but I still wonder every so often if the problem he had with my renting that apartment ever became a problem in his relationship with Linda. I hope not, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. **§§§** When I lived in Korea, I became lovers with the woman who lived downstairs from me. She spoke more English than I did Korean, but neither of us spoke the other’s language well enough that we could have anything other than the most cursory conversation without my bilingual dictionary. I told the story of our relationship—at least as I understood it back in 1999; I think I’d tell it slightly differently now—in an [essay](https://www.salon.com/1999/11/19/korea%5F3/?ref=richardjnewman.com) in [Salon.com](https://salon.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), but what I just remembered now, after writing the above recollection, is that there was a Korean man who somehow knew she and I were together. I have a vague memory of him approaching me in a park not far from where I lived and striking up as much of a conversation as I was able to have, though I don’t remember what it was about. He seemed friendly enough, but then, a few weeks later, I could hear him pounding on my friend’s door, yelling something about the migook saram, the American, and the question ooweh, why, over and over and over again. My friend started screaming back, her voice muffled, though she was speaking so quickly, and so clearly in anger, that I doubt I would have been able to understand anything she said even if I’d heard every word. I stepped out of my apartment and stood at the top of the staircase, not knowing what to do except, at least, to be a witness and maybe try to stop him if he became violent. My friend’s door was closed, which was why her voice was muffled, but I continued to stand there, watching, until, when he stopped banging on my friend’s door for a few moments, the man must have sensed my presence. In a scene that might have come from a movie, he locked eyes with me then looked at my friend’s door— she’d gone quiet in response to his own silence—then he looked back up at me, made a face I did not know how to read, and walked the four flights down to the building’s exit. I knocked on my friend’s door, but she did not answer, not even to tell me to go away. So I left her alone. The next time I saw her, I tried to ask her about what happened, but all she would say was that it was not my problem and that I didn’t need to worry about it. We never spoke about the incident again. **§§§** One of the oddest experiences I had in Korea happened when I was sitting by myself near a fountain on I-don’t-remember-which-floor in the [Lotte World Mall](https://www.lwt.co.kr/en/?ref=richardjnewman.com). A little girl, not much older than five or six, who’d been watching me from where she was sitting with her mother on the other side of the fountain, climbed down from her mother’s lap, walked up to me, and held her arms out for me to pick her up. Looking over at her mother, who smiled at me, I lifted the girl into my own lap. She then took one of my hands and turned it palm up, reached into the fountain and let a few drops of water drip from her wet hand onto my dry one. She stayed with me not more than thirty seconds longer and then motioned for me to put her down. When I did, she walked back to her mother, who smiled at me again as she took her daughter’s hand and left. That was it. I never saw either of them again. **§§§** In the apartment complex where I lived in Seoul, in a part of the city known as Jamshil, a group of children would usually be playing outside when I left for work. Whenever they saw me, they would follow me from behind, yelling and posting and laughing with delight as they called out, “Migook saram! Migook saram imnida!” (An American! It’s an American.) At first, not really knowing how to respond, I ignored them; but as I grew more familiar with the culture and learned a little bit of the language, a game developed between us. At some point, I would turn around and ask “Odioh?” (Where?) They would point at me and respond “Yogioh!” (Here!) We’d go back and forth like this a couple of times and then I would say, in English, “I have to go to work,” and, as I turned to leave, they would say, in English, “Goodbye!” Eventually, though I have no idea why, the kids stopped being there in the morning. I missed seeing them and I missed playing that game with them. ### Four By Four #42 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-42/ Last updated: 2025-07-17T20:59:02.000Z #### On this page ## Four Things To Read [*Put It On Record: A Memoir-Archive*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/put-it-on-record-a-memoir-archive-sokunthary-svay/20631138?ean=9798988165545&next=t&ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Sokunthary Svay: > It’s been over a dozen years since my postpartum depression but when summer begins in New York City, I still feel the ghost of that experience weighing down in the oppressive humidity. It’s one negative remnant of the first few months of my son’s life, although I have one good memory to counter that. One weekend afternoon at the close of summer, shortly after I sought help, my husband and I pushed our baby in the stroller on a neighborhood walk. As we got closer to home I could suddenly see the leaves on our tree with clarity. Perhaps it was the medication taking its course, or my first feeling of hope since my son was born, but that afternoon I felt the sun on my side for the first time. The story Svay tells about emerging from her postpartum depression is in many ways a mirror of the story she tells about coming to terms with being an immigrant refugee in the United States and a survivor of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal dictatorship in Cambodia; and it is the tension between those two experiences that gives this book its power. In each case she is estranged from herself by a radical disruption in her life, a physical/emotional/psychological experience that shatters her sense of self, and, in each case she needs to find a way not *back* to wholeness, but to reintegration of the disparate parts that results in a very different experience of what it means to be whole. In their broad outlines, the stories she tells have been told before, by other women, by members of other immigrant communities. What makes this memoir-archive so interesting, at least to me, is how Svay locates what I am calling the reintegration of her self firmly within her search for a way to give music a meaningful part in her life as an artist. It’s a journey well worth taking with her. **§§§** “[In The Bedroom](https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/language-literature-culture/yiddish-translation/bedroom?ref=richardjnewman.com),” by [Yehudis](https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/1168?ref=richardjnewman.com), translated from Yiddish by Jordan Finkin: > “Mirel, are you being serious? I don’t understand that kind of love. A young girl doesn’t love that way. She loves spiritually. Physical love comes next, eventually, unnoticed. A young girl can’t be the object of suspicion . . . I remember I was still young. My love for Dovid was an accident. Were I to meet a woman with his qualities, I thought, I would also love her in earnest . . . I loved listening to him talk for hours on end. He understood everything so cleverly, so deeply. My own desire was to understand Dovid, to be like him.” These lines, spoken by Gine to her friend Mirel while they are laying in separate beds, capture nicely the tension this short story explores between the desires these women feel and the social strictures within which they have to live. The story was published in 1908 in what Jordan Finkin calls in his brief introduction a “Passover collection,” and, indeed, another tension in the story is that between the meaning of Passover as a holiday that celebrates freedom from slavery and the lack of freedom these women feel in their own lives. Yehudis is the pen name of [Rokhl Bernshteyn](https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/1168?ref=richardjnewman.com)(1869–1942), was an important voice in Yiddish literature, though she is virtually unknown today. Finkin’s translation of this story is a worthwhile and, I would say, necessary attempt to give her work a renewed and serious attention. **§§§** “[Inside New York’s Statue of Liberty](https://danielkraft.substack.com/p/inside-new-yorks-statue-of-liberty),” by [Melech Ravitch](https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/1131?ref=richardjnewman.com), translated from Yiddish by Daniel Kraft: > I am a man of flesh and blood and bone, > my soul is love, laughter, and tears — > and you? Woman, empty iron giant, > with a torch raised in your hand, > you are a golem-woman with tin skin > mounted upon a skeleton of steel — — > your tin lips have never kissed bread. > Your iron ribs have never rocked a man in bed, > and — — I love you with a young love, fiery and tender, > for thirty years of youth and manhood I have yearned for you, > awaiting your first glance. Melech Ravitch was the pen name of Zekharye-Khone Bergner (1893–1976). A poet, essayist, playwright, and cultural activist. Ravitch was born in Radymno, eastern Galicia. He was raised in a secular home, where the primary languages were Polish and German. He began to write poetry in Yiddish under the influence of the 1908 [Czernowitz Conference](https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/2221?ref=richardjnewman.com), an international conference on Yiddish language and its role in Jewish life. He was also widely traveled, living in Australia, Argentina, Mexico, and Montreal, where he died in 1976\. This poem on the Statue of Liberty is interesting, particularly in contrast to Yehudis’ story, for its frankly sexual address to the statue as a symbol of liberty. Here, in the United States of the 21st century, it’s hard not to hear the ending of the poem as Christological, but I doubt very much that’s how Ravitch meant it. It’s more likely that he meant it as an expression of hope for the United States as “the land of the free.” **§§§** “[In 1975, Gay Moms Rarely Got Custody. So She Took Her Child Underground](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/29/us/lesbian-mothers-underground-kidnapping.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.Uk8.R6PQ.wVNW17p0ACJY&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com),” by Sarah Diamond: > The rescue — or kidnapping — played out entirely in private and was known only to the people involved. It also occupies a small but meaningful place in the history of the gay rights movement. Georgette DuBois was part of an underground group of lesbian mothers who worked together to take and hide their children because most courts considered gay parents unfit. I’d heard, of course, about underground abortion networks, and about underground networks organized to help women and their children escape abusive husbands/boyfriends, but until I read this article, I’d never heard about the underground network formed to kidnap—legally that’s what it was; though I am sure that “rescue” was also not uncommonly an accurate term—the children of lesbian mothers to whom the courts homophobically refused to award custody. The article tells the story of Georgette DuBois, who married Raymond LaRosa when she was 19\. They had a daughter, Kara. At some point, Georgette fell in love with a woman. As Georgette remembers it, after telling her that she should go be with a woman if that’s what she wanted, she and Raymond got along and managed a kind of informal joint-custody arrangement, but then Raymond took Kara from Pennsylvania, where they all lived, to Michigan. This was in 1975, just two years after the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, and the norm was still to see lesbian mothers as a kind of danger to their children, which was why Georgette, after consulting with lawyers who advised her that the only way she would get her daughter back was to “go underground,” conspired with other women to take her daughter back from Raymond. The story is worth reading in its own right, but it made me think about how culturally determined the assumptions about who should get custody of children in cases of divorce are. When my parents got divorced, the default assumption was that children would stay with their mother; in Korea, when I was there in the late 1980s, the default was that children stayed with their fathers. The article made me think as well —I’m setting aside for the moment what this issue looks like when it comes to gay parents—about how those assumptions are an artifact patriarchy and how patriarchy makes men and women default adversaries even when it comes to questions concerning their own children. If the right has its way—and we are inching there in bunches of inches—we will be going back to a society in which the law sees things more or less as it did in the 1970s, if not earlier, and the only people that is good for, ultimately, are the rich, mostly white men whose interests that kind of society is most efficiently organized to serve. --- ## Four Things To See All illustrations are from *A Voyage to New Holland,* published in 1699, by [William Dampier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William%5FDampier?ref=richardjnewman.com), 1651-1715. ### William Dampier ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KMWU!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc2c6b3ce-afff-4ce2-9806-65e175ea0c7e_478x799.jpeg) **§§§** ### A Voyage to New Holland (Australia) ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EmTA!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Feb394dc1-662d-4ef8-9342-ad523631fce3_799x518.jpeg) **§§§** ### Fish From a Voyage to New Holland ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!A3cL!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F24ab9217-cc29-45a9-a4af-e9e3bc440e40_478x799.jpeg) **§§§** ### Birds from a Voyage to New Holland ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!x5iC!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb1f32a06-7e34-4b38-a9ed-01bd6dd03ea3_478x799.jpeg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To Two very different jazz poets, each very much worth hearing. ### Aja Monet - Black Joy **§§§** ### **Aja Monet - Why My Love** **§§§** ### Barry Wallenstein - Eventually **§§§** ### **Barry Wallenstein - Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow** --- ## Four Things About Me My Masters Degree is in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, but the coursework in my program focused more on applied linguistics than on pedagogy. One of the subjects we studied, though I don’t remember now if it was an entire course unto itself or one unit within some other class, was linguistic fieldwork methodology, specifically in our case the strategies by which one can begin to map out the syntactical, semantic, and sociolinguistic structures of a language you do not speak and may never had heard before in your life. There was a woman from Burundi in our class and she agreed to be our Kirundi informant. The only thing I remember with any certainty about Kirundi is that it has sixteen noun classes. Noun classes are categories of nouns to which specific grammatical rules apply, like, for example, masculine and feminine nouns in languages like Spanish or Hebrew, with which the corresponding masculine or feminine forms of verbs and adjectives must be used. I’m not sure if this example, which has nothing at all to do with gender, comes from Kirundi, but I distinctly remember our professor giving an example in which nouns which referred to objects that were flat and round and nouns that referred to spheroid objects belonged to two different noun classes. Intellectual puzzles like that fascinated me and, if I wasn’t sure that teaching was what I wanted to do, I might very well have pursued a PhD in linguistics instead. **§§§** The other reason noun classes fascinated me so much had to do with the reading and thinking I was doing at the time about gender. I’m not going to try to reconstruct precisely what I was reading, but I remember having arguments with the way some of the feminist texts I read seemed to talk about manhood and masculinity as unchanging fixtures of the patriarchy within which anyone born into a male body was trapped. At the heart of these arguments was the fact that these same texts would sometimes wax poetic about all the different ways in which women could express and explore womanhood. I did not have a very sophisticated critique of what I perceived, and I don’t know if I ever said this aloud at the time, but I didn’t understand why, if a culture could distinguish in language between objects that were round and flat and objects that were spheroid, it couldn’t also distinguish between and among different ways of living in and expressing the identities of male and female bodies. I didn’t understand, in other words, why gender could not be a spectrum. Or at least a spectrum of sorts. I still divided the world into two genders, but I started to be able to imagine a world in which, within those two categories, there could be a very wide range of variation. I don’t remember if I ever said that out loud. Frankly, it felt to me so “out there” that I couldn’t imagine anyone taking it seriously. **§§§** Back in the 1990s, I published an essay about pornography called “Inside The Men Inside *Inside Christy Canyon,*” the concluding paragraph of which read in part: “I want a heterosexual pornography in which…male trust is eroticized, in which the places we have not been touched, the places it is in the interest of male dominance to keep hidden, are…brought into knowledge…For when the touch of sex is a touch that holds but does not violate, a space is created in which the life of one human being can co-exist in complete freedom with the life of another. This is what the *sex* in heterosexuality could be.” A friend who read that essay characterized it as an attempt “to queer” heterosexuality, which—though I would not have used that language at the time—I think it was. I thought about this as I finished writing the previous paragraph because I think, intellectually at least, the impetus to write “Inside The Men Inside *Inside Christy Canyon*” was partially rooted in the thinking about gender that learning about noun classes inspired. **§§§** Life choices always turn “what could have been” into “what might have been.” I have often wondered, for example, how my professional and creative life would have been different if I’d chosen to pursue a PhD in linguistics. I have no regrets about the choice I did make, but when I think back about *why* I made that choice—I was tired of being a student; I was ready to get a job and start living my life; and I wanted to travel and a TESOL degree would make that possible, largely on someone else’s dime—I am aware that I cut myself off from what I might have written and published and done if I’d pursued the academic and career path indicated by the three above paragraphs. ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-28/ Last updated: 2025-07-05T03:24:29.000Z *Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand, here I am sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, with visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.* —Virginia Woolf, letter to Vita Sackville-West (with thanks to Sven Birkerts, who quoted it in his Editor's Note, “[The Dream of the Ring](https://agnionline.bu.edu/editors-note/the-dream-of-the-ring/?ref=richardjnewman.com),” for Agni 101) ### Poetry Saved My Life URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/poetry-saved-my-life/ Last updated: 2025-06-25T16:30:23.000Z > *Poetry saved my life is not quite what I mean when I say it’s been a home for me, but both are true.* ### from "Fixtures and Fittings," by Sarah Salway URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/from-fixtures-and-fittings-by-sarah-salway/ Last updated: 2025-06-25T16:30:47.000Z “...The eternal whispering of the kettle would have kept us awake if our beds had let us sleep, duvets rapunzelling out of windows, but still the oven and the fridge carried on their terrible dance, gleaming metal against metal, souvenir magnets of theme parks clashing with haiku fragments and handwritten notes. So long as we carried on shopping we felt safe, our arms lengthening with the weight of all those bags, until it stopped, suddenly, one day, a truce made somewhere...” —*from* “Fixtures and Fittings," by Sarah Salway, published in [*Poetry Wales*](https://mailchi.mp/poetrywales/can-i-stop-falling-in-love-with-everything-i-see-by-daisy-behagg-8739353-4b3m63hgyq-17232745?e=9493f46429&ref=richardjnewman.com) ### Four by Four #41 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-41/ Last updated: 2025-08-22T12:22:50.000Z #### On this page ## A Cautionary Tale Two Khorasani darvishes were traveling together. One of them, because he fasted for two days at a time, was weak. The other ate three meals a day and was correspondingly strong. They came to a town where they were arrested at the gates on suspicion of spying. Their captors threw them into separate cells, the doors of which were then walled up with mud bricks. The dervishes’ innocence was not proven until two weeks later, but when the doors were opened, the stronger man was discovered to have died, while the weak man had survived. The townspeople were surprised, but a wise man among them pointed out that the opposite circumstance would have been even more surprising. The one who’d eaten three meals a day died because he lacked the wherewithal to withstand the hunger his captivity forced upon him. The weaker dervish survived because his habit of fasting prepared him for that hunger. *A man whose appetite is very small* *will not be overwhelmed by any hardship,* *but a man who thinks that eating signifies* *his wealth—if hardship overtakes him, he’ll die.* —from [*Golestan*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/selections-from-saadis-gulistan/) by Saadi of Shiraz, translated by Edward Rehatsek and Richard Jeffrey Newman --- ## Four Things To Read [*Let Our Bodies Change The Subject*](https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496237293/let-our-bodies-change-the-subject/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Jared Harél: ***Overnight*** *A daughter returns to you* *with three new freckles* *and the purple stain* *of popsicle on her tongue.* *She gives nothing but what you glean* *from slimmed features,* *sneakers gone old, the black hole* *of a backpack she shrugs* *off her shoulders* *to race unencumbered* *towards her friends* *down the street.* *Just yesterday she clung* *to the nape of your t-shirt,* *begging to stay.* *Just yesterday* *she was yours, and you,* *you gave her away.* *Let Our Bodies Change The Subject* is a lovely, moving, and sometimes unnerving meditation on what it means, in a world where you are surrounded by so many different kinds of threats, to live in and with family, in particular what it means to bring children into that world and to love them, fully and unconditionally, knowing that they will ultimately make their way through it on their own terms and well beyond the reach of your protection. Harél is a marvelous observer of the small details of family life, both the one in which he grew up and the one he has made with his wife; but what lifts those small moments out of the mundane, what turns his observations into moments that you, the reader, want to live within is his craft. His speaker sounds plainspoken, but look closely at the way Harél constructs his lines and you’ll see the work of someone who cares deeply about craft. Take a look, for example, at the first three lines of “Beer Run:” > It was summer. I was small. My uncle plunked me > into his pickup to keep him company > on his run for more beer. I was glad to go. I’m not going to do it here, but map out the sound patterning within and across those lines and you’ll see just how meticulously crafted the speaker’s conversational voice really is. Speaking as a poet, that commitment to craft as the thing that makes a poem a poem—something which is all too often missing in a lot of the poetry I read these days—is a large part of what made this book so enjoyable. **§§§** “[The Schools That Are No Longer Teaching Kids to Read Books](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/nyc-schools-stopped-teaching-books/678675/?gift=9L5E0%5F00dQA8ldt%5F3rAKn9oOfKWHtzNgTJL0Jpe9ZIg&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share),” by Xochtil Gonzalez: > Knowing how to read is crucial, but loving to read is a form of power, one that helps kids grow into curious, engaged, and empathetic adults. And it shouldn’t belong only to New York’s most privileged students. Those closing sentences of this essay hit especially hard in the context of the book-banning initiatives sweeping the country. Gonzalez’ focus, however, is something else entirely: the politics of reading curricula in New York City public schools and how one K-6 curriculum, [Into Reading](https://www.hmhco.com/programs/into-reading?ref=richardjnewman.com), published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, seems to be squeezing actual books out of the classrooms of the schools that adopt it. Gonzalez starts by pointing out that the previous pedagogical approach, called “balanced literacy \[which\] attempted to teach kids to read not through phonics, but by exposing them to books of their choice in order to foster a love of reading” turned out to be a huge failure, given the “appalling literacy numbers” posted by the city’s elementary schools. Into Reading is one of a number of curricula based on “a large body of research finding that learning to read and write well requires phonics, vocabulary development, and content and context comprehension.” The problem, Gonzalez writes, is that instead of “read\[ing\] and discuss\[ing\] whole books, \[students whose schools have adopted Into Reading\]…get \[to read instead\] a few paragraphs at a time \[before being\] prompted to answer a question. Reading has been distilled to practicing for a comprehension exam.” Gonzalez goes on to talk about how the school districts where Into Reading has been implemented tend overwhelmingly to be those in “the city’s most heavily immigrant, Black, and brown areas.” It’s worth following Gonzalez’ analysis to see how she ends up at the concluding sentences I quoted above. Fighting book bans is one, crucially important thing, but there are other ways to steer kids away from the kind of democratizing, potentially subversive power that one can claim through a true love of reading. We need to pay attention to and fight against those as well. **§§§** “[On Textual Violence: Cultural Imperialism and Monolingual ‘Translation](https://arablit.org/2025/05/14/on-textual-violence-cultural-imperialism-and-monolingual-translation/?ref=richardjnewman.com),’” a conversation between [Mona Kareem](https://monakareem.blogspot.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) and [Yasmeen Hanoosh](https://www.pdx.edu/world-languages/profile/yasmeen-hanoosh?ref=richardjnewman.com): > I wanted to take the veil of innocence off of literary translation. The colonial nature of translation is widely discussed in translation theory and translation studies, yet it often focuses on colonial archives or dictionaries, to give some examples. Literary translation, however, has been able to maintain its righteousness and innocence, which is really an extension of white innocence. For a working example, I focused on what is referred to as “bridge translation” whereby a white poet and a native speaker co-produce a translation in which the latter is silenced while used as a bridge. The issues with such phenomenon are many: political, ethical, aesthetic. Yet it goes unquestioned, even encouraged. As someone who was commissioned by a now-defunct Iranian cultural organization to produce more than one of these “bridge translations” from classical Persian literature into English—though my informants were (long-deceased) English-speaking Persian Studies scholars, not native speakers—I take the questions Mona Kareem raises here very seriously. I will tell the story of how I [came](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/the-teller-of-tales-stories-from-ferdowsis-shahnameh-2/) to [make](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/selections-from-saadis-bustan/) the [translations](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/selections-from-saadis-gulistan/) I have [published](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2024/11/Attar-s-Tale-of-Marhuma---The-Woman-With-a-Manly-Heart.pdf) another time. Here I will say only that I took pains to distinguish in a responsible way the work I did from the work of Coleman Barks and Daniel Ladinsky, whose versions of Rumi and Hafez respectively are deracinating, appropriating, and, frankly, colonizing in precisely the way Kareem alludes to in her use of the term “white innocence.” (I will leave the degree to which I succeeded and failed—because I am sure it’s both—to readers of these works.) Reading this conversation also brought home to me both my own ignorance of contemporary Arabic poetry and the degree to which all poetic cultures, and all efforts at literary translation, confront more or less the same questions, though they may do so at different historical moments and with different cultural and political histories as context. Those differences, I think, are what make room for learning to take place. **§§§** “[A Professor Was Fired for Her Politics. Is That the Future of Academia?](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/06/magazine/academic-freedom-politics.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.NE8.T22O.hITJyW4iZgOH&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com)” by Sarah Viren: > In their analysis, however, FIRE researchers highlighted one specific finding as particularly troubling: that a majority of “sanction attempts” against scholars came from inside the academy — from faculty, administrators or students. It’s a framing of the data that supports a broader conservative argument: that an intellectual monoculture is growing in the academy and is stifling freedom of speech. This view puts FIRE at odds with the American Association of University Professors \[AAUP\], which has long held that there are limits to what faculty members can say or write and those limits should be determined by the faculty members themselves. Viren’s article, which is primarily about Maura Finkelstein’s firing from her tenured position at [Muhlenberg College](https://www.muhlenberg.edu/?ref=richardjnewman.com) in Pennsylvania for pro-Palestinian statements she made both in and out of the classroom, also takes on the question of how that firing should be framed. The paragraph I’ve just quoted gets at one important component of that question. The politics surrounding Finkelstein’s statements and the various responses to them are by now well-rehearsed, so I’m not going to go into them here except to say that it’s clear to me that Finkelstein’s firing had more to do with what has come in some circles to be known as the “Palestine exception” to free speech and academic freedom than with any actual harm she did to students in or out of the classroom. It matters deeply, though, whether you frame the academic freedom that was violated in this case as an individual right—which is how the [Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression](https://www.thefire.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) (FIRE) sees it—or the way the [American Association of University Professors](https://www.aaup.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) (AAUP) does, as a norm that is determined, and the boundaries of which are policed, by the academic community itself. Finkelstein, for example, was fired in spite of the fact that the investigation into her statements, including a review by her peers, determined that they were neither harassing nor discriminatory. Both AAUP and FIRE argue that this was wrong. Importantly, though, as Viren notes, FIRE sees Finkelstein’s case as of a piece with that of University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, who, after an investigation by her peers, was suspended last fall, with a pay cut, for saying things like “the United States would be better off with more white people and that women are less knowledgeable than men, telling a student that Black people are inferior to white people and publicly discussing the grade distribution in her classes based on race.” It’s hard to imagine Wax’s statements not being directly harmful to students, since they relate explicitly to how she might evaluate student work; and so, at least for me, it’s hard to see the two cases, as FIRE clearly does, through the same lens. There’s a lot more to be said about this, of course, but FIRE’s position is deeply troubling to me, since it opens the door to and justifies precisely the kind of politically motivated, governmental intrusion into academia that we are currently seeing under President Trump. --- ## Four Things To See ### Backyard View, Public School in Background, Rulo, Nebraska, c. 1900, by Agnes Winterbottom Cooney [Agnes Winterbottom Cooney](https://www.artera.ae/profiles/agneswinterbottomcooney?ref=richardjnewman.com) (1878-1940) was an American photographer who specialized in cyanotype prints. This photographic process creates a distinctive blue color, which can be seen in her images of landscapes, interiors, and people. Cooney captured the everyday life of her time, showcasing details from architecture to everyday objects, capturing the beauty of simple things and the charm of ordinary scenes. Her work is a unique window into the past, offering a glimpse into the world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8_lt!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F76c61874-8c3c-4318-8743-c3b1c9a7fce7_3680x2913.jpeg) **§§§** ### The First Day of School, Jean Baptiste Vanmour, c. 1720 - c. 1737 A mother, accompanied by a group of women, brings her daughter to school for the first time. That the women are Turkish can be seen from their colorful clothing and the yellow slippers that only Muslims could wear, according to sumptuary laws (dress codes). A servant carries the girl’s embroidery frame. Needlework was a favorite pastime of women in affluent Turkish circles. Women held in slavery did the household chores. ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xOJ8!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8bb60f21-1a1a-4ac6-9c96-0e25812c9765_5654x4102.jpeg) **§§§** ### The Writing School, Utagawa, Toyokuni, 1769-1825 (Printmaker), Eijudo (Japanese, active 18th century) (Publisher) ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LOP7!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F62a80b4b-f902-493b-993b-ee4a2c458968_1107x1600.jpeg) **§§§** ### The Report Card of Charles Clairmont, March 3, 1845 ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Rnes!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5cdff777-ad19-4ea7-8709-ccdb890775be_974x1600.jpeg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### Abel Selaocoe - Ka Bohaleng / On The Sharp Side (Later with Jools Holland) **§§§** ### Abel Selaocoe & Bantu Ensemble 'Les Voix Humaines / Tsohle Tsohle' Live at KOKO **§§§** ### Hugh Masekela, Thuma mina **§§§** ### Miriam Makeba - Pata Pata (Live at Avo Session, Basel, 2006) --- ## Four Things About Me Back in the mid-to-late 1980s, when I was getting my MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), I worked part time in the Writing Center—then called The Writing Workshop—in the English Department from which I just retired. Since I was the only TESOL-qualified person there, most of the students I helped with their writing were second language learners. I remember one in particular, a woman from Iran, who was failing her English composition class and whose writing, it was clear from start, would not improve enough by the end of the semester for her to pass. As we discussed her situation, she revealed to me that she would lose her visa if she failed and that, if she was forced to return to Iran, she would face certain arrest and likely execution for her political activities in opposition to the still-relatively-new Islamic Republic. I don’t remember the details of how she obtained the visa, but I know I had no reason to doubt her, so I shared this information with her professor. He agreed to give her a minimal passing grade, though not without expressing to me, as if he held me personally responsible, his resentment that politics was intruding on the academic integrity of his classroom. What I remember most about this woman’s story, though, is the young man—he was either a Quaker or a Mormon; I don’t remember which and I have no memory of how he became involved with her—who offered to marry her so she could stay in the United States and eventually apply for citizenship. I don’t recall if he made that offer after they’d already started a relationship or before—my gut tells me it was before—but I know they did start seeing each other. I have no idea what happened to them, but I hope she was able to stay here and, if they did get married, I hope that they are still married and happy and living a fulfilled and fulfilling life. **§§§** The strangest excuse a student ever gave me for not getting their work in on time came from a young woman who explained to me that her boyfriend, who’d been serving in Iraq, would be coming home soon. I thought she was going to tell me that she’d been so excited and so involved with preparations for his homecoming that she’d let the assignment that was due fall by the wayside. Instead, she told me this. She’d been unfaithful, once, with a guy she knew from high school. Unfortunately, her enemies from high school, had somehow videoed that encounter—I don’t remember if the guy she was with was in on it—and they were blackmailing her. Her family, she said, was very wealthy and this group threatened to show her boyfriend the video if she did not steal for them some of her mother’s extremely valuable jewelry. I couldn’t imagine her making up a story like that to get an extension on a single paper, so I gave her the extension she was asking for, but, while I have a sense that she eventually disappeared from the class, I have no clear memory of what happened after that. **§§§** The most audacious request I ever got from a student came from a guy who showed up on the last day of class. He’d been doing the work till about a third of the way through the semester and then he just disappeared. I emailed him a couple of times to find out what happened, but he never responded. There he was, though, on the last day of class, waiting till everyone else was gone to speak with me. When I asked him where he’d been, he told me that he’d been arrested, along with some of his friends, for assaulting someone; that he’d been going to court, meeting with his lawyer, and dealing with other things related to the incident, which was why he hadn’t been in class. He then told me that because the damage he and his friends had done to the person they assaulted was so extensive he was almost certainly going to end up doing some time in jail. I could see the fear-bordering-on-panic in his eyes as he told me this, so, because he’d been a decent student till he stopped coming, and because I didn’t have the heart to be cold in the fact of his very real fear and just fail him outright, I offered to give him an incomplete for the class so that he could tell the judge that he planned to finish his coursework while he was serving his sentence. He looked me straight in the eye and without missing a beat said, “Actually, I was kind of hoping you’d give me a B.” I was, as you might imagine, stunned. I pointed out that he had in fact already failed the class and that I was doing him a favor by offering the incomplete. Then I asked what made him think I would give him a B. He said, without a hint of irony or any sort of self-awareness in his voice—and this is a direct quote—“I was hoping you’d do me a solid.” Needless to say, he failed the class. **§§§** The most disturbing encounter I ever had with a student—and please consider this a trigger warning if you’re someone who needs one—came very early in my career, before I was granted tenure. I was teaching a developmental writing course in which I’d asked my students to write a fable. We were sitting in a circle so those who wanted to could share what they’d written and the rest of us could respond. Setting aside the poor quality of the writing, I was impressed with imaginative effort at least some of my students had made. There was, for example, a modernized version of Little Red Riding Hood, set in an upper class neighborhood with the most sought-after senior boy in the local high school taking the part of the wolf. Another student conceived of a gender-reversed Sleeping Beauty, in which Princess Charming turns out to be the homeless woman who sleeps in the park. I was about to move on to the next part of the lesson when a young man who’d told us at the beginning that he didn’t want to share his story said that he’d changed his mind. His story concerned a drug dealer whose organization a female narcotics agent had been able to infiltrate by befriending the dealer’s girlfriend. When the girlfriend found that her new friend was, in fact, a narc, she informed her boyfriend, who killed the agent and, as thanks, gave his girlfriend “the literal fuck of her life, pounding away until she was no longer breathing.” The story ended with a description of the lavish funeral the dealer gave her. I will at some point write more about this encounter. Here, I will cut to the conversation Warren and I had after class. “Now that everyone else is gone and you don’t have to say the right thing,” he said—and these were his exact words; I wrote them down immediately afterward—“be honest. Wouldn’t it feel great to take some slut to a hotel and then meet your buddies later and tell them you’d killed her with your dick?” I told him no, but before I could say anything else, he went on, “Sure, maybe now that you’re older and you can’t get it up like you used to”—I was all of twenty eight—“but when you were younger, when you were an undergraduate, say, wasn’t fucking something you did so you could share it with your buddies, and impress them, and wouldn’t they have worshiped you if you told them you’d fucked a girl to death?” I decided that a monosyllabic answer was the best way to respond, since I knew I was not going to persuade him otherwise, so I said no again and went back to packing my things. Warren waited a few seconds and, when he realized I wasn’t going to say anything else, walked out of the class, muttering something under his breath of which I think I heard the words “pathetic,” “excuse,” and “man.” He did not come back to class after that, which might very well have had nothing to do with our conversation, but it’s hard for me not to think that it did. In the end he officially withdrew from the class and I never heard from him again. --- ## ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-27/ Last updated: 2025-06-21T12:37:04.000Z ## A Cautionary Tale Two Khorasani dervishes were traveling together. One of them, because he fasted for two days at a time, was weak. The other ate three meals a day and was correspondingly strong. They came to a town where they were arrested at the gates on suspicion of spying. Their captors threw them into separate cells, the doors of which were then walled up with mud bricks. The dervishes’ innocence was not proven until two weeks later, but when the doors were opened, the stronger man was discovered to have died, while the weak man had survived. The townspeople were surprised, but a wise man among them pointed out that the opposite circumstance would have been even more surprising. The one who’d eaten three meals a day died because he lacked the wherewithal to withstand the hunger his captivity forced upon him. The weaker dervish survived because his habit of fasting prepared him for that hunger. > *A man whose appetite is very small* > *will not be overwhelmed by any hardship,* > *but a man who thinks that eating signifies* > *his wealth—if hardship overtakes him, he’ll die.* *—*from [*Golestan*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/selections-from-saadis-gulistan/)by Saadi of Shiraz, translated by Edward Rehatsek and Richard Jeffrey Newman ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-26/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T00:21:40.000Z ## My Father’s Day gift! ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-25/ Last updated: 2025-06-03T17:42:38.000Z _No content available._ ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-24/ Last updated: 2025-06-03T15:55:56.000Z _No content available._ ### Four by Four #40 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-40/ Last updated: 2025-07-17T20:59:18.000Z #### On this page ## Writing News [*T’shuvah*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/tshuvah-2/) was listed in CLMP’s [Reading List for Jewish American Heritage Month 2025](https://www.clmp.org/news/a-reading-list-for-jewish-american-heritage-month-2025/?ref=richardjnewman.com). --- ## Four Things To Read [*Remembering The Alchemists & Other Essays*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/remembering-the-alchemists-other-essays-richard-hoffman/19303924?ean=9781734517767&next=t&ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Richard Hoffman: > *A self must learn. The body is. The body knows. A self learned to act as if it is real, and learned to ignore what the body knows. The body transcends the self and not, as religions have it, the other way around; even when they posit a stand-in for the self called the soul, the idea is that a personal transcendence is possible and ought to be sought after. Begin with that orientation to the divine, and one can talk all one wants about charity, generosity, brotherhood—it’s every man for himself. Even before there were religions there was religious war.* > > **—from* “Like Never Before”* At the center of this book of essays is a moral clarity rooted in an uncompromising commitment to the integrity of the body, and particularly to the bodies of children, as the foundation of a truly just society, which makes sense given that Hoffman was raped as a boy by a man he trusted. The book, however, is not a survivor’s memoir. Rather, the essays explore what it means to take that stand and apply it to the environment, to art, to love, to the question of whether there are lines we should not cross in trying to humanize those who declare themselves our enemies, and more. The voice through which Hoffman speaks in these pieces is approachable, patient, curious; he does not hide the moments of his own uncertainty or smooth the rough edges of his trying to figure things out; and that kind of honesty—not just in what he says, but in how he says it—is what made this book so moving for me. **§§§** [The Law Cannot Let Itself See The Nakba](https://jewishcurrents.org/the-law-cannot-let-itself-see-the-nakba?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Joshua Abramson Cohen: > *You don’t get to identify as a Zionist in a vacuum.* This interview with Rabea Eghbariah centers around an article Eghbariah published in the [Columbia Law Review](https://columbialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/May-2024-1-Eghbariah.pdf?ref=richardjnewman.com) called “Toward Nakba As A Legal Concept,” which is a closely argued, thoroughly researched and heavily footnoted piece that I am about halfway through. Boiled down to its essence, Eghbariah’s argument is that international law should adopt Nakba as the term to describe the “project of erasure” of the Palestinians that Zionism has been engaged in for the past 100 years. There are, of course, a whole lot of assumptions baked into that sentence, among them the question of whether or not erasing the Palestinians has, in fact, been a central component of the Zionist project. (And I understand Zionism here to be not the Jewish emotional connection to the land of Israel, but rather the concrete, specific, and material actions taken in relation to the Palestinians by the Jews who settled the land and by every Israeli government that has been in power since the state was founded.) I know there are people reading this who will have difficulty with the fact that I have given any credence at all to Eghbariah’s argument, but I urge you to read the interview and Eghbariah’s law review article nonetheless. Here is what he says before the line that I have quoted above: > *Just as Nazi ideology produced the Holocaust and Afrikaner nationalism generated apartheid, so, too, did Zionism birth the Nakba. From there, Zionism and the Nakba have come into existence hand in hand, with the destruction of Palestinian life making the Jewish state a reality.* To call yourself a Zionist and deny this fact—that the Palestinians would not have experienced the Nakba if Zionism had never existed; that Israel would right now not, for example, be forcing the Palestinians in Gaza into starvation, if Zionism had never existed—is to erase Palestinian existence and experience in precisely the way Eghbariah argues it has been the Zionist project to do. I have not called myself a Zionist for some time now in large measure because I agree that, whatever else might be true about the inescapable role that the Land of Israel—not the State, but the land—plays in Jewish religious and cultural identity, it is impossible to separate Zionism as a political project from the oppression, and now genocidal warfare, Israel has visited up on the Palestinians. You may disagree with me on that, but if that disagreement is not informed by an honest, good faith confrontation with analyses like Eghbariah’s, then you are indeed identifying as a Zionist in a vacuum. **§§§** [Where’s the outrage over ‘systematic’ sexual violence against Palestinians?](https://www.972mag.com/systematic-sexual-violence-against-palestinians/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Samah Salaime: > *As it turns out, even a dramatic escalation in gender-based crimes against women and girls during the war, and the unequivocal determination that Israel’s use of these methods was systematic, rather than merely isolated acts by individual soldiers, wasn’t enough to drive Israeli or international women’s organizations to oppose, condemn, or even call for an urgent examination of the issue. Even the fact that the report was released just days before International Women’s Day didn’t suffice to spark webinars, symposiums, or conferences at universities around the world, nor emergency discussions in parliamentary committees for the advancement of women’s rights.* Salaime wrote an article I linked to in [Four by Four #17](https://itallconnects.substack.com/p/four-by-four-17) called “[Women’s liberation mustn’t stop at either side of the Gaza fence](https://www.972mag.com/palestinian-jewish-feminists-women-liberation-gaza-fence/?ref=richardjnewman.com),” in which she argued that “feminist principles compel us to stand with both the Palestinian women being slaughtered in Gaza and the Israeli women testifying about sexual violence.” In the article I’ve linked to here she talks about having “lost \[both\] Palestinian comrades” over her “condemnation of Hamas’ violence against Israeli women” and “Jewish friends who regarded women in Gaza as legitimate targets.” If that last quote brought you up short, consider the quote Salaime brings from the UN report of comments made by Eliyahu Yosian from the [Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy](https://www.misgavins.org/en/home/?ref=richardjnewman.com), “The woman is an enemy, the baby is an enemy, and the pregnant woman is an enemy.” Granted, he made those comments on the far-right Channel 14, but, as we have seen here in the States, once a government and/or the media leave an opening for extremist ideas to become part of the national conversation, it’s not hard for the people who hold such views to normalize them. Most disheartening is the reactions Salaime quotes from some very high profile women and women’s organizations in Israel, all of whom insist that the UN report is just one more “step in the campaign to delegitimize Israel.” **§§§** [How the Sausage Gets Made: Inside Hollywood’s Prosthetic Penis Craze](https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/how-prosthetic-penises-are-made-tv-movies?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Emma Fraser: > *When a *Euphoria* scene calls for a prosthetic, Collins talks through the technical aspect with makeup-department head Doniella Davy. Is the penis erect…or flaccid? Will it require liquid? If so, “It’s a tube running through the \[prosthetic\] penis itself, and it’s being pumped out," Davy says. “If a person just needs to stand naked in a room, or walk naked through a room, his real penis will be filmed as long as the actor is comfortable with it. We only use penis prosthetics when penises need to do specific things other than just make an appearance.”* Part of me wants to let the title of this article and the above quote speak for themselves, but that last sentence—“We only use penis prosthetics when penises need to do specific things other than just make an appearance”—makes me want to point out that there is in the article an understated, but I think significant, acknowledgment of the emotional and psychological vulnerabilities that come with living in a male body that are too often minimized, trivialized, or entirely elided by cultural expectations surrounding manhood and masculinity. --- ## Four Things To See All images are from [The Cleveland Museum of Art](https://www.clevelandart.org/home?ref=richardjnewman.com) and are in the public domain. All text is quoted from Wikipedia. ### The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse), by Albert Pinkham Ryder [Albert Pinkham Ryder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert%5FPinkham%5FRyder?ref=richardjnewman.com) (March 19, 1847 – March 28, 1917) was an American painter best known for his poetic and moody allegorical works and seascapes, as well as his eccentric personality. While his art shared an emphasis on subtle variations of color with tonalist works of the time, it was unique for accentuating form in a way that some art historians regard as a precursor to modernism. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/05/1928.8_web.jpg) **§§§** ### Morning Glory with Black, by Georgia O’Keeffe [Georgia Totto O'Keeffe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia%5FO%27Keeffe?ref=richardjnewman.com) (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American modernist painter and draftswoman whose career spanned seven decades and whose work remained largely independent of major art movements. Called the "Mother of American modernism", O'Keeffe gained international recognition for her paintings of natural forms, particularly flowers and desert-inspired landscapes, which were often drawn from and related to places and environments in which she lived. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/05/1958.42_web.jpg) **§§§** ### Orpheus, by Odilon Redon [Odilon Redon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odilon%5FRedon?ref=richardjnewman.com) (April 20, 1840 – 6 July 1916) was a French Symbolist draftsman, printmaker, and painter. Redon is perhaps best known today for the dreamlike paintings created in the first decade of the 20th century, which were inspired by Japanese art and leaned toward abstraction. His work is considered a precursor to Surrealism. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/05/1926.25_web.jpg) **§§§** ### The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Rémy), by Vincent van Gogh [Vincent Willem van Gogh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent%5Fvan%5FGogh?ref=richardjnewman.com) (March 30, 1853 – July 29, 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade, he created approximately 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. His oeuvre includes landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and self-portraits, most of which are characterized by bold colors and dramatic brushwork that contributed to the rise of expressionism in modern art. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/05/1947.209_web.jpg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To All text is quoted from Wikipedia. ### 3MA · Rajery · Ballaké Sissoko · Driss El Maloumi **§§§** ### **Florence Price Violin Concerto No. 2** *Kelly Hall-Tompkins, violin* [**Florence Beatrice Price**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence%5FPrice?ref=richardjnewman.com) (née **Smith**; April 9, 1887 – June 3, 1953) was an American classical composer, pianist, organist and music teacher. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Price was educated at the New England Conservatory of Music, and was active in Chicago from 1927 until her death in 1953\. Price is noted as the first African-American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer, and the first to have a composition played by a major orchestra. **§§§** ### **Esperanza Spalding - I Know You** **§§§** ### **The Man I Love (George & Ira Gershwin) - Mary Lou Williams** --- ## Four Things About Me A few years before it was published in 2006, [*The Silence of Men*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/the-silence-of-men/) was a semifinalist for what was then called the Walt Whitman Award, the Academy of American Poets’ prestigious first book prize. (It’s now called the [Academy of American Poets First Book Award](https://poets.org/academy-american-poets/prizes/first-book-award?ref=richardjnewman.com).) [Sherod Santos](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sherod-santos?ref=richardjnewman.com) was the judge. I was very uninformed back then about how contests worked, so I assumed that he, not the group of gate-keeping readers the Academy almost certainly employed to weed out everything but the finalists—had read my manuscript and placed it in the semifinalists pile. I knew nothing about him other than his name, so I bought one of his books. I don’t remember which one it was, but I do remember not thinking very highly of it. I didn’t win, but I’d been submitting the manuscript to first book contests for some time, at a not inconsequential cost, so knowing that this time my manuscript had made it as far as it did was tremendously affirming. I played the contest game for a couple of years after that, but I never again received a letter telling me my manuscript was, as they say, “a contender.” I finally decided contests weren’t worth the money and started looking consciously for presses that would publish a first book without a contest. That’s how I found [CavanKerry Press](https://cavankerrypress.org/products/the-silence-of-men?ref=richardjnewman.com), my first publisher, and with one exception—the [National Poetry Series](https://nationalpoetryseries.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com), a $10,000 prize is nothing to sneeze at—I have not submitted to a book contest since. **§§§** The contest model has always irked me in general, not least because of a built in bias I started sensing some time ago that was documented by Juliana Spahr, Stephanie Young, and Claire Grossman in their article “[Literature’s Vexed Democratization](https://cssh.northeastern.edu/nulab/contemporary-literatures-vexed-democratization/?ref=richardjnewman.com),” that awards an overwhelming number of career-making literary prizes to MFA-holders, with fully half of those winners having graduated from one of four schools: Columbia University, New York University, University of California in Irvine, and the University of Iowa. First-book poetry prizes, though, bother me for a different reason as well: the way they fetishize the first book. I read an essay a long time ago in which the writer, I think it was [Eavan Boland](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/eavan-boland?ref=richardjnewman.com), talked about what is lost when first books are expected to be perfect enough, whatever that might mean, to win contests or pass muster as MFA theses. She missed, she said, how uneven first books used to be (in whatever time frame she was referencing), the pleasure of watching from poem to poem as the poet tried different things, some of which would pan out and some of which would not. I don’t know if this is what I remember from the essay or if this is my own framing, but it seemed to me that Boland was talking about a level of vulnerable authenticity, or maybe authentic vulnerability, that the polish required to win a contest or pass muster as a thesis tends to smooth over. It’s an interesting point, but I wish I had the essay so I could say more about it. (If anyone reading this knows the essay I’m talking about, please let me know.) **§§§** I’ve never read Lewis Hyde’s book [*The Gift*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-gift-how-the-creative-spirit-transforms-the-world-lewis-hyde/18408257?ean=9781984897787&next=t&ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* but, back when I was first learning how to be a poet, it was not uncommon to hear poets talk about poetry as being part of “the gift economy.” A poem, this way of thinking went—if I remember correctly—should be thought of not as a commodity, but as a gift given, freely given, with no strings attached, by the poet to the community. I really liked that way of thinking about the poems I was making, though I also remember wondering how that framework made room for the fact that a book of poetry was a commodity by definition. When I think now about this way of seeing poetry and what it means to be a poet, though, what strikes me is how at odds it is with the professionalization of creative writing that the proliferation of MFA programs has brought about. While I have my own opinion about that, I mean it here as a description, not a criticism. In an interview that I cannot find, [Patricia Spears Jones](https://psjones.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) talked about how relatively new it is to hear poets talk about and work at “having a career” as a poet and mean something that is different only in degree, not kind, from what it means, for example, to have a career as a teacher or a lawyer. I wish I could remember exactly what Jones said, because it was far more eloquent than how I am going to paraphrase her here: that she never thought of herself as having a career as a poet, she just made poems. I often wonder—and this has nothing to do with the quality of the poems that get written—what we have lost with the waning of that perspective. **§§§** I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my early influences, in part because I am in the process of being email-interviewed by a poet from Iran who asks questions that, even when they are not about influences, compel me to reflect on why I think about things the way I do, and that reflection inevitably involves thinking about the poets and writers whose work first shaped me. I’ve also been thinking about early influences, though, because I’ve been noticing lately how generally uninterested I am in trying to keep up with what is current in the poetry world. I don’t mean that there aren’t poets whose work I like and respect, or that there aren’t conversations that I think are important enough to pay attention to and that I sometimes learn from, but so much of what is hyped as new and exciting—and I will admit up front that this is an unfair and inaccurate generalization, that what I am putting down here is my unexamined emotional response—ends up feeling more like what I will call an intellectualization of the impulse to poetry than an engagement with the art itself that it makes me want to reconnect with the poets and writers that fed *my* initial impulse. Here are a few: - Poetry: John Donne, e. e. cummings, June Jordan, Ai, Albert Goldbarth, Robert Creeley - Prose: June Jordan, James Baldwin, Hayden Carruth, Sallie Tisdale ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-23/ Last updated: 2025-05-10T16:57:09.000Z ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/05/IMG_0052.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/05/IMG_0054.jpeg) Gypsy and Archie at night. ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-22/ Last updated: 2025-05-10T16:53:03.000Z > The student to whom you gave an incomplete in good faith because they really were confronted with serious difficulties at the end of the semester, and seemed very serious about completing the work they were unable to do, who then tries to get over on you with a paper written by an AI that was not “smart enough” not to invent quotes and poems that do not appear in the text you assigned. ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-21/ Last updated: 2025-05-09T15:55:59.000Z ## Preamble We are starting to roll. We are coming to you through the internet. And when the weather is right, masked, we are coming to your door. We will ring the bell, then step back six feet and wait for you to pick up the leaflets we have left in your mailbox. And we will wait for you to open them up and look over at us and ask, why did you take so long...as you tell us that you have had your bag packed but you will not go anywhere except to the ballot box. Not now. The current occupant has gone too far, broken every rule and every dream. And we are going to post them back, on the walls, on columns, and in the official residence of our dreams, the house of the people we will rescue at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. —Indran Amirthanayagam, from *Ten Thousand Steps Against The Tyrant* ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-20/ Last updated: 2025-04-29T09:29:25.000Z ## The morning view from my window... ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-19/ Last updated: 2025-04-29T09:22:03.000Z > Once upon a time... ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/04/IMG_0059-1.jpg) ### Four By Four #39 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-39/ Last updated: 2025-06-03T15:19:22.000Z #### In This Issue ## Writing News Sonia Alland’s and my translation of “[The Words](https://www.trreview.com/post/the-words-by-salvador-espriu-translated-by-sonia-alland-and-richard-jeffrey-newman?ref=richardjnewman.com),” by Salvador Espriu, was published in [Black Lawrence Press](https://blacklawrencepress.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com)’ [tr. review of translations](https://www.trreview.com/post/the-words-by-salvador-espriu-translated-by-sonia-alland-and-richard-jeffrey-newman?ref=richardjnewman.com). **§§§** My poem “[In That Moment of Change](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f91fef8b0d4490021b637f5/t/67e853f4df0c991ed0c1465b/1743279101386/2025+IHRAM+Q1+Lit+Magazine+KDP+Upload.pdf?ref=richardjnewman.com),” which I wrote in memory of my friend Ronny, who was murdered by her husband in 2021, was published by the [International Human Rights Arts Movement](https://humanrightsartmovement.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) in [*The Evolving Gaze*](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f91fef8b0d4490021b637f5/t/67e853f4df0c991ed0c1465b/1743279101386/2025+IHRAM+Q1+Lit+Magazine+KDP+Upload.pdf?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* an issue of their quarterly publication devoted to questions of manhood and masculinity. They’ve gathered an impressive range of work, in terms of country of origin, age, gender, and more. It’s a publication definitely worth a look on its own merits. My poem is on page 93. **§§§** Back in 2021, I took part in [Queensbound](https://queensbound.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), poet [KC Trommer](https://www.kctrommer.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com)’s audio project for bringing poetry into public spaces, both online and in the physical world. The concept is simple. Each poet chose a subway stop in Queens, NY and incorporated it into a poem that they then recorded for inclusion on the site. My stop was Elmhurst Avenue on the R line. If you go to the [Queensbound website](https://queensbound.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), you can listen to my poem by clicking on the station, or you can listen on [Soundcloud](https://queensbound.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), or—and here is why I am telling you about this now—you can check out the [Queensbound podcast](https://open.spotify.com/show/7mSIllgpZxvuLKWj8MaYOx?ref=richardjnewman.com), which recently went live. My poem is in the [third episode](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6ft31hrGZ2QCgvHAjuV7qk?si=jc%5FI2wJLRCSX5-HYfp0WWw&ref=richardjnewman.com), but I hope you will consider checking out all the episodes. --- ## Four Things To Read [*Nasir Khusraw: The Ruby of Badakhshan*](https://www.iis.ac.uk/publications-listing/nasir-khusraw-the-ruby-of-badakhshan/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Alice C. Hunsberger: > *If* [*Nasir Khusraw*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasir%5FKhusraw?ref=richardjnewman.com) *\[1004-between 1072 and 1088\] is less well-known today, even in Iran, than other Persian poets such as Sa‘di, Khayyam, Rumi or Hafiz, other travel chroniclers and historians such as Ibn Battuta or Ibn Khaldun, and other philosophers such as Ibn Sina, al-Farabi or Nasir al-Din Tusi, this may in part be due to his devoted allegiance to the Ismaili Shi’i faith…Also, rather than composing love poems or mystical odes…Khusraw focused largely on ethical and moralizing poetry, admonishing the reader to attend to the task of spiritual improvement in place of chasing after the baubles of this material and materialistic world.* As you might guess from that brief quote from the Preface, this book is mostly for people in the field of, or with an informed interest in, Persian Studies. Alice Hunsberger gave me a copy in 2011 when we met at a talk she was giving about the book, which I attended because my own translations of Saadi (which is the non-diacritical spelling of Sa’di) had brought me marginally into a circle of writers and scholars engaged in research about and the translation of classical Persian poetry. A lot of what Hunsberger has to say, I have to confess, went over my head. I simply do not know enough about Islamic, much less Ismaili Shi’i, theology and epistemology. I did find very interesting, if I understood it properly, Hunsberger’s discussion of Khusraw’s conviction that the intellect is the only truly authentic way to pursue both a righteous life and knowledge of God, an idea that sounded very much like the emphasis on learning Torah, on using one’s intellect to understand Jewish law and what it means to be a Jew, that I was taught when I was in yeshiva. I was also fascinated by Hunsberger’s discussion of Khusraw’s travelogues. One thing that stuck out to me—in the vein of “the more things change…”—was the fact that, in 11th century Cairo, the buying and selling of drinking water was big business; and I especially appreciated learning about Khusraw’s critique of court poets who, these are Hunsberger’s words, “use their art to weave the praise of unworthy kings, telling beautiful lies for worldly wealth.” Finally, Hunsberger’s study is also interesting as a formal exercise in the writing of biography. Khusraw’s life and work present interesting problems for a biographer to solve and Hunsberger does so in a way that’s worth engaging with separate and apart from whether the book’s content is specifically your cup of tea or not. **§§§** [The SAVE Act’s Impact on Women Voters Isn’t a Coincidence. It’s Voter Suppression.](https://msmagazine.com/2025/03/26/save-act-voting-rights-women-trans-voters-elections/?omhide=true&emci=32381032-f80b-f011-90cd-0022482a9fb7&emdi=1ba052bd-9d0c-f011-90cd-0022482a9fb7&ceid=1174915&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Beth Lynk: > *Make no mistake: The* [*SAVE Act*](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/22?ref=richardjnewman.com) *is not going to “save” anything. This legislation would create unnecessary barriers to registering to vote in every state. It would require all voters to provide proof of citizenship documents in person when registering to vote or updating their registration—provisions that effectively end online, automatic and mail-in voter registration. Women who change their name after marriage or divorce would face unnecessary barriers to registering to vote.* While the [SAVE Act](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/22?ref=richardjnewman.com) seems tailor made to make it more difficult for poor people and people living in rural areas to vote, along with a host of other groups living in one way or another on the edge, its potential impact on women is particularly insidious because it demonstrates how the right can attack women without having to name what they’re doing as an attack on women. The issues this legislation could create for women who changed their name after marriage, or who didn’t change their name back after divorce, is redolent of the time when banks could either refuse women credit cards in their own names or require them to have a male cosigner. That practice ended only in the 1970s. More importantly, though, it’s crucial to recognize the context in which that practice existed. Back then, for example, pregnant women had no protection against being fired from their jobs; it wasn’t until 1975 that women in all 50 states could serve on juries; and spousal rape was not yet a crime. The consequences of the SAVE Act for women, intended or not (though it’s hard to conclude that they were not intended), feel very much like a step back in that direction. **§§§** [Trump Is Selling Jews a Dangerous Lie](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/opinion/trump-jewish-antisemitism-wesleyan.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.%5F04.xVNE.6KyAJzkV09M8&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Michael S. Roth: > *As the first Jewish president of a formerly Methodist university, I find no comfort in the Trump administration’s embrace of my people, on college campuses or elsewhere. Jew hatred is real, but today’s anti-antisemitism isn’t a legitimate effort to fight it. It’s a cover for a wide range of agendas that have nothing to do with the welfare of Jewish people.* I’ve said this elsewhere, but I will say it again. It has become commonplace, on the left at least, to use the genocidal destruction Israel has wrought in Gaza to justify dismissing, minimizing, and/or trivializing Jews’ concerns about antisemitism, as if concern about both those things cannot coexist in the same moral imagination. What I admire about Roth’s op ed is that he manages to call out the confidence game Trump and company are trying to run on the American Jewish community while barely even mentioning what is going on in Israel and Palestine; and—at least as I read his essay—he does this in two ways. First, by not revealing his own stance on Israel and Palestine, implicitly driving home the point that antisemitism is an issue for all Jews—Zionist, non-Zionist, anti-Zionist, whatever. Second, he makes clear through the force of his examples that antisemitism is not primarily about what’s going on now in Israel—even if Israel’s behavior may be what triggers some antisemitic acts. Regardless of where you stand on Israel and Palestine, this essay is worth reading. **§§§** [We Underestimate the Manosphere at Our Peril](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/opinion/manosphere-online-boys-parents.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.AU8.bvfW.yaY83jXZ1fjh&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Rachel Louise Snyder: > *It took under nine minutes for TikTok to offer troubling content to their fake 16-year-old boys, which later included explicitly anti-feminist and anti-L.G.B.T.Q. videos. Much of the content blamed women and trans people for the standing they believe men have lost in the world. More extreme content appeared within 23 minutes. Male supremacy videos intersected with reactionary right-wing punditry within two or three hours.* Back in the mid-aughts, I blogged pretty regularly at Barry Deutsche’s site [Alas](https://amptoons.com/blog/?ref=richardjnewman.com). Alas was, if I remember correctly, the first feminist blog run by a man, and I was very happy to contribute to that effort, both in my own posts and in the comments I contributed to the discussion. (As a side note, Alas is now primarily a platform for Barry’s political cartoons, which are definitely worth checking out.) A non-trivial portion of the discussion had to do with what was being written and promulgated on men’s antifeminist blogs. The term [manosphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manosphere?ref=richardjnewman.com), an obvious play on [blogosphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogosphere?ref=richardjnewman.com), emerged around that time and it quickly became an umbrella term for a number of different online communities that nonetheless have in common the goal of promoting some version of traditional masculinity, an often virulent antifeminism, and misogyny. What was once clearly a fringe of internet culture, however, has become more and more mainstream. “We live in a new world,” Snyder writes, “where words like ‘women,’ ‘gender’ and ‘trauma’ are banned or limited in research studies. Phrases like ‘women are property’ and ‘gay people are mentally ill’ are no longer violations of conduct at Meta.” Snyder’s essay is also worth reading for the links she’s embedded. Just about every one leads to something that is worth knowing about this issue. ## Four Things To See ### Orpheus Charming The Animals By [Josias Murer II](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/person/103M0F?ref=richardjnewman.com) (1564-1630). Murer, who was part of a family of artists living in Zurich in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds, became the exclusive glass painter of Zurich's city hall in 1591\. He was fully occupied with this distinguished commission until 1614\. Murer was trained by his father, Jos Murer, with whom he often worked. He also frequently worked with his well-known brother, Christoph Murer. In addition to his designs and paintings for the Zurich city hall, Murer created numerous stained glass panels of coats of arms for churches and city halls throughout the region. Little else is known about this artist. The image is from Getty and is in the public domain. ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0daff415-3bdf-4ed1-8f99-ef526320e318_832x1024.jpeg) **§§§** ### A Manuscript Page from “On Poetry and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature,” by Mary Wollstonecraft You can read the full essay [here](https://www.berfrois.com/2021/11/mary-wollstonecraft-on-poetry-and-our-relish-for-the-beauties-of-nature/?ref=richardjnewman.com). The image is from the New York Public Library and is in the public domain. ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3bd3329d-9c42-4212-9bba-5fc471c9a824_635x760.jpeg) **§§§** ### Llewllyn And His Dog This image is also from the New York Public Library. It’s from a children’s book illustrated by the Dalziel brothers. The lines are the first verse of the poem “[Llewellyn And His Dog](https://wordsmith.org/board/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=67402&ref=richardjnewman.com),” by the Honorable W. R. Spencer. [Llewllyn the Great](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llywelyn%5Fab%5FIorwerth?ref=richardjnewman.com) was a medieval Welsh ruler who, through a combination of war and diplomacy, dominated Wales for 45 years. The dog’s name was [Gelert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelert?ref=richardjnewman.com). ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbecd6e8a-2df8-4144-baa1-949d0279e17d_558x760.jpeg) **§§§** ### The Power of Music (1847) By [William Sidney Mount](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William%5FSidney%5FMount?ref=richardjnewman.com) (November 26, 1807 – November 19, 1868). Mount was a 19th-century American genre painter. Born in Setauket, New York in 1807, Mount spent much of his life in his hometown and the adjacent village of Stony Brook. During that time he achieved fame in the U.S. and Europe as a painter who chronicled rural life on Long Island. He was the first native-born American artist to specialize in genre painting. Mount was also passionate about music and a fiddle player, a composer and collector of songs, and designed and patented several versions of his own violin which he named the “Cradle of Harmony.” This painting, set in rural Long Island before the Civil War, presents an African American laborer listening intently to a fiddle tune enjoyed by white men. While a love of music unites the figures in a bond of shared humanity, the two races occupy different spaces--one inside, one outside, both separated by a barn door--effectively symbolizing the pronounced divisions in America at the time. ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3d84695c-989f-45b1-8e1f-142e08d8bcd3_1106x893.jpeg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### **Lou Rawls - Stormy Monday (with Stanley Turrentine)** **§§§** ### **Bobbie Gentry - Ode To Billie Joe** **§§§** ### **Oded Tzur - The Three Statements of Garab Dorje** [Garab Dorje](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garab%5FDorje?ref=richardjnewman.com) was the first human to receive the complete direct transmission teachings of Sutra, Tantra and Dzogchen. The circumstances of his birth are shrouded in different interpretations, with some accounts describing a miraculous birth by a virgin daughter of the king of Uddiyana. **§§§** ### **Mickey Katz - Duvid Crockett** You can find the footnoted lyrics of this song [here](https://lyricstranslate.com/en/mickey-katz-dovid-crocket-lyrics.html?ref=richardjnewman.com). --- ## Four Things About Me We own an orange [Le Creuset cast iron oval baker](https://www.lecreuset.com/signature-oval-baker/20188US.html?ref=richardjnewman.com) that, along with a matching orange skillet that went the way of the world years ago, was given to me nearly four decades ago by a man named Herbert, who was passing them along to me from his friend Michael, who had died of AIDS not long before and for whom Herbert had been a primary caregiver. Herbert, a friend of my grandmother’s, was a gay man who had either converted to Roman Catholicism or had recommitted himself to his religion—I don’t remember which—and, following the logic that only homosexual acts were sinful, not being homosexual itself, he had become celibate. Caring for Michael, I think, was not only Herbert’s way of being of service to someone in need—if I remember correctly, Michael’s family had disowned him—but also a kind of penance for the sinful (in his and his god’s eyes) life he had previously led. I don’t remember why I went with Herbert to visit Michael the one time I met the man, but I remember a gaunt, red-haired man with a well-groomed beard lying in bed with the blanket pulled up to the middle of his chest. I don’t remember how long we stayed or what we spoke about, or how long after that visit Herbert presented me with the cookware, but I do remember what he said when he gave it to me. Since Michael had no family to leave anything to, Herbert explained, he wanted to make sure that the few belongings that constituted his estate went to people who meant something to him. I, though I have no idea how, had made such a strong impression on Michael that one time we met, that he included me in this group. “I went to see Michael the day after you met him,” Herbert said, “‘That,’ he said—Michael was referring to you—‘is a good man. I want to give him something.’” I still think of Michael every time I use his gift to cook. **§§§** I’ve been thinking about paper grading a lot lately, mostly because I am retiring this year, and each set that I grade brings me closer to the one that will be—because I do not intend to teach in my retirement—the absolute last one.(I know: talk about burying the lede, right? But more about that in a moment.) What I’ve been thinking is that almost no one I know who is not an academic, really understands the degree to which grading essays is emotional labor; and even among those who are academics, I don’t know many who fully recognize that the emotional labor is different when writing is what you’re teaching, as opposed to when you are teaching a content. I’m not talking about the anger and frustration you feel at half-assed work or at students who don’t know how to follow directions, or at least I’m not talking primarily about that, and I certainly am not suggesting that the grading of English papers is therefore in a class of its own as a condition of employment. Difference does not have to mean hierarchy. Rather, I’m talking about the labor involved in accompanying, guiding, mentoring, students not only on the intellectual journey their work represents, but also on the journey through language, the wrestling with language, their writing cannot help but be. Because when writing is what you’re teaching, you can’t avoid the fact that even the students who do half-assed work have put their vulnerability on display; and I do believe that because this vulnerability foregrounds their relationship to language in a way that, say, a research paper for history class does not necessarily do, working with them touches on their sense of self, on the state of their self-esteem, in a different way as well. I don’t have much else to say about this right now. I just wish it was something more people recognized. **§§§** Why am I retiring? The initial trigger was an incentive offered by the college where I work. Every advisor I consulted, some professional, some people I trusted, advised me that it would be a mistake not to take it. Once I started contemplating even the possibility of retiring, however, an inescapable realization began to dawn on me: I no longer have patience for the eighteen-to-tweny-or-so-year-olds who make up the majority of my students, and because I don’t have that patience anymore, teaching does not fulfill me the way it used to. When I tell most people that, they nod knowingly and begin to commiserate with what they think I mean, that students today are so much worse than they used to be: less respectful, more entitled, too immersed in their phones, unwilling to read, to think for themselves, too transactional about their education, too indifferent to the world around them. I don’t want to deny that there is some truth to these observations, though I think many of them boil down to the fact that we are a generation or two apart, but I do not think that there are any inherent, essential differences between the students of today and those from thirty-six or twenty-six or even sixteen years ago. I see in the young people sitting in my classrooms today the same levels of maturity, of cognitive development, of commitment to their own intellects as I did when I started. They write, more or less, the same essays, make the same mistakes, and give the same excuses as college freshman and sophomores have always done. I, I realized as I thought about not teaching them anymore, am the one who has changed. When I started teaching, I was young enough that, at least for some of the older students in my class, if I had not been their teacher, we could have been hanging out together at a bar. I truly enjoyed the challenge of showing why learning to write competently mattered. Now, I am old enough to be their father and, if their parents are young enough, even their grandfather. I will not say I do not care, but I have come to understand that the challenge is just interesting to me anymore. More than that, though, I realized that after thirty-six years I am ready—no, that’s not strong enough, I realized that I *need* to do something different. I don’t know exactly what that is yet, but I am looking forward to finding out. **§§§** One of the strangest things about being the most senior person in my department is that none of the people who were my colleagues when I got hired are full-time faculty anymore. Some, even these thirty-six-years later, are teaching adjunct, but most are gone from the college completely. It makes me feel in a way nothing else does just how much institutional memory I carry, but it also makes me realize how much I have forgotten. Not too long ago someone posted a picture of members of the department from twenty-five or thirty-years ago, asking if someone could name the people in the picture. I remembered all of their faces, but I got almost every one of their names wrong. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list.* ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-18/ Last updated: 2025-04-12T18:20:28.000Z > *A memoir is a representation of the author's encounter with memory. It is a compromise with the demands of narrative and that medium we call a book. It is less a record of the past than the record of a sustained questioning, reflective authorial inquiry.* *—*Richard Hoffman, “Backtalk and Backlash: The Aims, Impact, and Value of Memoir,” in *Remembering The Alchemists* ### Being Able To Say This Out Loud URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/being-able-to-say-this-out-loud/ Last updated: 2026-06-04T14:33:06.000Z **Author’s Note:* As I point out below, our public discourse about sexual harassmant and assault tends to assume a male prepetrator and a female victim/survivor. I was very happy, therefore, to be invited—again, the first time was in 2018—by the Sexual Assault Awareness Sub-Committee of my campus’ Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee to speak during our annual Sexual Harassment & Assault Awareness Week. I am sharing the text of the talk with you now, at the beginning of* [*Sexual Assault Awareness Month,*](https://www.nsvrc.org/blogs/together-we-act-united-we-change?ref=richardjnewman.com) *because I think it’s important, especially during this month, to make sure the voices of men like me are heard, but also to let you know that I am available to give a talk like this for your organization, if it’s something you would like to fit into your programming. Either way, I hope you will consider sharing this post as far and wide as you are comfortable doing. You have my thanks in advance.* *One last thing: It is important to watch the video before reading the text.* --- If, like the women who read the accounts of sexual abuse at the beginning of that video, you assumed the accounts themselves had been written by women, I’d like you to take a moment to think about why. Then I’d like you think about the statistic that appeared briefly on the screen: that researchers estimate one in six men have experienced some form of sexual victimization. That’s an awful lot of men. It means that one out of every six men in this room, in this college, town, county; one out of every six male police officers, deli owners, CEOs, elected officials, plumbers, social workers, doctors, lawyers, bus drivers, waiters, fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers, sons—the list could go on—one out of every six men lives his life shaped by the impact that we know sexual trauma can have on those who have experienced it. I’ll say it again: That’s an awful lot of men. Granted, men’s sexual violence against women is a normalized, systemic part of our culture, but the fact that our cultural discourse about sexual violence assumes almost exclusively a male perpetrator and a female victim begs the question of what it is about men, about our collective idea of what it means to be a man, that men like those who appear in that video are essentially invisible as survivors of sexual violence. Or to focus the question on why we are here today: What is it about how you see me that makes it hard to imagine the skinny and terrified twelve-year-old boy I was, absolutely powerless to stop the old man in my building from violating me; or to imagine the shy, awkward, insecure, and desperately needy boy, who, just a few years later, could not stop another man, a casual friend of my family, from feeling me up whenever he wanted to? In order to share with you some thoughts I have about why that is, I am going to tell you parts of my story in some considerable and sometimes explicit detail. Before I do that, though, I want to say something else. I am taking a risk in speaking to you here today, especially because Nassau Community College is where I work. You will walk out of this room knowing things about me that you could, given the opportunity, use against me. I am, in other words, choosing to trust you, knowing full well that some of you might not be worthy of that trust. I believe the risk is worth it, though, because being able to say out loud what I’m going to tell you here today has made the difference, as it has made the difference for others who have similar stories to tell, as it could make the difference for those of you, because I know you are here, regardless of your gender, who have not yet told your stories—being able to say out loud what I am going to say to you today has made the difference between living the life I have wanted to live and feeling like the only life I deserved was the shame-filled half-life that the men who violated me tried to force me into. \*\*\* I never knew his name. When I picture him now, I see a man somewhere between my age—I’m sixty three—and ten or fifteen years younger. I don’t think of myself as old, but I think of him as “the old man in my building,” because that’s what he looked like to my twelve-year-old eyes. He was white, with dirty-blonde hair and a mustache. In my memory, he walks with his shoulders rounded forward as if he were always tired. I also remember that he wore glasses and that he had very kind eyes. Shortly after he moved into the apartment at the top of the staircase to the second floor of our building, he said hello to me for the first time. I was standing alone in the courtyard and he stopped as he walked past, nodding and smiling. “Hi!” was all he said. The second time he saw me, he did the same thing, and by the third or fourth time, a ritual of greeting had grown between us. He would smile and say hello first; I would smile, say the same thing back; and then, for a long silent moment, he would fix me with his gaze, while I stood there, a kid hungry for attention, too happily embarrassed to move, wishing when he walked away that I’d done something, anything, to prolong our conversation. My parents separated when I was three, divorced by the time I was five, and the man who became my stepfather when my mother remarried had not too long before the old man in my building first said hello packed up what had been our family station wagon and run off to North Carolina. I was hungry for adult male attention, and the old man in my building seemed willing, even eager to give it to me. So, when one day in late summer he did not keep walking after our usual exchange, I felt a thrill of anticipation run through me. “When am I going to see you?” he asked. I stood there, wordless in the warmth of his smile. He nodded in response, as if he understood everything I did not know how to say, and then he walked off, still smiling, to wherever he was going. That question—When am I going to see you?—was how he greeted me for a while after that. I don’t remember what, if anything, I said in return, but then, one summer afternoon, as I was heading out of our building to meet my friends, the old man was walking down the staircase leading from his apartment to the front door, which we reached at the same time. As I went to turn the knob, he held the door shut with his left forearm, maneuvering me with his right till I stood facing the corner near the mailboxes where the doorframe met the wall. Pulling me tight against him, he ran his hands beneath my shirt and up the legs of my shorts; he groped my chest and belly, squeezed my butt, and cupped between my legs, all the while whispering hoarsely into my ear, over and over again, “When am I going to see you?” I had no words for what he was doing, no training such as young children get now in how to attract an adult’s attention or try to scare off an attacker. All I could do was stand there till he was finished, and when he was finished, I ran. I don’t remember how far or how long or in which direction, but I ran as if I could leave my skin behind, as if running would turn me into another person. When I finally stopped running, in the small park across the street from the Lutheran Church, I sat a long time with the knowledge that my running had undone nothing, that my body was still the body he had touched. I had no idea what to do with this knowledge, though, and that shamed me, so I kept it to myself, and in order to make it appear that nothing had happened, I continued to say hello to the old man the same way I always did, pretending not to see the ironic twist he added to his smile each time he asked, “When will I see you?” I don’t know how long after that first assault it was, but I was sitting with some friends in front of my building when the old man came home from food shopping and asked me to help him upstairs with the bags in his shopping cart. I wanted to say no, of course, but I didn’t know how without raising for my friends the question of why I was being rude. The last thing I wanted was to explain myself to them. “I’ll give you a dollar,” he said, when he saw my hesitation. “No, two,” he insisted, as he took a wad of bills out of his pocket, peeled off two singles, and nodded towards the top bag. (In 1974, two dollars went a lot further than it does now.) I took the money from his hand—I did not know what else to do—picked up the bag he pointed to, and followed him upstairs, where he opened the door and motioned me in ahead of him. I stepped inside, thinking I’d leave the bag on the floor and get out as quickly as I could, but he was too fast for me. He closed and locked the door behind him before I could turn around, then took the bag from me and dropped it. The cans at the bottom landed with a crash that shook the whole apartment. With his hands on my shoulders, he gently guided me further inside. Then he snaked his arms around my waist, undid my belt and unzipped my pants, pushing them down so they fell around my ankles. All I could do was stand there, frozen to the spot where my feet had stopped moving. Looking down at me with a wide smile—he’d come around to face me and I have the distinct memory that he was suddenly missing his two front teeth—his eyes, at what I imagine must have been the fear in mine, grew tender. “You’ve never had a blowjob before, have you? Don’t you want me to love you?” In the silence with which I responded, he pulled down my underwear and took my penis in his hands—I remember thinking his fingers were like a cage—and he told me how beautiful and big it was, how good he wanted to make me feel, and then somehow I was sitting on the couch that had been a few steps to my right, my pants still at my ankles, and his own pants were down, and his penis, large and reddish purple and semi-erect, hung in front of my face. His voice came from somewhere above me, urging me to play with it, at least to touch it, and the next moments are blurred in my memory, but I can still feel his hands on either side of my head, the steady pressure of his fingers at the hinges of my jaw, and even now, fifty years later, I still gag a little each time the damp metallic taste of him fills my mouth. I don’t remember getting dressed, but I can see myself unlocking his front door and walking out of his apartment. The rest of that day is a blank to me. The following afternoon, the old man saw me standing by myself in the courtyard. He stayed a short distance away and pleaded with me to go upstairs with him again. This time, he promised, would be different. He would move more slowly, be more gentle. I stared off into the space in front of me. “No!” The word came from somewhere inside me that I did not recognize. I don’t remember if he responded, but I know I didn’t say anything else. I just stood there, ignoring him until he walked away. He did not speak to me again for the rest of the time he lived in my building. \*\*\* I sometimes wonder how my life would have been different if I’d told someone what the old man had done to me. Then I remember that I tried, and that it did not go well. I was sitting in front of my building with my friend Vanessa when the old man happened to walk by. He nodded in our direction, pausing in front of me for the space of half a breath. I glued my eyes to the ground. Vanessa, who had responded to him with her own greeting, turned to me after he went inside. “Why were you so rude?” she asked. “He was just saying hello.” I continued to stare at the ground in silence. “Oh, come on! Don’t pretend you didn’t hear me.” She pushed at my arm to make me look up. “What’s wrong?” She fixed her eyes on mine. She was my friend and she was concerned. “It’s no big deal,” I tried to brush her question aside. “But he looked right at you! Why did you act like he wasn’t even there?” My thoughts were racing and my mind went blank at the same time. I trusted Vanessa. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what I could tell her that would make any sense. Even a statement as simple as He touched me would not have meant back then what it means today. Then, suddenly, as if it had come from somewhere outside my body, the urge to say something filled me, and I spit out the only thing I knew at the time that was supposed to signify without question that he was the kind of man who would do what he had done to me. “He’s a faggot!” I tried to put as much venom into my voice as I could, hoping it would give those three words the weight of the accusation I wanted them to be, but Vanessa was unmoved. “So he’s homosexual? So what?” The slight edge in her voice told me she was getting ready for an argument. “Why is that a problem?” I was crestfallen. I’d known as soon as the words left my mouth that they did not mean what I wanted them to mean. I did not think there was anything wrong with being gay, but I did not know how to take my words back without inviting more specific questions than I was ready to answer. Silence was the only response I had, and so all I have of the end of that conversation is the memory of my friend and me staring at each other across a wordlessness neither of us knew how to bridge. \*\*\* I need to take a step back here to say a few things. Back then, the women’s movement was just beginning to bring men’s sexual violence against women into mainstream public awareness. No one, and I mean no one, was talking about the sexual abuse of boys, and the dominant image of the person who committed such acts was a mentally ill, depraved and perverted homosexual man whose goal was to “recruit” boys into homosexuality. That’s why I hoped that calling the old man a faggot would make Vanessa understand what I was trying to tell her. It should not need saying, but I am going to say it anyway. There is nothing about being gay that has anything to do with whether or not a man chooses to sexually abuse a boy. I think most people these days understand this, but that understanding has not prevented the persistence of homophobic misconceptions about boys who are abused by men. Among these misconceptions is the belief that such boys will become gay as a result of the abuse or that they already were gay, even if they didn’t know it, and that this was what drew the abuser to them. Neither of those misconceptions is true, of course, but you can understand how fear of the emasculating stigma attached to them might keep a boy or man from disclosing the abuse that was done to him. Indeed, that fear is one reason men sometimes wait decades before revealing that they were victimized, and many go to their graves without ever telling a soul. I first told someone, my girlfriend at the time, whose name was Pat, when I was in my early twenties, just a few years after the second man who molested me was no longer in my life, and the reason I was able to do so was that I heard a voice. I know that may sound to some of you like mystical mumbo-jumbo, but it’s true. I was reading an essay by the feminist poet Adrienne Rich—some of you may know her work—and I came to a passage in which she was talking about the connection between the sexual objectification of women and men’s sexual violence against women. When I finished that passage, I heard a boy’s voice inside my head ask, “But what about me? What about what happened to me?” I knew immediately that it was the voice of my twelve-year-old self pointing out that I had recognized without acknowledging it that what I’d read could also be applied to my experience with the old man in my building. At first, I tried to pretend that I hadn’t heard what I heard, but doing so made me sick to my stomach. The only thing that relieved the nausea was promising myself I would to tell the truth about what the men who victimized me had been done to me. I found the conceptual and analytical framework for telling that truth in feminism, but feminism also gave me something else: the gift of anger, the white hot clarity of and absolute commitment to the idea that the only person responsible and accountable for an act of sexual violence is the person who perpetrates it. I certainly struggled with the shame and humiliation of having been violated, but that anger taught me never to blame myself. My own healing, in other words, is inextricably rooted in feminist politics. Yours doesn’t have to be. In fact, no one’s healing should ever be politicized, in the sense that no survivor of sexual violence should ever be told that their healing needs to conform to this or that political agenda. At the same time, though, it would be dishonest of me not to acknowledge that, were it not for the feminist critique of men’s sexual violence against women, it is entirely likely that my experience and the experience of other men like me would be as relatively invisible now as it was back then. \*\*\* I will tell you a little later the story of how I came to tell Pat about what the men who violated me did to me. For now, I just want to tell you about how remarkable it was that she believed me. I say remarkable because, though I did not learn this till years later, the conventional wisdom in the 1980s, even among therapists, was that the sexual abuse of boys was so rare that a boy, or man, who revealed that he’d been abused was almost certainly talking about something that happened in his fantasy life, as a kind of wish fulfillment, not something that had happened in the real world. At the heart of this practice and, I believe, at the heart of why sexual violence against men and boys continues to be basically invisible in our society, is a failure of the imagination rooted in the heteronormativity of our culture. You may not use the word heteronormative, but you know what I’m talking about. It’s why, for example, as a matter of cultural expectation, men are supposed to pursue sex with women, not the other way around, and why women are supposed to play the role of the pursued; and it’s also why, though we each may judge it differently, we recognize it as being outside the norm when people don’t fulfill those roles. Men’s sexual violence against women, in other words, is congruent with heteronormativity—he pursues her; she is pursued—and it is indeed a bitter irony that when a man sexually assaults a woman, his actions actually confirm her role in the heteronormative script. This also means, however, that if she chooses to speak out, nothing she reveals about her experience would call her gender identity into question. I certainly do not mean to imply that it is therefore easy for women to reveal that they have been sexually assaulted or to dismiss or trivialize the hell that they are all too often put through when they do reveal such things, but the structure of that revelation in cultural terms is very different from the one that applies when both the perpetrator and victim of sexual violence are men, a circumstance that violates heteronormativity by definition. For a man to reveal that he was sexually victimized by another man, in other words, is for him to confess that he allowed himself to be forced out of the role he is supposed to play, that he was, essentially, unmanned, not only by the actions of the man who victimized him, but also by the fact that he did not defend himself. The man who reveals that he was abused by another man thus risks the integrity of his gender identity in a way that a woman in a similar situation does not. No wonder so many sexually abused men choose silence. No wonder you may have assumed that the stories of abuse at the beginning of that video were told by women. \*\*\* I want to switch gears and talk to you now about a different misconception when it comes to sexually abused boys, the one that says, say, a fourteen-year-old whose middle school teacher coerces him into having sex with her—who, in other words, rapes him—was not actually raped at all. That, in fact, he “got lucky” in the best sexual sense of that expression, and that for him not to see himself that way, especially if he has the temerity to say so publicly, is for him to admit that he is gay and does not deserve the manhood into which having sex with a woman supposedly inducts him. At the heart of this misconception is the notion that men should always want and always be ready for sex, but that is really just another way of saying that men should have no sexual boundaries. Applied to the fourteen-year-old boy I just asked you to imagine, that notion is patently ridiculous, but consider this exchange, which took place in a discussion about consent I was having in a Women and Gender Studies course some years ago. The class was all-female and, as far as I knew, all-heterosexual, and the woman who had become the unofficial spokesperson summed up the conversation to that point. “In other words,” she said, “we are dead tired of all the fucking clueless ways men keep hitting on us, especially all that unwanted touching, even from the ones you might potentially be interested in.” “What would happen,” I asked, “if a guy you were kind of interested in asked permission to touch you first?” “A guy who asked?” The spokeswoman was incredulous. “He’d be the clingy and weepy type for sure, and who wants to put up with that shit?” The rest of the class agreed. What my students wanted—this was the spokeswoman again, the rest of the class nodding along—was “to be hit on by men who know how to take what they want, without asking and without apology, and who make you feel like you’re the only woman in the room worth having while they’re doing it.” I decided to try a different tack. I asked the class to imagine a man they wanted to kiss. Given everything they had just said about unwanted touching, would they consider asking him first or would they just kiss him? A different woman spoke up. “Why would I need to ask? I’d just kiss him. What man, what real man, if you put it ready-to-eat on his plate, is going to say, ‘No thanks. I’m not hungry?’” “What if he did, though?” I asked her. “What if he did say ‘I’m not hungry?’” “Then what the hell good is he?!” The entire class erupted in laughter. I found myself feeling that day a frustration similar to the one I experienced the first time I told a girlfriend who wanted to have sex that I didn’t. She took it personally. My lack of desire, according to her, could mean only one of two things. Either I was no longer attracted to her, maybe because I’d found someone else and hadn’t yet worked up the courage to tell her, or because I’d realized I was gay and hadn’t yet worked up the courage to tell her that either. “You’re a man,” she said, and everything she knew about men told her that saying no just wasn’t how I was supposed to respond “when your girlfriend strips naked, sits in your lap, and tells you she wants to fuck.” Like women, of course, like anyone of any gender, men have the right to decide for ourselves when and whether we want to have sex; and, just like for women—and this is the feminist insight without which I would not have been able to say much of what I have said in this talk so far—that right is the fundamental prerequisite for defining on our own terms the relationship between our sexuality and the rest of our lives. When I say it like that, it seems so obvious, so self-evidently true, that I begin to wonder why I think it needs to be said at all. Culturally, though, we don’t think about men’s bodies in this way. Consider, for example, that we know what verb to use to describe what a man does when he uses his penis to rape a woman. We say, “He penetrated her without her consent.” No corresponding verb comes easily to mind, however, to describe how a woman who genitally rapes a man uses her vagina to do so. In fact, except for those jurisdictions where rape is defined most straightforwardly as having sex with someone without their consent, even legal definitions of rape that are supposed to be gender neutral are built on the model of penetration. The Department of Justice, for example, defines rape this way: “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” Since this definition includes penetration with an object, rape can be committed without a penis—meaning, in theory, that anyone could rape anyone—but for the crime to qualify as rape, the object needs to have been used as if it were a penis. In this sense, rape remains a gendered crime in most of the United States. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) does acknowledge on its website that women can and do force men to have sex with them without consent, but the CDC itself acknowledges that the phrase it uses to describe this behavior, “made to penetrate,” was chosen specifically to distinguish it from rape, because “rape and made-to-penetrate \[are\] separate concepts \[that describe\] two…distinct types of violence with potentially different consequences.” It’s as if penetration is the only way the CDC can conceive of sexual intercourse, and so only non-consensual penetration that is both willful and proactive, in which the penis or penis-like object is used as a weapon, can be construed as rape. \*\*\* Almost thirty years ago, in a book called Intercourse, a feminist named Andrea Dworkin offered a different perspective. Noting that “\[consensual\] intercourse \[has been\] commonly \[understood\] as \[an\] act of possession in which…a man \[occupies\] a woman \[by\] penetrating her” Dworkin wondered why > it is not the man who is considered possessed…\[His penis\] is buried inside her\[,\] surrounded by strong muscles that contract like a fist shutting tight…\[His penis is\] enveloped, smothered, in the muscled lining of flesh that he never sees, only feels, gripping, releasing, gripping…\[until he\] rolls over dead and useless afterward, shrunk into oblivion…beat\[en\], defeated in endurance and strength both. Even though she is talking about consensual sex, Dworkin demonstrates quite convincingly with this description that it is possible to think of the vagina as an instrument of conquest and possession, and of the penis as an organ that can be violated. She even offers a verb to describe that particular use of a vagina, noting the irony that a man is not considered possessed in sex “even though \[his penis\] is engulfed inside her.” Engulfment, however, does not register culturally as a sexually meaningful act in the way that penetration does. If it did, our understanding of the sexual boundaries of a body with a penis—of what it means to negotiate those boundaries in consensual sex and what it means to violate them—would have to incorporate this fact: consensually putting your penis inside the body of another person is no less an act of trust, no less a sharing of vulnerability, than the consent that other person has given you to put it there. \*\*\* There’s a lot more that can be said about the issues I’ve raised here, but our time is limited. What I hope I’ve done is sketch out for you some of the reasons why I think we have the cultural blind spot when it comes to sexual violence against men and boys that the video I showed you is constructed to highlight and why men and boys are often so reluctant to tell their stories. As I said earlier, I want to end this talk by telling you the story of how I came to tell Pat that I’d been abused. Because, while feminism may have given me the intellectual and psychological apparatus to name my experience and begin to come to terms with it, the emotional courage it took be public about it, to tell others, to go to therapy, to write the books of poetry and essays I’ve written that are rooted in this experiencce, to give this talk, emerges first from the fact that she believed me. There is, or will be, for each of you in this room who has been sexually victimized someone like Pat in your life. I hope you will take the opportunity to talk to them when the time is right. And for those of you who have not been sexually victimized, in addition to hoping that you never will be, I hope that if someone like me does come to talk to you that you will be for them the kind of friend Pat was for me. All you need to know about this part of my story is that Bill was the name of the second man who abused me. I had not thought about Bill for a long time when Pat put her hand on my hip and we started moving in a not very graceful imitation of swing dancing as the Lionel Hampton Band played its first number at Vassar College’s Spring Semiformal. After about thirty seconds, though, I stopped dancing. “What’s wrong?” Pat asked. I bent down and whispered in hear ear, “I have no idea what I’m doing.” “Neither do I,” she smiled. “That’s what makes this so much fun!” She started moving again, and so did I, and suddenly it didn’t matter that we were faking it. When the music slowed and the crowd thinned to those couples drawing close for the evening’s first slow dance, Pat leaned into me, put one hand on the back of my neck, playfully grabbed at my butt with her other one, and pulled my ear down to her mouth. “I like the way you move,” she whispered. I don’t know if Pat saw the moment’s hesitation I felt before I smiled, but her words and the way she touched me had returned me to the room in which Bill would feel me up. I no longer felt like dancing, so I told Pat I was thirsty and headed towards the bar. I wanted a few minutes alone to clear my head. I liked Pat, a lot, and the thought that what Bill had done to me might ruin the good time she and I were having made me angry. Didn’t I deserve to dance with my girlfriend, to enjoy the way she was enjoying me, without shame? I decided I had to tell her. The smart thing, of course, would have been to tell her when the semiformal was over, or even to wait until the next day, after we’d each had a good night’s sleep, but I was afraid I would lose my nerve if I waited any longer. I handed Pat her drink, sat down facing her, and took a deep breath. “I have to tell you something,” I said. “What?” She hadn’t heard me. The music was too loud. “There’s something I need to talk to you about.” A quiet passage left room for me not to raise my voice. “Okay,” she nodded her head, but her eyes were on the dance floor and she was tapping her feet restlessly to the music. “No, really, there’s something about me that you need to know.” That got her attention. She turned to face me, leaned her elbow against the back of my chair, rested her chin in her hand, and waited. “When I was a kid, I was mol—” At that moment, the entire horn section began to play, drowning out the rest of my sentence. “When you were a kid what?” She had to raise her voice to make sure that I heard her and I could see the question on her face. Couldn’t this wait till later? “I was molested when I was a kid.” I nearly shouted back, hoping none of the people around us were paying attention. “You were what?!” “Molested. By a guy I worked with at the catering hall I told you about.” “Uh-huh?” Her voice was noncommittal, except for the rising, tell-me-more tone at the end. When I did not answer her—just saying it once had left me drained—she took my hand and led me to the dance floor, holding me close and tight as we moved. I did not know then that she would ask me the next day to tell her my story, all of it, including both Bill and the old man in my building, or that she would respond not just with warmth and understanding, but with a fierce and tender protectiveness for which I will never stop being grateful. What I knew was that the world had not fallen apart. I’d said the words “I was molested” and not only had my girlfriend not walked out in disgust; she still wanted to dance with me, which in that moment was more than enough. Thank you. ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-17/ Last updated: 2025-04-03T03:02:02.000Z *“A self must learn. The body is. The body knows. A self learned to act as if it is real, and learned to ignore what the body knows. The body transcends the self and not, as religions have it, the other way around; even when they posit a stand-in for the self called the soul, the idea is that a personal transcendence is possible and ought to be sought after. Begin with that orientation to the divine, and one can talk all one wants about charity, generosity, brotherhood—it's every man for himself. Even before there were religions there was religious war.”* —Richard Hoffman, “Like Never Before,” in *Remembering The Alchemist* ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-16/ Last updated: 2025-03-21T10:40:23.000Z Interesting to compare these two views, written four hundred years apart or so: All men and women are to each other the limbs of a single body, each of us drawn from life’s shimmering essence, God’s perfect pearl; and when this life we share wounds one of us, all share the hurt as if it were our own. You, who will not feel another’s pain, no longer deserve to be called human. –*Saadi of Shiraz* (my translation) **§§§** All mankinde is of one Author, and is one volume; when one Man dies, one Chapter is not torne out of the booke, but translated into a better language; and every Chapter must be so translated. *–John Donne,* Devotions ### Four by Four #38 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-38/ Last updated: 2025-05-24T21:25:08.000Z #### On this page ## Writing News ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7e6a1674-1bfe-4add-85a8-294d8912aae8_2583x3286.jpeg) I have, finally, completed a draft of the manuscript of poems that emerged from a daily writing practice I sustained from New Year’s eve 2019 until the first week of 2021\. It’s taken me four years to sort through, hone, and revise the material, and I am very happy with the result. Some of the poems have been published. “[Sunset](https://www.instagram.com/humanaobscura/p/DCrXsemPz94/?ref=richardjnewman.com),” for example, appeared in the lovely journal [*humana obscura*](https://www.humanaobscura.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*;* “[The People of Gaza Keep Dying](https://newversenews.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-people-in-gaza-keep-dying.html?ref=richardjnewman.com),” appeared on [*New Verse News*](https://newversenews.blogspot.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* and “[On February 4, 2020, instead of watching Donald Trump deliver his State of the Union Address…](https://michaelbroder.substack.com/p/second-coming-no-16-feb-4-2025)*”* was published in Michael Broder’s [Second Coming](https://michaelbroder.substack.com/s/second-coming/?utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=menu) series—on, ironically enough, February 4, 2025\. Other poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications like [*Poets of Queens 2*](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/poets-of-queens-2-jared-beloff/1145952908?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* [*The Scene*](https://thescene.life/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* and the literary journal published by the [International Human Rights Arts Movement](https://humanrightsartmovement.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com). During the initial stage of this project, I set myself only one constraint: that while I did not care how little I wrote on any given day, I would not write beyond the limit of that day’s page in the [Lechtturm1917](https://www.leuchtturm1917.us/?ref=richardjnewman.com) page-a-day planner I’d bought. Once I was ready to start sorting, honing, and revising, though, I increased those constraints to three: - I would work on the poems only in the order of their composition; - If it turned out that the way to make a particular day’s writing work as a poem was to combine it with material from another day’s output, I would only take that other material from something else I’d written in the same month; and, - In terms of content, while I would allow myself to go as far back into the past as I wanted/needed, I would not introduce anything into a poem that happened after the original day, or if that were not possible, the original month of composition. I made two exceptions to this last constraint, “The People in Gaza Keep Dying” and “In That Moment of Change.” I wrote the poem that became “The People in Gaza Keep Dying” in January 2020 in response to the experience of reviewing [*Contestable Truths, Incontestable Lies*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2024/11/Review-of-Contestable-Truths--Incontestable-Lies--by-Stephen-Sher.pdf)*,* by Steven Sher. Sher’s book is a deeply racist, proudly anti-Palestinian, Orthodox Jewish justification of the Jews’ claim to the Land of Israel and to the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish nation state. Particularly disturbing is a poem called “Bombing Gaza” that, in light of the devastation Israel has wrought there since October 2023, could be called prophetic. Before October 2023, I wasn’t sure how exactly I wanted to focus the poem. Once Israel began to bring Sher’s “Bombing Gaza” to life, however, it felt irresponsible not to connect the poem explicitly to current events. I decided to give the poem a title that would do this work instead of changing the text of the poem itself. The detail I added to “In That Moment Of Change” is its dedication to the memory of my friend Veronica McGinley, who was murdered by her husband in April 2021\. At that time, the poem had still not fully taken shape. It fills me with a deep, deep sadness that she will never read it, which is why I am dedicating this book to her. --- ## Four Things To Read [*After The Operation*](https://fourwaybooks.com/site/after-the-operation/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr: > *When they come for you, when the unfamiliar roar comes, and a sudden opening, and light pours in, when what had kept you safe, what had always been, is breached, pried open, and light pours in, what do you want to have been writing then?* Gray, a poet and translator, was diagnosed at 68 with a benign tumor in her brain that she elected to have surgically removed. *After The Operation* is her poetic chronicle of that experience. The emotional weight of the book is carried by its metaphors, which transform the speaker’s mind into “an uninhabited coast” that needs exploring. Similarly, the year becomes a puzzle the speaker takes apart every morning. Birds appear throughout the book, though whether they are symbols the speaker conjures, allegorical figures she uses, or hallucinations she actually sees, or all three at once is not clear. Either way, though, they come across in the reading, along with the metaphors I mentioned above, as the product of a mind trying to make sense, make meaning through poetry, of an experience that might otherwise remain solely in the realm of the clinical. The most moving part of the book comes at the end of the January 20, 2022 journal entry—which, coincidentally, is my birthday—from which the passage that I quoted above is taken. Read in the context of the brain surgery Gray went through, it is about what happens, what it means, when the physical, structural integrity of who you are is violated. Read in the context of today’s politics, though, it is about far more than that. It is the ultimate question any writer needs to answer: Is what you pursue in your writing meaningful enough that when “they” come for you, whoever or whatever “they” happen to be, it will be precisely the work you want to have been stopped in the middle of, work that mattered enough that they had no choice but to stop you from doing it. **§§§** [Unveiling the Domestic Mind: Persian Women Poets on the Self and the Other](https://poets.iranicaonline.org/article/unveiling-the-domestic-mind-persian-women-poets-on-the-self-and-the-other-2/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Fatemeh Minaei: > *This article compares, contrasts, and discusses poems by women from across the millennium of Persian poetry. It foregrounds the differences while not presuming any ontologically stable contrasts. It also does not claim to identify any underlying sociopolitical or economic factors behind these changes since such claims would lead to repeating common knowledge or making uneducated guesses. This article instead focuses on how the Persian female poet has become not only possible but normal.* The last line of that paragraph, which is from the introduction, took me back to article and books I read in the 1980s and 90s about women’s poetry in the United States, in particular Alicia Ostriker’s [*Stealing The Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing%5Fthe%5FLanguage:%5FThe%5FEmergence%5Fof%5FWomen%27s%5FPoetry%5Fin%5FAmerica?ref=richardjnewman.com)—though this is a purely impressionistic association, since it’s been thirty years at least since I read Ostiker’s book. I don’t know enough about Iranian literature in general or Iranian women poets in particular to say anything at all intelligent about the individual artists Minaei refers to in her essay, but the trajectory she traces is, broadly speaking, a familiar one. Starting with the classical poets, Minaei documents attitudes ranging from *Somehow she managed to be a poet despite being a woman* to the line by a male satirist which said that men hearing the ghazals of a poet known as “the beauty of \[her\] time” would think they were “composed by the vulva.” Minaei also—and this also made me think of Ostriker’s book—talks about the difficulty women poets faced trying to carve out a sense of female identity using language that was inevitably androcentric, a process made in some ways more complex by the fact that Persian does not have gendered pronouns. Most importantly, though, Minaei documents the ways in which Iranian women poets, by claiming language for themselves are increasingly accepted, as she says, as “normal,” not curiosities. This is an interesting essay, worth reading. **§§§** [Maimie Pinzer: July 14, 1885–1940](https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/pinzer-maimie?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Romy Shoam: > *At the age of thirteen, Pinzer spent several nights at a man’s house, which prompted her mother to request her arrest—a grave response, perhaps reflective of their difficult mother-daughter relationship. When Pinzer was imprisoned at the police station in the Philadelphia City Hall, she exchanged sexual favors with a prison guard in order to be allowed out of her cell. At her judicial hearing the next morning, her mother and uncle, who had molested her throughout her childhood, accused her of being an incorrigible child. Pinzer was transferred to the Moyamensing Prison, then sent away to a Magdalen Home, a reform institution for girls, for a year. From this period onwards, she learned how to use prostitution to ensure her security.* My source for this article is [The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women](https://jwa.org/encyclopedia?ref=richardjnewman.com), a resource I discovered only recently. The details of Mamie Pinzer’s life that are recounted in this entry come from a correspondence she maintained with [Fanny Quincy Howe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny%5FQuincy%5FHowe?ref=richardjnewman.com), an American essayist and novelist who was also a member of the Boston economic and social elite. That correspondence was published in a book, [*The Mamie Papers: Letters from an Ex-Prostitute*](http://www.ruthrosen.org/books%5Fmaimie%5Fpapers.html?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* edited by Ruth Rosen, in 1977. The encyclopedia entry gives a brief overview of what one working-class Jewish woman’s life was like in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Of particular note is The Montreal Mission for Friendless Girls, which Pinzer founded and ran out of her apartment in 1915\. “Pinzer,” the article states, “wanted to target English Protestant and Jewish women because they were excluded from the charity work administered by the Catholic Church.” She was also opposed to using the word *Friendless* in the name because of its negative connotations. “Her personal approach…informed by her own experience, differed greatly from the standard treatment of prostitutes by social workers and reformers at the time,” concentrating more on providing material help to the women, rather than the moralizing, spiritual “guidance” they usually received. This article was, for me, a peek into a slice of history—Jewish, women’s, working class—that I would not otherwise have gotten. It’s work a look. **§§§** [Teens Are Forgoing a Classic Rite of Passage](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2025/03/teen-dating-milestone-decline/681971/?gift=9L5E0%5F00dQA8ldt%5F3rAKn5URhcF4WlQsuuMPyPqyBLE&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share), by Faith Hill > *Research indicates that the number of teens experiencing romantic relationships has dropped. In a 2023 poll from the Survey Center on American Life, 56 percent of Gen Z adults said they’d been in a romantic relationship at any point in their teen years, compared with 76 percent of Gen Xers and 78 percent of Baby Boomers. And the General Social Survey, a long-running poll of about 3,000 Americans, found in 2021 that 54 percent of participants ages 18 to 34 reported not having a “steady” partner; in 2004, only 33 percent said the same.* In this article, along with a companion piece she wrote called “[The Slow, Quiet Demise of American Romance](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2024/12/4b-sex-strike-american-dating/680770/?gift=9L5E0%5F00dQA8ldt%5F3rAKnzw2SKF3Ejhni5szciye8NU&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share),” Hill explores a phenomenon that, as someone who has not dated in more than thirty years, feels very, very distant. Still, I was intrigued by the way this piece worked its way through the subject, from the possibility that what we’re really talking about is a difference in labels—“situationship” vs. “relationship” to research that suggests young people might be better off not dating in terms of their leadership and social skills, for example. Other aspects of this topic Hill explores, include “a real \[negative\] shift in how comfortable American are…with emotional intimacy;” the gender-political divide, in which men are shifting more to the right and women are moving to the left; and the way in which even “under conditions of a gender cold war, \[while\] many girls might get on fine\[,\] boys could suffer more,” because boys are much more likely not to have as many close friendships as girls and are therefore more likely to be at a deficit when it comes to the kind of social and emotional skills/maturity that is required for a successful romantic relationship. That gender gap has implications for a lot more than just romance and is very much worth paying attention to. --- ## Four Things To See In honor of [Norouz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowruz?ref=richardjnewman.com), the Persian New Year, here are “four things to see” connected to Iran. All images are from the [Metropolitan Museum of Art](https://www.metmuseum.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) in New York City and are in the public domain. ### Cheek Piece from a Horse Bit in the Shape of a Winged, Human-Headed Quadruped This piece dates from the 8th century BCE and is probably from [Lorestan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorestan%5Fprovince?ref=richardjnewman.com), Iran. ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5d3ccf47-7429-453f-aa9f-2498c8ae1486_3112x4000.jpeg) **§§§** ### A Stamp with a Pahlavi Inscription This stamp is from the Sassanian period, which dates from the 3rd to the 7th century CE. [Pahlavi](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pahlavi-language?ref=richardjnewman.com) is an extinct language, also known as Middle Persian. ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7a0811cf-c16e-4d2a-9688-993bda9618e2_753x1026.jpeg) **§§§** ### Frontispiece of Rumi’s *Masnavi* This frontispiece depicts a lively scene in which mounted hunters use swords, bows, and arrows to pursue their prey. An inscription dates the completion of this manuscript in 1488-89 CE. Broadly speaking, the [*Masnavi*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masnavi?ref=richardjnewman.com) teaches moral philosophy and mysticism. ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F27d3d899-d01b-4f80-b813-fb2b1cf24f31_1429x1954.jpeg) **§§§** ### Young Lovers Embracing Dating from the 16th century CE and probably from [Qazvin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qazvin?ref=richardjnewman.com), Iran, this album page consists of cut‑out panels of calligraphy in [nasta'liq](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nastaliq?ref=richardjnewman.com) script alternating with panels of illumination, all surrounding a drawing of an amorous couple. The delicacy with which the lovers are rendered makes for an unusually sensual image. The drawing is surrounded by lyrical and mystical verses. ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffcff23c4-ba3a-410e-88d4-647fb959a536_1566x2380.jpeg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### **Mitra Sumatra - Helelyos** Also in honor of Norouz. **§§§** ### **Ani DeFranco - Little Plastic Castle** **§§§** ### **Allison Miller’s Boom Tic Boom - Live at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center** **§§§** ### **Richie Havens - Freedom** --- ## Four Things About Me Recently—I don’t know why—I was thinking about a course I took as an undergraduate with [Professor Rose Zimbardo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose%5FZimbardo?ref=richardjnewman.com) at Stony Brook University, and I remembered a paper I wrote for that class about the three caskets in *The Merchant Of Venice.* In particular, what I remembered is the fact that Professor Zimbardo asked in the margin about which scholars I’d read in order to arrive at one of the points I made. At first I thought she was implicitly criticizing me of plagiarism, but then I realized she intended the comment to mean that she was impressed an undergraduate had bothered to do that kind of research. The irony was that I hadn’t done any research at all. I’d arrived at the insight on my own. (I only wish I could remember what it was.) I could not, however, recall the paper in any more detail than that—not surprising, since I wrote it in the 1980s—so I went to my computer, sure I would find it among the undergraduate and graduate essays I turned into PDF files about ten years ago. It wasn’t there. **§§§** Among the papers that were there was “The Troubadours And Medieval Hebrew Poets Of Muslim Spain,” which I wrote for a history course with Professor [Helen Lemay](https://sbsuny.academia.edu/HLemay?ref=richardjnewman.com). I remember this paper very well. Towards the end of the semester after I took the class, I decided I wanted the paper back, so I contacted Professor Lemay to find out how I could go about getting it. She told me it was still in the box where she’d left it, but when I went to the History office to retrieve it, I found it *with another student’s name on it.* Someone had stolen the paper and handed it in as his own. Ironically, he got a higher grade than I did, either an A to my A- or an A to my B+. I somehow managed to find out which dorm this guy lived in, but when I confronted him, he was completely unrepentant, claiming that he’d stolen my work because his sister had been in the hospital all semester and not only didn’t he have time to do the work, but he also couldn’t afford to fail the class. I think I may have believed him because of how indifferent he was to the idea that, if I reported him, which I threatened to do, he could be kicked out school for academic dishonesty. I think I remember talking to Professor Lemay about this, and I think I remember her not being so interested in pursuing charges, though I could be totally wrong about that. Either way, I decided not report him on the off chance that he really was telling the truth. Now that I’m a professor, I would never let someone get away with that kind of academic dishonesty, no matter how dire their circumstances, but that fact does raise the question of what the compassionate response would be. **§§§** The other paper I enjoyed revisiting is called “The Problem of Form.” I wrote it for I-don’t-remember-which literature class during my first semester in Syracuse University’s Creative Writing MA program. This is the (edited-to-remove-my-graduate-school-hemming-and-hawing) thesis statement, “There are also…certain questions about form…which the notion of form as an extension of content does not provide a way of exploring.” I was frustrated—and my frustration was a young poet’s frustration—by the circularity of the scholarly approach to form that seemed only to treat it as an extension of content, ignoring, or at least that’s how it seemed to me at the time, the fact that a poet’s formal choices are only successful if they result in poems, regardless of whether not the choices themselves are driven by content. In other words, and I still stand by this, I was working through for myself the notion that a poet’s formal choices have to work first as form, as music, as structure before their relationship to content can even begin to matter in an artistic/aesthetic, much less scholarly, sense. **§§§** This is what Professor Linda Shires wrote in response to that paper: > *Your essay is interesting as a personal investigation. In other words I think poets like Eliot, for example, would *agree* with much of what you say—indeed have said it themselves. It isn’t new. But your argument—your manifesto—engages. It is strongly argued and you are widely read. Insights “along the way” are rich \[and\] informed.* The major weakness of my application to Syracuse’s program, it was pointed out to me by two faculty members, one a poet and one a scholar, was that I didn’t seem to have my feet planted firmly in one camp or the other; and since this was in the 1980s, during what I came to think of as “the theory wars,” the scholar who was my graduate advisor—not Professor Shires—minced no words in telling me what he thought when I very timidly asserted that I thought of myself as a poet first. This is practically a direct quote, “If you want to commune with your muse, that’s your business, but I thought you came to Syracuse to learn something.” Professor Shires’ comments, on the other hand, unprompted, affirmed for me the validity of my interest as a poet in the question of form. She gave me permission to pursue my academic work at Syracuse as a “personal investigation,” not a scholarly one—something my advisor and my other non-creative writing professors tended to see as inappropriately rebellious—and I am very grateful to her for that. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #37 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-37/ Last updated: 2025-03-03T19:46:33.000Z #### On this page ## Writing News I have two pieces of writing news to share with you: An essay that is very important to me, “[I Was A Creative Writing Program Dropout: One Poet’s Story](https://majusculelit.com/?page%5Fid=3408&ref=richardjnewman.com),” has been published by [Majuscule](https://majusculelit.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), an online journal that’s very much worth knowing about. The essay takes as its starting point the moment in May of 1985 when [Philip Booth](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/philip-booth?ref=richardjnewman.com), one of the founders of Syracuse’s MA in Creative Writing—they didn’t have an MFA back then—told me, and I quote, “You don’t need a creative writing degree to be a poet.” The rest traces the path I forged for myself as a poet and, along the way, says some things that I think are worth saying about MFA programs in general. I hope you’ll [check it out](https://majusculelit.com/?page%5Fid=3408&ref=richardjnewman.com). **§§§** It has become commonplace to use the devastation Israel has wrought on the Palestinians, whether you call it genocide or not, to dismiss Jewish concerns about antisemitism as trivial by comparison, especially when they are in any way connected to Israel or Zionism. I was gratified, therefore, that Poets & Writers Magazine chose to publish my response to Namrata Poddar’s essay, “[Decolonize the Novel: Writing Against Western Strictures of Realism](https://www.pw.org/content/decolonize%5Fthe%5Fnovel%5Fwriting%5Fagainst%5Fwestern%5Fstrictures%5Fof%5Frealism?ref=richardjnewman.com).” You can read my response in its entirety [here](https://www.pw.org/content/reactions%5F41?ref=richardjnewman.com)—it’s the second one on the page—but I will quote from the ending: > I am responding as a Jewish writer to an article about the politics of narrative published in a magazine for writers, in which the article’s author uses my identity to make her closing argument; and I am pointing out that her use of my identity, while it does not invalidate her argument as a whole, does not live up to the decolonizing standard she set for herself in her essay. In this context, in an era when we expect writers to care very much about, and to take care with, how we use the identities of those who are Other to us, that does not seem to me to be trivial at all. I continue to believe Poddar’s article is worth reading, but I think my response offers an important perspective. --- ## Four Things To Read [Q: Can We Talk About Narrative Magazine?](https://litmagnews.substack.com/p/q-can-we-talk-about-narrative-magazine?source=queue), by Betsy Tuch > *Narrative Magazine ran a contest, charged $27 for entry. Out of the hundreds and likely thousands of submissions they received, they could not find a single story, essay, photo essay, or graphic narrative worthy of their esteemed magazine. Not for First Place, and not even for Second. Will the entrants receive a refund? No, because as per their submission guidelines, the fees are non-refundable. Will the magazine explain why they did not choose winners in any of these categories? It doesn’t seem so. Narrative is a long-standing literary magazine with a large subscriber base. If they received just 500 submissions for their contest, that’s $13,500\. Given the magazine’s reach, and given the breadth of genres represented in the contest, they likely received at least one thousand submissions. Which means this contest could have generated…well, a year’s salary for some.* The role played by contests in the literary world is a fraught one at best. What Tuch does in this issue of her newsletter, [Lit Mag News](https://litmagnews.substack.com/), is expose the-questionable-at-best behavior of a literary magazine that is likely on many writers’ bucket list of where they would like to publish. I also appreciate the biting sarcasm and bitter irony embedded in the way Tuch has structured this piece. If you are a writer submitting work, or if you have reason to care about the socioeconomics of literary magazine publishing—from either side of the submission pile—this is worth reading. **§§§** [In Gaza, The Olive Trees Resist](https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1656591?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Hend Salama Abo Helow > *Our harvest season has always been more than work; it is an unspoken ritual of love and resilience. But last year, genocide stole that from us. Our olive crops, ripe and waiting, were left to wither beneath the soil, buried under the chaos of relentless airstrikes. The terror in our hearts chained our limbs, leaving us unable to embark on the season that once brought life to our family and land. For years, we relied on skilled olive workers to help us complete the harvest in a week or two — a time of unity, laughter, and shared labor. But this year an insurmountable fear loomed over us, the shadows of war casting doubt on whether we would even survive the gathering.* In this brief essay, Helow tells the story of her family’s determination to complete the olive harvest despite the genocide raging around them. The details are disturbing enough in themselves, but I think this story is especially worth reading now, in the context of President Trump’s proposal to remove the Palestinians from Gaza—essentially a reboot of an idea that [Joe Biden tried to pressure Egypt](https://reason.com/2025/01/27/trump-revives-bidens-failed-proposal-to-remove-palestinians-from-gaza/?ref=richardjnewman.com) into accepting—as if they never really belonged there in the first place. It’s important to recognize that the destruction Israel has wrought in Gaza has not severed the connection that Palestinians who live there feel for the land. If anything, Israel’s actions have only strengthened those connections. **§§§** [People Hate Mourning Jews](http://dsadevil.blogspot.com/2025/02/people-hate-mourning-jews.html?ref=richardjnewman.com), by David Schraub > *And it is not just the Bibas family, but the entire Jewish world, who is* [*mourning*](https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-843123?ref=richardjnewman.com)*\[Kfir Bibas’\] death. And, because we are Jews, that means that some people—sometimes other Jews—will tell us we are mourning Kfir wrong. One way we might be “wrong” is if we have the temerity to focus, for even a short spell, just on the Bibas family. Don’t we know others have suffered too? Are you saying that Jewish lives matter more? How tribal, how cloistered, how gauche, to not use this moment to make a statement about the universal value of all human life. But another way we might be “wrong” is if we do mourn Kfir Bibas by reference to the universal value of all human life—and in particular, of both Israeli and Palestinian life.* In the three part series I wrote called “Israel and Palestine: Whose Side Are You On?” ([1](https://www.richardjnewman.com/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are/), [2](https://www.richardjnewman.com/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are-916/), [3](https://www.richardjnewman.com/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are-0b8/)), I talked briefly about why I think it’s necessary to understand Hamas’ October 7th attack as both an expression of Palestinian resistance and as antisemitic. (Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it an antisemitic expression of Palestinian resistance.) At the time, Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza had not yet begun in full force, though it wasn’t hard to predict what was to come, and I thought it was important to make visible some of the complexity I felt within myself in responding to Hamas’ attack as a Jew. As the war raged on, however, and the destruction of Gaza and Palestinian life—the ongoing massacre of Palestinian men, women, and children—became increasingly overwhelming to contemplate, it grew more and more difficult to see focusing on that complexity, relevant though I continued to believe it was, as timely. The hostage exchange, however, has brought this question to the fore in a way that Schraub illuminates nicely, though from a very different angle than the one I took in my essay. His post is well worth reading. **§§§** [The Erotic in Poetry: Self-Knowledge, Empowerment, and Sexual Liberation](https://majusculelit.com/the-erotic-in-poetry-by-sara-sturek/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Sara Sturek > *My doctor diagnosed me with vulvodynia, a condition of pain and discomfort in the vulva referred from tight and dysfunctional pelvic floor muscles. My vaginal muscles were unknowingly flexing, all the time. My pelvic floor was the place I was holding all my stress, anxiety, and trauma similar to someone with a stiff neck or shoulders… I had experienced sexual trauma in the past, and while I believed I had moved on, processed it, my body seemed to operate independently. It was still afraid, unwilling to cooperate with my brain. Every time, I continued to have sex with untreated vulvodynia I was re-experiencing the sexual trauma inflicted onto my nerves, bones, and flesh.* That diagnosis lies at the heart to Sturek’s essay, which is decidedly not about how she healed or how erotic poetry, reading and writing it, helped her heal so that she could enjoy sexual penetration without pain. Rather, the essay is about how writing poetry became for her “a space \[in which\] ’to release’ what I could not always physically in pelvic floor therapy” and how that made her poetry a place “to navigate sexuality and gender beyond societal limitations.” In the end she makes a connection between her commitment “to seek sexual pleasure despite such sexual dysfunction” and her choice to write sestinas, a formal constraint that “works sort of like a cock ring, or a ball gag” to create a meaningful contrast between “pleasure and severity.” Sturek’s essay is a thoughtful meditation on the connection between poetry and the body that goes well beyond the usual ways that idea is expressed, as, for example, in Charles Olson’s idea of [Projective Verse](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69406/projective-verse?ref=richardjnewman.com), where the connection is through breath as a means of establishing rhythm and meter. Sturek asserts that the constraints vulvodynia exerts on her sexuality are not unlike the formal constraints of the sestinas she writes, that working within those constraints to seek pleasure, whether of the body or of art-making, is, in the end, a way of “practicing what it mean\[s\] to be free.” --- ## **Four Things To See** These covers—all from the British Library, from the series “Thrilling Life Stories for the Masses,” and all published in 1892—are in the public domain. ### A Wife In Name Only ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8032949a-c6b0-44ff-9d49-8378b3dd962f_539x800.jpeg) **§§§** ### The Fates of Three ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F76a877c1-62d5-46f4-a6e7-bf37654acae1_545x800.jpeg) **§§§** ### The Secret of the Pool ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb569282a-984a-4969-8095-1990fdab7f16_532x799.jpeg) **§§§** ### Her Bitter Awakening ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F04474f57-e949-46ce-a063-a18883dd7b24_532x799.jpeg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### **Day Dream - Kenny Baron and Dave Holland** **§§§** ### **Shekare Ahoo - Mitra Sumara** **§§§** ### **Dawn - Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble** (If you're unable to watch this on my website, I highly recommend clicking through to YouTube. This is a beautiful piece of music.) **§§§** ### **Prokofiev - Overture on Hebrew Themes** --- ## Four Things About Me ## When I was seventeen, my father showed up to take me out for my birthday with a terrible hang over. He took me to what back then would have been thought of as a very fancy diner and, after we sat down, explained to me that he only had enough money to pay for me to have dinner, which, he said, was fine, since all he could really stomach was a buttered bagel. I ordered duck l’orange, which I’d never eaten before, and I’m sure we talked while he sat opposite me eating his bagel, but I don’t remember anything we talked about, except that, on the way home, he said something about how he “could’ve been around more. I have no memory of responding, but when I think about that birthday meal now, I place it in the context of my father telling me not too long before he died about what it was like when he and his third wife first started gambling in Atlantic City and they would run out of money. They sometimes had to sleep, he said, on a bench and use the reserve cash they made sure never to gamble to take a bus back to where they lived in Manhattan. Maybe my birthday that year happened to fall on a day after they’d lost everything—his wife at the slot machines and he most probably at the blackjack table. **§§§** The first secret I remember being asked to keep was my about father’s gambling. When he and my mother divorced in the mid-1960s, he was awarded weekend visitation rights. He would take my brother and me for the day on Saturday and sometimes we’d spend the night with him at his parents’ place in Brooklyn. I don’t remember when it started, or how often it happened, but he would sometimes stop when he was taking us home at an [Off Track Betting](https://www.offtrackbetting.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) (OTB) establishment. I didn’t fully understand what he did in there when he left me and my brother in the car—which people did back then—but he would look at us very seriously every time he came out and say something like, “Make sure you don’t tell your mother we stopped here. It’s just between us.” I kept the secret for him for I-don’t-know-how-long, until one time, when my mother asked us what we did with our father that day, I let slip that we’d stopped at OTB on the way home. I don’t remember what my mother said, if anything, and I’m not sure how my father found out that I’d told her. I think my brother might have let it slip accidentally-on-purpose, since there was some tension after the divorce about me being on my mother’s side and him being on my father’s. However he found out though, I remember very clearly my father turning around in the driver’s seat of his car after he pulled into the parking lot of our apartment complex. “I was hoping I could trust you, Richard, but I guess I can’t.” He glared at me while he spoke those words and all I wanted in those moments was to disappear. **§§§** When my mother married the man who became our step-father, she asked my brother and me to call him Dad around the house, not George, and to call our father Larry. It would, she explained, make George feel more welcome in our home. I don’t think my mother did this to undermine my father’s place in our lives, at least not consciously, but I understand nonetheless why contemporary divorce settlements often include a clause explicitly prohibiting this practice. Neither I nor my brother were at all confused about who our real father was, and George never once tried to use what we called him to alienate us from our father, but the fact that we did as my mother asked caused my father no small amount of pain and anxiety, which he often took out on me. He didn’t mention the issue of what we called George specifically, but he would go out of his way to make me feel guilty about not appreciating him. One example sticks out in my memory. Back then, they didn’t have stepfather cards for Father’s Day, so my brother and I gave George the same kind of card we gave our father. I don’t remember caring very much about what George’s card actually said, as long as it said something generically appropriate for the day. I did care, though, about what the card I gave my father said. I wanted it to mean something. One year, I must’ve been around nine or ten years old, I picked out for the first time a card for my father that I had a personal connection to. I don’t remember anything about it, except that there was a picture of a Garfield-looking cat on the front and that I saw the message, whatever it was, as an inside joke between me and my father, one that would tell him just how great I thought he was. When I gave him the card, though, after he’d read my brother’s, he looked at the front, scanned the inside, and said, “I bet the card you gave George had the word *Dad* printed on it, not like this one.” Then, without saying thank you, he tossed the card along with my brother’s onto the front passenger seat. “Get in,” he told us, and we climbed into the backseat and he drove us off to whatever it was we did that day. **§§§** When I think now about how young my father was when he and my mother got divorced—if I have the timeline right, he was not much older than 25—I have, despite the pain he caused me, a great deal of compassion for him. Back then, there was no such thing as either joint custody or even the concept of a “non-custodial parent.” My father’s role was defined by the term “absentee parent.” Given the baggage that term cannot help but carry, when I put myself in my father’s place, I don’t know how I would have handled hearing my younger brother and me, for example, struggle to navigate what-to-call-whom-when if we were talking on the phone with our father and George happened to be in the same room. Being able to understand my father is not the same thing as being able to reconcile with him. There’s a much longer story there that I will have to save for another time. ### February 16, 2025: Wordshed URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/events/february-16-2025-wordshed-2/ Last updated: 2025-02-11T01:41:12.000Z On February 16th, I will be reading in the Wordshed NYC series along with Lynne Sachs, John S. Hall, Anant Dhavale, and Lauren Dulberg. According to the [Instagram post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DFtk%5FgSPT%5FQ/?utm%5Fsource=ig%5Fweb%5Fcopy%5Flink), in addition to poetry, there will be films and music. Sounds like a great evening. Here are the details: **When:** Sunday February 16, starting at 6:30. **Where:** The Von Bar, 3 Bleecker Street at the Bowery ### Four By Four #36 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-36/ Last updated: 2025-02-07T11:00:59.000Z #### On this page ## Writing News In the kind of synchronicity that usually happens only in fiction, a piece that I wrote on February 4, 2020 was published exactly five years later, on February 4, 2025\. I confess that I am not sure whether to call it a poem or a piece of creative nonfiction, but it’s called “[On February 4, 2020, instead of watching Donald Trump deliver his State of the Union Address…](https://michaelbroder.substack.com/p/second-coming-no-16-feb-4-2025)” [Michael Broder](https://michaelbroder.substack.com/), publisher of [Indolent Books](https://www.indolentbooks.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), accepted it for the series he is calling “[Second Coming: A poem-a-day series in creative response to the threats posed to our democracy by the incoming presidential administration](https://michaelbroder.substack.com/s/second-coming).” You can read the piece I am talking about [here](https://michaelbroder.substack.com/p/second-coming-no-16-feb-4-2025). ## Four Things To Read ### [*The Bookstore Book: A Memoir,*](https://www.pinktreespress.org/the-bookstore-book?ref=richardjnewman.com) by Ron Kolm Consisting of a sequence of vignettes in both prose and poetry that capture one man's life in books, *The Bookstore Book* is a guided tour through a slice of New York's literary scene that usually doesn't get much attention. In the same way that, for example, office staff are the people you go to if you want insight into a business' true inner workings, Kolm shows in this book that, at least during the years he worked in the city's independent bookstores, the bookstore staff plays a similar role. From the quirky anecdotes he shares about his encounters with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, Kathy Acker, Patti Smith, and Charles Bukowski to the only-in-New-York moments that he captures without adornment or sentimentality, Kolm allows us into what it was like to live a writer's life of and in books before Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon changed irrevocably that way of life. Reading Kolm's book made me nostalgic for the days when I could immerse myself in St. Mark's Bookstore or the Spring Street Bookstore, or even the Scribner's bookstore that used to be on Fifth Avenue the way you immerse yourself in a warm and welcoming pool of water, always leaving with some drops still clinging to your body, even if those drops were all you took away with you. *The Bookstore Book* draws it emotional power, as well as its depth, from the apparent artlessness of Kolm's writing, whether in poetry or prose, an effect that takes a lot of work to achieve. *The Bookstore Book* is worth reading, if only for the history, but it also contains small moments of aesthetic pleasure that continue to grow even after you put the book down. **§§§** ### "[What Happened to the Black-Jewish Political Alliance?](https://jewishcurrents.org/what-happened-to-the-black-jewish-alliance?ref=richardjnewman.com)," by Rachel Cohen > \[In [*Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s*](https://nyupress.org/9781479826889/black-power-jewish-politics/?ref=richardjnewman.com), Marc Dollinger shows that despite their vocal support for the African American struggle, most Jews were not risking their livelihoods for black freedom in any real way. As Dollinger writes, Southern Jews embraced Dixie and were overwhelmingly silent on civil rights. Northern Jews took pride in their support for justice, but “most experienced that movement from the safety and comfort of their living rooms, where they read about direct-action protests in the newspaper or watched it on television.” Cohen offers in this brief essay a discussion of Dollinger’s main thesis, which is succinctly captured in the essay’s subtitle: “Challenging the sanitized history of blacks and Jews during the Civil Rights era.” The narrative of the Jewish community’s role in the Civil Rights movement that I learned was precisely the opposite of the one summarized in the above quote. I was taught that Jews were uniformly and unanimously united in their (often heroic) proactive support of the movement, in both word and deed. It does not surprise me—and this is what Cohen says Dollinger’s book shows—that the full story is more complex than that, on both sides of the alliance. Indeed, reading Cohen’s piece made me think of the one (and, sadly, failed) attempt that I know of on my campus to form a Black-Jewish alliance. It was in the early years of my career and the planning and inevitable accompanying politics happened far above my head, so there’s a lot I don’t know about why we failed. Two things, however, have stuck with me. I am not sure if the first one was an insight at which people arrived at the time or if it’s an idea I am imposing in hindsight, but, as I recall, the initial call for an alliance did not emerge from a collaboration between Jewish and Black faculty, but rather from a proposal issued by Jewish faculty. Whether or not this was the intent, in other words, the proposed alliance was a product of the Jewish faculty’s vision and it was structured as an invitation to Black faculty to enter the Jewish faculty’s space—a sure recipe for misunderstanding and failure. The other thing I remember is trying to discuss with a Black colleague after our one and only meeting why his use of the term “philosemitic” was problematic. I don’t recall precisely how he used it, but I can still hear my colleague telling me that Louis Farrakhan was not antisemitic, but that my support of “my people,” right or wrong, was something to be respected. I’ve put Dollinger’s book on my list of books to get. **§§§** ### [*What Water Knows*](https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810143845/what-water-knows/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Jacqueline Jones LaMon The title of this book recalled for me a quote by Toni Morrison, “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” Water journeys in this volume from the taps in the first poem from which “it’s rare to find people who drink” to, in the last, that which, “stand\[ing\] apart/from ourselves,” we choose not to drink, substituting instead “Bordeaux—that strong, heady red we pour into stemware,/to escort us away from our lives,” thereby escaping, or so we hope, the fact that water knows “the inside of insides of us.” Functioning as metaphor, symbol, allegory, and as itself, water weaves its way through these poems like a river winding its way through issues that are central to our time—racism, for example, or addiction, or climate change—as well as those that are inescapably part of what it means to be alive among people: commitment, betrayal, loss, renewal, love. There is an implicit narrative that runs through the poems, or so it seemed to me, but the poems do not reveal the story itself. Rather, they invite us into the speaker’s thought process as she works through what the narrative confronts her with. This, for example, is the beginning of “The Latitude, The Longitude, And A Third Axis Called Time:” > *When you change your environment, you change* > *your opportunities*—or so said my son, endorsing > our move across the nation to a place he didn’t know. > And we went, and worlds shifted, and we thought > him so wise, to have sensed that only parts of our thinking > were true, the rest only habit, relentless and dogged. We never know why the family has to move or from where. Instead, the poem becomes a meditation not on the move itself, but on the storm the family travels through in silence and how that silence, especially when entered into together, “holding hands and breathing,” is a kind of preparation for the inevitable “encroaching storms” that life throws at us. “The Latitude, The Longitude, And A Third Axis Called Time” is also an example of a sonnet-like form LaMon uses throughout the book. It’s one that I have never seen before, and I am guessing she invented it: three five line stanzas followed by a single, sixteenth line, set off from the others like the final couplet in a Shakespearian sonnet. Most often, this line is composed of a three-item list, the first two items of which in some way “sum up” elements of the previous three stanzas, while the third opens the poem up into entirely new territory. The last line of the poem I am discussing here, for example, is “The desert scorch. The flooded streets. The minefields of the night.” I am glad I read this book. **§§§** ### "[On the 'Victims of the Victims:' Revisiting Edward Said’s ethical humanism in the context of the Gaza genocide](https://jewishcurrents.org/on-the-victims-of-the-victims?ref=richardjnewman.com)," by Ussama Makdisi > Today, after 76 years of meticulous cruelty that touches every aspect of Palestinian life throughout historic Palestine, as Israel carries out a genocidal campaign in Gaza that, at the time of writing, has killed an estimated 64,260 Palestinians and wounded tens of thousands of others, I am unsettled by the question: Does the “victims of the victims” still make sense as an ethical-historical formulation? Makdisi is referring to [Edward Said’s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward%5FSaid?ref=richardjnewman.com) assertion—he quotes here from Said’s book [*The Question of Palestine*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-question-of-palestine-edward-w-said/17315844?ean=9780679739883&next=t&next=t&ref=richardjnewman.com)—that “empathizing with ‘the disastrous problem of anti-Semitism’…offered some way out of the morass of competing victimhood” that so often disrupted (in Said’s time) meaningful and productive discussions of what to do about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. “This intertwining of empathy,” Makdisi writes, “reflected \[Said’s\] conviction that the fate and futures of Palestinians and Israelis were inevitably tied together by the question of Palestine.” The gist of Makdisi’s essay is the question of whether, given not only Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, but also the fact that the “liberal West has categorically refused to view Palestinians as victims of any moral or historical significance,” Said’s call for empathy for what Jews have suffered throughout the centuries still “makes sense as an ethical-historical formulation.” It’s an important question. There may have been a time, certainly after World War II, but even going back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Jews who settled Palestine could reasonably be seen as victims fleeing antisemitic oppression, regardless of whether or not, or even to what degree, they embraced Zionism as an ideology. I am reminded as I write this of June Jordan’s acknowledgment in her 1985 essay, “The Blood Shall Be a Sign Unto You: Israel and South Africa,” that > \[f\]or anyone Jewish…Israel must represent, on a level of sensibility inaccessible to argument and/or entreaty, an absolute imperative, a refuge, a place of sanctuary, a final deliverance out of the deserts of horror. Certainly, that was the version of Israel’s significance with which my early Jewish education was saturated, and it’s not hard to understand why Jews worldwide might feel that way just forty years after the Holocaust (understood not only as itself, but also as the epitome of a centuries long history of antisemitic violence and oppression). Nor is it hard to understand why someone might think that acknowledging that emotional reality would open the door to a corresponding Jewish empathy for the situation of the Palestinians. After all, if you see someone suffering the way you have suffered, isn’t the logical course of action to do what you can to end that suffering? Speaking for myself, one of the reasons Jordan’s essay was so formative for me was that it was the first time, ever, that someone who wasn’t Jewish had asked me to look at the facts of what Israel was doing to the Palestinians, while simultaneously acknowledging the legitimacy of my feelings-at-the-time about the need for Israel’s existence. Given the genocidal extent to which Israel has victimized the Palestinians since October 7th, Makdisi asks if it still makes sense to extend that kind of empathy to Israeli Jews. It’s a good and fair question, as long you don’t make the mistake of conflating Israel and Israeli Jews with the Jewish people worldwide. --- ## Four Things To See ### A Broadside by Liora Ostroff ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff887a9b3-96d5-49ca-95cb-85f50b5e07c9_2416x2958.jpeg) You can read the artist’s statement here: [artist statement - liora ostroffartist statement - liora ostroff.pdf772 KBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2025/02/artist-statement---liora-ostroff.pdf "Download") **§§§** ### Colored Veterans of the 15th regiment, 369th infantry, marching up Fifth Avenue, New York City, 1919 ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F51e38a29-ed84-42bb-b4f8-2dc0e4b4d559_4096x2059.jpeg) ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd65e3ccf-7c83-4d0d-997f-131efee7500a_4096x2053.jpeg) **§§§** ### Black Power Poster from National Museum of African American History and Culture by Alfredo Rostgaard ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc7bcc0b0-7b69-4f6f-957e-b75a2e4e2adf_2400x4006.jpeg) **§§§** ### Supper Time by [Horace Pippin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace%5FPippin?ref=richardjnewman.com) ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa334e209-07b5-4fe6-9a8a-c363620d9e98_3300x2601.jpeg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### **Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit** **§§§** ### **Curtis Mayfield - People Get Ready** **§§§** ### **Mavis Staples - We Shall Not Be Moved** **§§§** ### **Nina Simone - Mississippi Goddam** --- ## Four Things About Me **Case of mistaken identity #1:** In March 1998, [*Prairie Schooner*](https://prairieschooner.unl.edu/?ref=richardjnewman.com) published two poems of mine, “Kashrut” and “You Will, Of Course, Assume It Is For You,” which eight years later became part of [*The Silence Of Men*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/the-silence-of-men/)*.* To have not just one, but two poems published in a nationally recognized literary journal was a major accomplishment, of course, but to share space in the journal with poets whose names I knew—[Linda Pastan](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/linda-pastan?ref=richardjnewman.com), [Robert Pack](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-pack?ref=richardjnewman.com), [Albert Goldbarth](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/albert-goldbarth?ref=richardjnewman.com), [Ruth Stone](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ruth-stone?ref=richardjnewman.com), and, as a translator, [Marilyn Hacker](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/marilyn-hacker?ref=richardjnewman.com)—was affirming for me in ways I don’t think I knew I needed until that moment. Shortly after the issue of the journal came out (Vol. 72, No. 1), I got a message on my answering machine—remember those?. A male voice said, “Hello, Richard Newman, this is [Richard Newman](https://newmanrichard.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com)” and went on to explain that he, too, was a poet and that he thought we should probably talk. When I called him back, he explained that his friends, thinking that my poems were his, had been congratulating him for getting published in *Prairie Schooner.* Since he knew he hadn’t written the poems, he’d called Hilda Raz, who was editing the journal at the time and whom he knew through his work as editor of [River Styx Magazine](https://www.riverstyx.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com), to get my phone number. We chatted for a while and then he brought up the question of how to avoid this kind of confusion in the future. Since he already had an established presence in the literary world and I did not, I told him that I would start using my middle name when I published. I have this vague memory that he told me he would start using his middle name as well, but he never did. In any event, that is how I came to be known, for the first time in my life, as Richard *Jeffrey* Newman. **§§§** **Case of mistaken identity #2:** I remember I was sitting at my desk at home grading papers, when I got a phone call on my landline. I picked up the receiver and the voice on the other end said, "Is this Richard Newman?" When I answered in the affirmative, he asked another question, "Did you recently purchase new living room furniture from Macy's?" Now I was suspicious. How did he know this, I asked in return. "I think they accidentally sent me your bill," he responded and he read out to me the items listed there. Sure enough, it was the living room furniture my wife and I had purchased not too long before. Somehow Macy's had sent my bill to his Cambridge address. What made this case of mistaken identity memorable, however, is that the Richard Newman to whom I was talking turned out to be a well-known professor of African American Studies at Harvard University. According to this [Newman's Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard%5FS.%5FNewman?ref=richardjnewman.com), his work "reshaped both African-American History and Early American History by unpacking the ways in which revolutionary era blacks, in particular AME Church founder Richard Allen, contributed as ‘founding fathers.’” I knew none of that as we chatted on the phone about our respective careers, however. After I looked him up, though, I ended up buying two of the books he edited, [*Everybody Say Freedom: Everything You Need to Know about African-American History*](https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/everybody-say-freedom-everything-you-need-to-know-about-african-american-history%5Frichard-newman%5Fmarcia-sawyer/964773/item/11664083/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* which he edited with Marcia Sawyer and [*African American Quotations*](https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/african-american-quotations/1414753/?ref=richardjnewman.com#edition=1751452&idiq=15434408)*,* of which he is the sole editor. I have used each one often and I always remember fondly how I came to discover this other Professor Newman and his work. **§§§** **Case of mistaken identity #3:** I was standing in the hallway talking to a colleague, when I got a call from my wife. "Where are you?" she wanted to know. I told her I was in Bradley Hall, which is the building on campus where my office is located. "Are you sure?" she wanted to know, the edge in her voice giving me a clue that something was wrong. "Yes, I'm sure," I told her, and I gave her the name of the colleague I was talking to—I don't remember who it was—who then gave me, as you might imagine, a strange, quizzical look. “Go some place private where we can talk," my wife said, so I went back to my office and closed the door. A doctor had just called her, she said, telling her to come "pick her husband up" from a psychiatric ward somewhere in the Bronx. When she told this doctor he couldn't be talking about *her* husband, because he had left for work earlier that day, he didn't believe her, and his tone, she said, made it clear that he thought he was talking to a heartless woman who was perfectly happy to let her husband stay in that psychiatric ward. Obviously, the man in the ward wasn't me and so I assumed my identity had been stolen. What actually happened, however, as I learned later, from the doctor in charge of the institution where that other Richard Newman had been admitted, was that he had been brought by police to the emergency room of the hospital in my neighborhood because he was suffering a psychotic break. When the hospital admitted him, because his name was the same as mine, and because his birthday was the same as mine, my records popped up on the computer, since I had been there at some point in the past. As a result, whoever admitted him just assumed he was me. The situation was ultimately resolved, but for a brief while I felt like I was living in the middle of a short story written by Franz Kafka. **§§§** There was a bully in the neighborhood where I grew up whose name was also Richard. He was enough older than me that we almost never crossed paths, but his younger brother, also a bully, crossed paths with me quite a lot. I was about twelve or thirteen years old at the time. I do not remember, and it may be that I never knew, why this other Richard approached me one day in the courtyard outside the building where I lived. I was hanging out with a group of my friends when he walked up to me. I’m pretty sure his brother was with him. “I hear,” he said, “your name is Richard. Is that true?” I told him yes. “Well, that’s my name too, and it belongs to me, so you can’t use it anymore. Figure out what else you want to be called, because if I find out after this that people are still calling you Richard, you’re going to be very, very sorry.” I vaguely recall trying without success to reason with him, and I was scared when he left. I don’t remember him ever bringing the subject again, but I did walk around for a while with a low-level of anxiety thrumming through me, especially when I saw his brother. In the end, nothing ever came of it, but it was a formative experience nonetheless, in that someone more powerful than I tried to erase my identity, or, more accurately, try to get me to agree to erase my identity to satisfy his whim. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below*. [](https://radix.coop/product/mortals-graphic-novel/?ref=richardjnewman.com) [](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-15/ Last updated: 2025-01-28T11:33:05.000Z > Why is it that the final poem of the book you're working on, the one that ties the entire volume together, always proves to be the most difficult to revise? ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-14/ Last updated: 2025-01-24T23:03:32.000Z A gull in Oban, August 2024. ### Four By Four #35 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-35/ Last updated: 2025-01-27T02:58:00.000Z #### On this page ## Four Things To Read [*Mortals*](https://radix.coop/product/mortals-graphic-novel/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by John Dermot Woods and Matt L: The frontispiece of this graphic novel, which is repeated on the book’s final page, is an illustration of the riddle, *What goes on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?*The answer is a human being, who crawls as an infant, walks on two legs through the middle of their life, and needs a cane when they are older—except that the frontispiece has the person, in this case a man, running instead of walking. The riddle, which is never stated explicitly, frames the development of the book’s main character, a man named Francis. Francis is a married-soon-to-be-divorced father, though you don’t know that until it actually happens. He’s also an actor—a very self-involved one, at least at first, so much so that he doesn’t even remember the name of his son’s best friend, whom we learn at the beginning of the book has died. The rest of the story, broadly speaking, traces Francis’ confrontation with his own mortality, and how that plays out in his relationship with others, especially his son and his ex-wife, and with himself as a father and an artist. One of the strengths of this book is the way that the kind of commentary that would be necessary in a traditional novel and that could easily come across as didactic or moralizing is rendered implicit in the artwork. For me, the most interesting part of that confrontation—which is divided into three sections that correspond to the three “ages of man” that are the answer to the riddle—is how Francis comes to terms with the fact that he’s been using his desire to be a serious artist, his commitment to not selling out, as a way to avoid the humility and vulnerability that are required to make art in the first place. I recommend this book. **§§§** [Five Journalists in Gaza Reflect on Ceasefire Announcement](https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/five-journalists-in-gaza-reflect?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Sharif Abdel Kouddus (who also translated the journalists’ Arabic into English): > **My feelings when I heard the announcement — I saw the happiness of people and their tears of joy. But with regard to myself, as a journalist and a human being and a Palestinian who lives in north Gaza, I have contradictory feelings ranging from joy to sorrow. I lost nearly 250 members of my family. Relatives of relatives: my nephews, nieces, aunts, their sons and daughters, my uncles and their wives and children. I lost a very large number of people. We are one of the families that has the highest number of martyrs in this genocidal war.** > > *—*Bilal Salem, Gaza City. A 37-year-old journalist from Gaza City. He is a member of the Salem family who have lost over 270 members in different Israeli attacks.** As the title says, this article collects the responses to the recently negotiated cease fire between Israel and Hamas of five Palestinian journalist who currently live in Gaza. I am sharing it with you not because I have anything to add, but because these are voices you will not hear in the mainstream media, where the cease fire will no doubt be covered as an unmitigated triumph and as a sign that it’s time for both sides to begin the long process of “putting the war behind them,” as if the war had been a symmetrical one, in which each side had suffered equally. I don’t mean, of course, that Israelis, especially the hostages and their families, friends, and loved ones, did not suffer; but to suggest that the ceasefire means the same thing to each side or that it is—as people have tried to characterize October 7—separate and distinct from the entire history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as the mainstream media is likely to do, is at best a cynically disingenuous silencing of voices like the ones Kouddus shares in this article. **§§§** [No, Katherine Franke Was Not Fired](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/cq344f2kkglgoh4w951xo/No-Katherine-Franke-Was-Not-Fired.pdf?rlkey=8eskrdqrjih2jerps41znr3c7&dl=0&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Steven Lubert: > ***My research for this article included an examination of the public record, a review of Columbia’s final Investigation Determination (which has not been made public), information provided by university employees about the extensive findings in the underlying Investigation Report, exhibits attached to Franke’s appeal, and other relevant documents. I learned that Franke did not face discipline because she “referenced a history of harassment against Palestinians,” or for her “support of pro-Palestinian protesters.” Rather, two outside investigators concluded that, in an interview with Democracy Now! on January 25, 2024, she had “subjected Israeli members of the Columbia community to discriminatory harassment.”*** Lubert wrote this piece in response to the one-sided coverage of Katherine Franke’s decision to leave Columbia University, where she had been the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University and Founder/Director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law. In a statement she released on January 10, 2025 Franke [characterized the end of her tenure at Columbia](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/k750rv9daev2yje27m5w7/Statement-from-Katherine-Franke.docx.pdf?rlkey=l0rum72cy0co240abe5nwdavg&dl=0&ref=richardjnewman.com) as the “termination \[of her employment\] dressed up in \[the\] more palatable terms \[of retirement\],” resulting from her defense of “students’ right to peaceful protest” in support of the “rights and dignity of Palestinians.” Lubert’s article complicates that picture in important ways, providing information that Franke leaves out of her account, as well as a perspective that is rooted less in polemic or ideology than in a desire for factual accuracy. That said, there is no question that Columbia University’s administration, along with many other colleges and universities across the country, has been both exceptionally hostile to pro-Palestinian voices and overly solicitous of those voices that are pro-Israel. In that context, it is easy to take Franke at her word when she says > *\[T\]he University has allowed its own disciplinary process to be weaponized against members of our community, including myself. I have been targeted for my support of pro-Palestinian protesters – by the president of Columbia University, by several colleagues, by university trustees, and by outside actors. This has included an unjustified finding by the University that my public comments condemning attacks against student protesters violated university non-discrimination policy.* Franke made those comments in an interview with [Democracy Now](https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/25/columbia%5Fpalestine%5Fprotest%5Fattack?ref=richardjnewman.com): > *Columbia has a program. It’s a graduate relationship with older students from other countries, including Israel. And it’s something that many of us were concerned about, because* so many of those Israeli students, who then come to the Columbia campus, are coming right out of their military service. *And they’ve been known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus. And it’s something the university has not taken seriously in the past. (My italics)* The non-italicized portion of that quote, according to the outside investigators cited by Lubert constituted a Title VI violation in that it “lacked a factual basis and constituted a negative, unfounded stereotype about Israeli students, who comprise a protected class.” Lubert also points out that the law firm hired by the university to conduct this investigation found “\[b\]ased on multiple interviews…that Franke’s comment had an adverse impact on Israeli students, causing them to experience isolation and distress and contributing to a hostile learning environment.” While it’s unlikely that a similar generalization made in a less volatile context about any other protected class, assuming they were not part of a larger pattern and amounted to a sentence or two uttered during a media interview, would have resulted in a professor’s dismissal, I don’t think anyone would disagree that the professor who made those comments would need to be called to account. Nonetheless, there’s a lot to unpack here. Israelis, for example, and especially former Israeli soldiers, being citizens of a country that is waging a genocidal war against a relatively helpless population, are easy targets. More than that, because it’s “easy” to dismiss the kind of generalization Franke made because of its “trivial” nature when compared to the devastation Israel is wreaking in Gaza, it is easy to paint anyone who wants to hold someone like Franke accountable as at best “not getting it” and, at worst, an apologist for genocide. Then there’s the fact that Lubert’s appeal to objectivity conveniently elides Columbia’s anti-Palestinian hostility as the context in which the whole affair needs to be understood. To ignore that context, after all, is to avoid the question of why the consequences to Franke of a single inappropriate sentence in a media interview should have such absolute consequences. There’s more, but to get into that would require an entire essay. **§§§** > [Why Is a Publisher of Antisemitic and Homophobic Authors Winning a National Book Award?](https://arcmag.org/why-is-a-publisher-of-antisemitic-and-homophobic-authors-winning-a-national-book-award/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Mark Oppenheimer: > > *Even in our busy news season, a time of elections and wars, one might have thought that the announcement that a National Book Award will be given next month to a purveyor of antisemitic and homophobic tracts would have caused a bit more of a stir. It seems like the kind of story that would be picked up by major newspapers, public radio, or, at the very least, the trade magazines whose sole purpose is to cover publishing. It is remarkable, then, that there has not been greater attention to the work of William Paul Coates, who will receive the award on Nov. 20\. As the publisher of *The Jewish Onslaught*, as well as assorted other books, Coates has promoted writing that is, in the parlance of our time, problematic, promoting pseudoscience while demeaning Jews and gays, among others.* Were it the case that Coates’ press, [Black Classic Press](https://www.blackclassicbooks.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) (BCP), published these book while providing some kind of critical or historical context that explained why it was important to publish them, despite their “problematic” nature, the fact that he’s receiving the award would not be an issue. After all, there are presses, to pick an obvious example, that make sure to provide contextual apparatus for the editions of *Mein Kampf* that they publish. Oppenheimer details the problematic books in BCP’s catalogue, including, along with *The Jewish Onslaught,* titles like *Chosen People from the Caucasus: Jewish Origins, Delusions, Deceptions and Historical Role in the Slave Trade, Genocide and Cultural Colonization; The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront,* and *We the Black Jews: Witness to the “White Jewish Race” Myth and African Origins of the Major Western Religions.* Most interestingly, and tellingly, Oppenheimer documents the fact that “Tactics of Organized Jewry in Suppressing Free Speech,” a speech by Tony Martin, author of *The Jewish Onslaught,* can be bought either from Black Classic Press or the website of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a Holocaust-denial organization. Two things stand out for me: The fact that the National Book Foundation was willing to give Coates the award despite the unapologetic presence of those books in his catalogue seems to me clearly to demonstrate a double standard in how we respond when it comes to antisemitism versus other forms hatred. Also, the fact that the same text is available both from Black Classic Press and the Institute for Historical Review makes it very clear that this double standard exists at least in part because antisemitism is the exclusive purview of neither the left nor the right. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ## Four Things To See These images of the [Beach Pneumatic Transit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach%5FPneumatic%5FTransit?ref=richardjnewman.com), also known as the [Broadway Pneumatic Underground Railway](https://www.historiclowermanhattan.org/innovations/broadway-pneumatic-underground-railway?ref=richardjnewman.com), are all in the public domain. They were originally published by the [New York Parcel Dispatch Company](https://randomdailyart.com/artists/New-York-Parcel-Dispatch-Company/?ref=richardjnewman.com) and can be found on [Raw Pixel](https://www.rawpixel.com/search?page=1&path=3.sub%5Ftopic-2607&sort=curated&ref=richardjnewman.com). The Beach Pneumatic Transit was the first attempt to build an underground [public transit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public%5Ftransit?ref=richardjnewman.com) system in [New York City](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New%5FYork%5FCity?ref=richardjnewman.com). ### Illustration of the new post office & proposed Broadway underground railway (1872) ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1d89a13-0753-4e10-bdf0-f7ab05aec2c3_1435x1763.jpeg) **§§§** ### Interior Design of the Pneumatic Passenger Car (1872) ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2b15a2db-9efc-4895-9bb9-1266b74435d0_1371x1408.jpeg) **§§§** ### The Underground Tunneling Machine (1872) ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe2733566-dd12-477c-b4d8-102ab2ac3ab8_1083x1432.jpeg) **§§§** ### View of The Station from The Tunnel (1872) ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2698ec94-7ac4-4cb6-8341-9dc13dcee049_1480x1154.jpeg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### **Galeet Dardashti - Adonai Hu Ha’elohim** **§§§** ### **Errollyn Wallen - In Earth** **§§§** ### **Heart - Magic Man** **§§§** ### **Justin Hiltner - Wildflowers** --- ## Four Things About Me When I was in fifth or sixth grade, I interviewed one of my maternal great-grandmother’s sisters—I think it was Aunt Becky—for a family history project. She told me about her family’s experience with pogroms in Romania. (My grandmother, if I remember correctly, was the first member of her family born in the States.) In particular, Aunt Becky told me about the Christian family across the street who hid them in the basement whenever a pogrom was happening. At the time, I didn’t fully understand the depth of the courage that family showed, but it made a real impression on me nonetheless. It is not overly dramatic to say that if that family hadn’t shown the courage it did, my great-grandmother and her sisters might never have been able to come to the United States. More than that, though, that family’s courage has stood for me as an exemplar of what my own response to hatred and oppression ought to be. I may not always live up to that standard, but it is the one to which I try to hold myself accountable. **§§§** Fifteen years ago, I was teaching a summer composition course in which there was a student from India who stayed after class one day to speak with me about writing. I don’t remember the particulars of the conversation, but my antennae definitely went up when I saw how anxious she became when she looked at her watch and said her husband was waiting for her in the car. It was clear to me that she was worried about more than making him wait a couple of extra minutes. She came back to speak with me again—she told me she told her husband it was to discuss an essay she was having difficulty with (in fact her writing was quite good)—and it was during that meeting that she revealed to me that she wanted out of her marriage because her husband was abusive. Then, one day, when she’d asked again to see me after class, she told that her husband had threatened to kill her. Not here in the states, she said, but while discussing a trip he was planning for them back to India, he showed her a gun he had and started talking about how she might be in control in America because there were laws here that tied his hands, but he would be in control once they were back in their country. She understood him to mean in no uncertain terms that he planned to murder her once they were there, and that he expected to be able to do so with impunity. When she told me this, I put her in touch with the [South Asian Women’s Association](https://www.sawa-usa.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) (SAWA). She could not use her cell phone to make the call, since her husband checked her phone regularly. The only place she said she felt safe calling, because it was the only place where she could be guaranteed some measure of real privacy, was on campus. She didn’t want to use the phone in my office, though, because her husband might come looking for her if she took too long getting to the car after class. Instead, I brought her to another office I had access to, and she made the call from there. SAWA helped her with the information she needed about her legal rights as a non-citizen victim of domestic violence. That information helped her feel strong enough to call on some friends who helped her get away from her husband. We were in touch on and off during and after her divorce and I wrote letters of recommendation for her once she decided on a career path, but it’s been more than a decade since I last heard from her. I hope she is doing well. **§§§** In 2017, a central Asian student in an ESL class I was teaching came to my office to discuss the essay I had assigned for that week. What started out as a discussion about how to organize her paper, however, became very quickly a discussion of how meaningless she thought school was, since she knew she wasn’t going to be able to do anything with her degree. Her parents, she said, were desperately trying to marry her off. She was the youngest child in her family, had graduated high school the previous year, and her parents, especially her father, wanted to make sure she did not fall prey to the “corrupting freedom” American culture offered women. Her parents had been trying to arrange a match for her for some time, but while the men they chose were all well-established and would be able to take good care of her, they were also much older than she was, boring (in her estimation), and, according to her, really, really ugly. It wasn’t, she explained, that she was opposed to marrying someone her parents chose for her, and she definitely did want to marry someone from her own faith and culture, but—she’d either been born here or had come here when she was very young—she wanted the man she married to have at least a little bit of the Americanized identity she had. She went on to tell me that she’d dated a few men from her background—always behind her parents’ backs, of course—but even though they seemed to be pretty thoroughly acculturated, they all exhibited some version of what she experienced with the one man she thought might be someone she could marry. As soon as they officially became a couple, he started checking her Blackberry to see whom she was calling and who was calling her. It reminded her of her father, she said, who, though he’s threatened to do so, hasn’t yet gone quite that far. She was angry and frustrated, shamed by both her own helplessness and the fact that she’d been sneaking around behind her parents’ backs—so much so that she started saying things like, “Maybe I should just end it all.” When I asked her what she meant by that, she said she’d been thinking she should just surrender to her parents, that since marriage was the only way she could ever have any semblance of her own life, maybe she should just marry one of the men they chose for her and then figure things out from there. One of the reasons she felt so isolated and helpless, she explained, was her American friends’ inability or unwillingness to understand why she didn’t just break with her parents. Some of them apparently told her she had only herself to blame since she did not run away. (Some friends!) I think she may have said I was the first person in whom she confided, but I am not sure. What I do know is that she told me she’d chosen to trust me because I’d talked in class about living in Korea at a time when arranged marriages were still the norm and where it was as culturally unacceptable to go against one’s parents as it was for her to go against hers. A year or so after this conversation, I heard she’d gotten married. I have no idea what the circumstances were, but I remember thinking at the time that it didn’t matter whether the man she married was imposed on her by her parents or whether he was a man she’d chosen, the one discussion she and I had opened a window for me I would not otherwise have had about what [compulsory heterosexuality](https://web.archive.org/web/20160213095421/http://people.terry.uga.edu/dawndba/4500compulsoryhet.htm) is like from a woman’s perspective. (The article I’ve linked to is in some ways dated—the first sentence is a good example—but it’s worth reading nonetheless.) **§§§** For a while, I was teaching evening classes till late enough that I sometimes did not get home from work until around 11 PM. One night, I passed a couple talking about thirty feet from the entrance to my building. The woman was leaning with her back against the driver’s side front window of one of the vehicles parked on the street. Her bag was on the car’s roof. The man stood in front of her, close enough that she couldn’t easily move away, with his right hand planted firmly on the line where the front and rear doors met. His posture, though, seemed more intimate than threatening. They were arguing in Spanish and their voices were low, so I took them to be just what they appeared to be, a couple having a disagreement, and I walked by without giving them a second thought. As soon as I walked up the steps leading to my building, though, the man shouted something in Spanish and I heard what sounded like his hand slamming, flat and hard, against the roof of the car they’d been leaning on. I stopped and listened for about ten seconds. It was quiet. I peaked around the tree that was blocking my line of sight. They were standing more or less as they had before, and when nothing else happened, I assumed he’d had a momentary outburst and started to walk into the lobby. As soon as I did so, though, he started yelling again, and this time the sound of shaking metal made it clear that he’d hit the alternate-side-of-the-street-parking sign that was right next to where they were standing. I stepped back onto the street just in time to see them walking past. He had her purse in his left land and her upper arm in his right. Her shoulders were slumped, and, to my eyes, it looked like she’d decided she had no choice but to let him lead her away. Then, as if he felt my eyes on the back of his head, the man turned around, let go of her arm, handed her purse back to her, and took a few steps towards me. The invitation to provoke him into more than words was more than obvious in his tone, “What are *you* looking at?” I didn’t answer. He took another step towards me. “Mind your own fucking business,” he shouted, loud enough that I can’t imagine the people on the first couple of floors of my building didn’t hear. “This has nothing to do with you, okay?” Again, I didn’t answer. “Look this is *not* between you and me,” he yelled. “Then you don’t need to hurt her,” I responded in as quiet and calm a voice as I could. “What the fuck? I’m not hurting her.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Just go home.” It was an order he expected me to follow, not a reassurance everything was okay. Then he turned back to the woman, retrieved her purse, and hung his arm over her shoulders, pulling her to him and saying something in her ear as they walked down the block, neither of them looking back in my direction. I watched for another ten seconds or so. They looked like any other couple walking home after having been out for the evening, so I went upstairs, made myself a cup of tea, and watched a little television to unwind before going to bed. There’s a lot to say about this scenario and maybe I will one day write the essay that teases it all out. What goes through my head every time I think about it, though, is whether or not the situation really was abusive—it would be unfair not to acknowledge that it might not have been—and how close I might have come to being assaulted. If I had to guess, I’d say the man was about ten or fifteen years younger than I was—this happened when I was in my fifties—and looked like he could do a lot of damage without very much effort. Thankfully, that did not happen, and I continue, even all these years later, to hope the woman was as safe as he wanted me to think. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below*. [](https://radix.coop/product/mortals-graphic-novel/?ref=richardjnewman.com) [](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-13/ Last updated: 2025-01-19T19:34:01.000Z _No content available._ ### February 1, 2025: Winter Tides Poetry Reading in Port Jefferson URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/events/untitled-12/ Last updated: 2025-01-23T02:53:12.000Z I will be reading on Feburary 1st in the Winter Tides Poetry event hosted by [Emily Brandt](https://www.emilybrandt.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) and [Cori Kresge](https://corilmt.com/about?ref=richardjnewman.com). The event is held at [The Curry Club](https://curryclubatsaghar.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) in Port Jefferson. I’ve eaten there before; the food is marvelous! There’s an open mic, so if you have work to share, consider bringing it. **When:** Saturday, Feb 1 - 6-9pm **Where:** The Curry Club, 111 W. Broadway, Port Jefferson **Schedule:** - **6-6:45pm**: **writing time** (**prompt** **created by Cori)** & **open mic** - **6:45-7:30: order & eat dinner** - **7:30-8:30/9**: **FEATURED READERS: Dani Barnhart, Richard Jeffrey Newman, Ekoko Omadeke, LB Thompson, and Brian Trimboli** ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-11/ Last updated: 2025-01-18T11:24:37.000Z ## Lines That Didn't Make The Cut Across the span, as counterpoint, a flock of pigeons lifted into flight. “We get,” he said, “a bullet each. If you do not die, you do not die.” Nothing I regret hurts more than this: I watched the cloudless sky refuse to darken; I did not watch their guns refuse to kill, or the rising of all those suns. ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-10/ Last updated: 2025-01-18T11:00:37.000Z ## Lines That Didn't Make The Cut Desire feeds on what it finds, blurring the borders of our narrative. The ones who want to hide our past from us have woven through that book you're here to translate a warning: “Precautions are superfluous. They will be back. It is already late.” ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-9/ Last updated: 2025-01-18T10:52:03.000Z ## Dog Yoga ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/IMG_2111.jpg) ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-8/ Last updated: 2025-01-18T10:32:40.000Z ## Archie, two moods ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/IMG_2108.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/IMG_2109.jpeg) ### Four By Four #34 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-34-2/ Last updated: 2025-01-19T18:49:46.000Z #### On this page ## Four Things To Read [***Fabulous Beast***](https://www.tamupress.com/book/9781680031898/fabulous-beast/?ref=richardjnewman.com)***,*** by Sarah Kain Gutowski: *Fabulous Beast* is divided into three sections—“The Sow,” “The Woman With The Frog Tongue,” and “Minor Gods”—that are bookended by a prologue and epilogue. The prologue and epilogue frame the book as an exchange between mother and daughter in which, broadly speaking, the three inner sections are stories the mother tells to explain things to her daughter about what it means to be a woman and a mother in a world where very specific and idealized versions motherhood and womanhood might be valued, but actual women and mothers are systematically devalued and dehumanized. That programmatic and overtly political nature of that description, however, does not do the book justice. This is a book of poetry, not a polemic. Gutowski’s concern—animated without question by a feminist perspective—is less about, for example, making women’s oppression per se visible than it is about capturing, with all its internal contradictions and ironies, the interior experience of trying to build a meaningful life as a woman and/or a mother under the terms that oppression imposes. She does this by weaving the women she writes about into narratives built from elements of fairy tale, myth, and even horror. Neither the sow, nor the woman with the frog tongue, nor the woman who appears in “Minor Gods,” in other words, is a crusader in any obvious sense of that term; and much of the book’s power derives from the fact that none of the sections—each of which deserves a review on its own terms—resolves in an obvious, polemical manner. I think it would be very interesting to read *Fabulous Beast* next to Julia Kolchinsky Dashach’s [*40 Weeks*](https://www.yesyesbooks.com/product-page/40-weeks?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* which is also about motherhood and which I wrote about in [Four by Four #17](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-17/), and I found it really interesting that Gutowski’s “Mama, Couldn’t She Eat a Fly? Because She Has a Frog Tongue,” in which the woman with the frog tongue has a dream about her arm detaching itself from her body, immediately recalled for me the protagonist of [*Moon Brow*](https://restlessbooks.org/bookstore/moon-brow?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Shahriar Mandanipour (translated by Sara Khalili), who spends the entire novel searching for the arm he lost in Iran’s war with Iraq. I have not thought deeply about this connection, but it might be something worth pursuing. The last thing I will say about *Fabulous Beast* is how much I admire how well-crafted the poems are. In her notes Gutowski says that the form of “The Woman With The Frog Tongue” is based on Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queen,” and what she does with the form is really interesting, but you can tell that Gutowski paid the same careful attention to form in the other two sections as well. The language of these poems is orchestrated, in every sense of that term, and they bear study on that level. **§§§** [***William Labov, Who Studied How Society Shapes Language, Dies at 97***](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/24/us/william-labov-dead.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.kU4.Sm4I.Pa8u9WPnXwLm&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com)***,*** by Clay Risen: > *In one famous study, he went to three department stores in New York City — high-end Saks Fifth Avenue, middle-class Macy’s and budget-level S. Klein — and asked for an item he knew was on the third or fourth floor. What he found confirmed his hypothesis that the New York accent was shaped not just by region but by class: The more expensive the store, the more likely he was to hear the “r’s” in “fourth floor.” What was more, he recognized that the salespeople he asked at Saks were unlikely to be upper class themselves — instead, he concluded, they code-switched to a type of speech that fit their customers.* I studied Labov’s work when I was a graduate student in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) at Stony Brook University. I remember well our discussion of this study’s relevance to what it means for an adult English-language learner to try to make sense of the different registers of the language they would be likely to encounter in their daily lives. The truly eye-opening aspect of Labov’s work, however, at least to me, was his study of what was then called Black English, but has since been called by a range of names, including [African American Vernacular English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American%5FVernacular%5FEnglish?ref=richardjnewman.com) and Ebonics. The book he wrote is called “[Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular](https://www.pennpress.org/9780812210514/language-in-the-inner-city/?ref=richardjnewman.com).” I don’t remember if we read the entire book, but I was deeply moved by the way his study exposed the racism inherent in the promotion of the variety of English I spoke as not just the only correct way to speak, but also the only one that could truly be called a language. He distilled much of what he had to say in that book for a popular audience in a 1972 article he wrote for *The Atlantic* called “[Academic Ignorance and Black Intelligence](https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/95sep/ets/labo.htm?ref=richardjnewman.com).” I started using this article to introduce the grammar class I taught because I was surprised by how many students who registered for the class held some (admittedly watered-down ) version of the beliefs about African American Vernacular English (AAVE) that Labov was fighting against: > *The most extreme view which proceeds from \[the deficit model of understanding AAVE\]—and one that is now being widely accepted—is that lower-class black children have no language at all. Some educational psychologists first draw from the writings of the British social psychologist Basil Bernstein the idea that “much of lower-class language consists of a kind of incidental ‘emotional accompaniment’ to action here and now.” Bernstein’s views are filtered through a strong bias against all forms of working-class behavior, so that he sees middle-class language as superior in every respect–as “more abstract, and necessarily somewhat more flexible, detailed and subtle.” One can proceed through a range of such views until one comes to the practical program of Carl Bereiter, Siegfried Engelmann, and their associates. Bereiter’s program for an academically oriented preschool is based upon the premise that black children must have a language which they can learn, and their empirical findings that these children come to school without such a language.* This article is still worth reading today, as is the obituary I linked to initially. **§§§** [***Boneyarn***](https://ashlandpoetrypress.com/product/boneyarn/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by David Mills: The subject of this collection is the Negro Burial Ground in what is now Lower Manhattan: the land itself; the people buried there; the politics, of slavery and otherwise, that led to the founding of the cemetery; and more. I think I might have known the Burial Ground existed before I read this book, but I had no idea just how disturbing and complex the history behind it is, ignorant as I am about the legacy of slavery here New York City, where we like to think of ourselves as always having been “above such things.” Indeed, each time I referred to the notes Mills provides, I found myself wishing that Ashland Poetry Press had published the poems as part of a two-volume set, with the other volume containing the history that Mills has to fill in so that a reader will have better access to the many-layered richness he’s packed into the poems themselves. You don’t necessarily need the history to appreciate the poems, but since part of the purpose of this book is clearly to educate, it would have been interesting to see how knowing a fuller historical context would have changed the way the poems “hit.” The strongest poems in the book break down into two categories: those like “Chimney Sweep Apprentice” or “Coating: Warwick” in which Mills inhabits the voices of the people he learned about through his research and those like the ones titled “Talking To The Bones,” in which he imagines himself into the allusive, enigmatic, and epigrammatic, voices of the bones of the dead. Throughout the book, I enjoyed watching Mills’ work through the challenge of finding the forms—poetic, syntactic, rhythmic—that would hold this history that so few people know about, and I would remiss if I did not note, as I did talking about *Fabulous Beast* above, the pleasure I often took in letting the finely tuned music of Mills’ poetry wash over me. Finally, the section titled “Jupiter & Wheatley’s Suite,” sent me back to an essay I had not read in several decades, June Jordan’s “\[The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America”\]\[ Something like a sonnet for Phillis Wheatley\]([https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68628/the-difficult-miracle-of-black-poetry-in-america](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68628/the-difficult-miracle-of-black-poetry-in-america?ref=richardjnewman.com)).” It’s an essay worth reading next to David Mills’ book. **§§§** [**Things Not Seen**](https://jewishcurrents.org/things-not-seen?token=zgrz1MhC93kAilPSc8TiOeutSp%5F0s5J5&x-craft-preview=754035adc6112f1c088086ae6ad4922de2554fc8837c7dd08c770c5db8cd0abaejedxvcatq&ref=richardjnewman.com)**,** by Hrag Vartanian and Valentina Di Liscia: > *A wave of anti-Palestinian repression has swept the Western art world in the aftermath of October 7th, 2023\. From Amsterdam to San Francisco, artists who have criticized Israel’s brutal war on Gaza have seen their exhibitions canceled, their work deinstalled, and other opportunities rescinded.”* This article catalogues thirteen pieces of art that were, in the words of the authors, “either targeted by cultural entities or removed in protest” because of the artists’ stance regarding Israel and Palestine. I don’t have the rights to reproduce any of that art work in the “Four Things To See” section below, but reading the article reminded me of “[Sun City](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music%5Fin%5Fthe%5Fmovement%5Fagainst%5Fapartheid?ref=richardjnewman.com#Sun%5FCity%5Fand%5Faftermath),” a protest song from the anti-apartheid movement in the United States produced in the 1980s by [Artists United Against Apartheid](https://africanactivist.msu.edu/organization/210-813-12/?ref=richardjnewman.com). I’ve included a YouTube video in the “Four Things To Listen To” section. --- ## Four Things To See These images are all from the [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/free-to-use/?ref=richardjnewman.com) and are all in the public domain. ### Corporal Joseph Pierce [Corporal Joseph Pierce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph%5FPierce%5F%28soldier%29?ref=richardjnewman.com) of Co. F, 14th Connecticut Infantry Regiment achieved the highest rank for a Chinese American soldier during the Civil War. (Photo by William Hunt, 1862-1865) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f8bb6aeec-9e17-4773-b427-40e2190c66eb_636x1024-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Daughter of a Mexican Field Worker Photograph by [Dorothea Lange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea%5FLange?ref=richardjnewman.com), May 1937 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2ff70a7e1d-dd8f-465d-82ce-30847356e4e3_1024x819-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### [Sequoyah](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sequoyah?ref=richardjnewman.com), holding the syllabary he created for writing the Cherokee language Portriat print by John T. Bowen, 1838 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f24501980-2e6a-4bf5-bfec-eb8d8de7436f_731x1024-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Photograph of a portrait of Susie King Taylor [Susie King Taylor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susie%5FKing%5FTaylor?ref=richardjnewman.com) served more than three years as nurse with the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops Infantry Regiment during the American Civil War, although officially enrolled as a laundress. She also taught children and adults to read while serving with the regiment. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f41c1a91c-2ab5-42d7-8be6-c2efb4be22e9_669x1024-jpeg.jpg) --- ## Four Things To Listen To ### **Sun City - Artists United Against Apartheid** This is from [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music%5Fin%5Fthe%5Fmovement%5Fagainst%5Fapartheid?ref=richardjnewman.com#Sun%5FCity%5Fand%5Faftermath): [Steven van Zandt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven%5Fvan%5FZandt?ref=richardjnewman.com), upset by the fact that artists from Europe and North America were willing to perform in [Sun City](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun%5FCity,%5FNorth%5FWest?ref=richardjnewman.com), a whites-only luxury resort in the “homeland” of [Bophutatswana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bophutatswana?ref=richardjnewman.com), persuaded artists including Bono, [Bruce Springsteen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce%5FSpringsteen?ref=richardjnewman.com), and [Miles Davis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles%5FDavis?ref=richardjnewman.com), to come together to record the single “Sun City,” which was released in 1985. The single achieved its aim of stigmatizing the resort. The album was described as the “most political of all of the charity rock albums of the 1980s.” “Sun City” was explicitly critical of the [foreign policy of U.S. President Ronald Reagan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign%5Fpolicy%5Fof%5FRonald%5FReagan?ref=richardjnewman.com), stating that he had failed to take firm action against apartheid. As a result, only about half of American radio stations played “Sun City.” Meanwhile, “Sun City” was a major success in countries where there was little or no radio station resistance to the record or its messages, reaching [No. 4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent%5FMusic%5FReport?ref=richardjnewman.com) in Australia, [No. 10](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPM%5F%28magazine%29?ref=richardjnewman.com) in Canada and [No. 21](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK%5FSingles%5FChart?ref=richardjnewman.com) in the UK. **§§§** ### **The Puppet Who Dances BeBop - The Barbara Carroll Trio** **§§§** ### **Venus / Zohreh - Shiva Feshareki** **§§§** ### **Quando spiega l'insegn' al sommo padre - Paola Massarenghi** --- ## Four Things About Me When I switched from public school to yeshiva after seventh grade, I was one of the top students in my class. I don’t remember if I had the highest grades, but I am pretty sure I was in the top five percent, if not higher. As I recall, I did not want to switch schools, but someone—I don’t think I ever knew who—offered me a full scholarship based on how fully I embraced what I was learning about being Jewish in the after-school Talmud Torah I’d been attending and on my stated desire at the time to be orthodox when I grew up. (My family was not observant.) My mother and my grandparents thought it would be foolish to turn the offer down, though their reasoning had nothing to do with religion. They were convinced I would get a better education in the yeshiva than I would in public school. In some ways, they may have been right. The experience of “learning Torah” trained me in a kind of critical thinking that I don’t think would have been back then part of a high school public education, but an equally important lesson, one that I have carried with me ever since, is just how corrosive an overemphasis on getting good grades—which there meant getting straight A’s—could be. It wasn’t that I thought doing well was unimportant, but watching how unhappy my top-of-the-class classmates were as they stressed over whether or not they would ace their entire report card—to win their parents’ approval, to get into the college they wanted to go to, or some combination of both—helped me begin to understand that getting a good grade was not necessarily the same thing as truly learning something. That distinction remains to this day a central part of my pedagogy. **§§§** We graduated from the yeshiva with our high school diplomas in 11th grade. We could choose from three options for how to spend the following year. You could go to Israel to learn Torah in a yeshiva; you could attend a special program in which you learned Torah in the morning and took college classes in the afternoon; or you could go back to public school for 12th grade. I opted for the third choice, but I was completely unprepared for how I was received by the people who had been my classmates in sixth and seventh grade. Some of them, for example, would not talk to me until they found out that my class ranking was lower than theirs. One episode remains firmly fixed in my memory. A girl named Debbie, along with whom I had been one of the top two students in sixth grade, asked to see my schedule. Since I had already fulfilled all my graduation requirements, I had been enrolled in only one AP class, English, and the rest of my schedule was filled out with electives. Debbie—who, like all the students at the top of our class, was enrolled in all the AP classes that were available to her—tossed my schedule dismissively back onto my desk. “What did they teach you at that fancy, private school? To be lazy?” I don’t think she said two words to me for the entire rest of the year. **§§§** I started losing my hair when I was around fifteen years old, which meant that, by the time I reached 12th grade, I looked older, sometimes a lot older, than my classmates. This, coupled with the fact that I had come back to the school as a senior, led to one of the strangest rumors about me that I’ve ever heard. Spread mostly by people who had not known me before, the rumor stated that, along the lines of [*21 Jump Street*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21%5FJump%5FStreet?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* I was a narc, planted in the school to root out my classmates who were selling drugs. This, of course, was not true, though it was true that the neighborhood in which I lived, being on the border of Queens and Nassau County, was at the time one of, if not the primary conduit through which drugs traveled from New York City to Long Island. Ironically, in the months after graduation, an undercover narcotics squad conducted a huge sting operation just a few blocks away from where I lived. They arrested more than a few of the kids who were in my graduating class. **§§§** One of the most embarrassing moments of my senior year in public school took place in AP English. We were discussing “[To His Coy Mistress](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44688/to-his-coy-mistress?ref=richardjnewman.com),” by Andrew Marvell. Our teacher asked if anyone knew the biblical reference in the last couplet: > *Thus, though we cannot make our sun* > *Stand still, yet we will make him run.* I was the only one to raise my hand. I doubt I remembered the specific chapter and verse, Joshua 10:12–14, but I did know that the lines refer to the battle between the Israelites and the Amorites, in which God gave Joshua the power to tell the sun to stand still until the battle was done and the Israelites were victorious. After I gave my answer, Mr. Giglio put his book down and looked disapprovingly over the class. “That story was part of Sunday’s reading in Church. How is it that this boy who does not even go to Church knew Marvell’s allusion, while not one of the rest of you did?” --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* [Subscribe to It All Connects](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signup) ### Four By Four #33 (Chanukah Edition) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-33-chanukah-edition/ Last updated: 2025-01-06T12:32:55.000Z # Four Things To Read [*Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems by Gemma Gorga*](https://www.ipgbook.com/late-to-the-house-of-words-products-9781947817340.php?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* translated by Sharon Dolin: > *A reader will note a consistent interplay in \[Gorga’s\] work between the literal and the figurative, where everything is and is not itself. Thus, the “murky color” of the pomegranate’s stain on “our fingers” becomes the “open color of memory.” In her poem “Amusement Park,” the poet has a date with sadness, and while she conjures up the image of a ride on a Ferris wheel, she soon transforms it into an existential state: “How long have I been spinning round on this Ferris wheel,/now close to the world, now farther away?”* That’s from Dolin’s introduction, and it captures what was, for me, the most salient aspect of reading this book: the element of play that kept me interested from start to finish. And not just interested. It’s been a long time since I read a book of poems about which I could say, simply, that I enjoyed it at the level of sensual pleasure–and I include in this pleasure that which accompanies the intellectual and emotional leaps the reader has to make between the literal and figurative. I know Dolin’s work from [*Burn and Dodge*](https://sharondolin.com/poetry-books--poems.html?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* where she shows herself to be a meticulous craftsperson, a facility you can see at work in the sparse and carefully shaped lines of this translation. That level of care and attention to detail is what allows the play—of language, of ideas, of metaphor—at work in the center of Gorga’s poetry to be, simply, seriously, deeply, the pleasure that it is. The poems definitely deserve more than one reading. This was one of my favorites: > **So Then She** > > *With flour and water she worked* > *his body. With flour and saliva* > *she conceived, leaned, learned* > *that with flour and both hands you reach* > *the secret pliability of matter.* > *With flour and lips she worked* > *the man down to the unbearable* > *elasticity of tenderness.* > *The slowly she tasted* > *his body, the bread that was his body,* > *bread that fit as well in her hands* > *as does light on earth.* **§§§** [What’s The Meaning of Hanukkah?](https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/language-literature-culture/yiddish-translation/whats-meaning-hanukkah?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Mendele Moykher-Sforim, translated by Ri J. Turner: > *“Anyway, the slap itself,” Shmuel went on, “wouldn’t even be worth mentioning if it hadn’t ultimately caused an upheaval that led me to discover new ideas. Basically, the slap I received from my father was not in vain. The whole discussion of Hanukkah, my father’s anger, the unexpected slap—it all remained vivid in my memory and drove me at quite a young age to chew on the question, ‘What’s the meaning of Hanukkah?’”* This story—the source does not give the date of original publication, only that it can be found in volume 9 of Moykher-Sforim’s collected works—devolves upon the kind of question that would lead many teachers to characterize the asker as a smart-ass: “The story about the single jar of oil that should have lasted only one day but lit the sanctuary for eight didn’t make \[any\] sense. If that’s how it happened, then the miracle itself only lasted for seven days—so why introduce an eight-day holiday?” That question leads the narrator to open “an extra-canonical book—a book of Jewish history,” and it’s there that his “eyes were opened and \[he\] found an answer” to the question which gives the story its title. I don’t want to say more, because I think part of the story’s genius is that the narrator does not articulate this answer himself. Rather, Moykher-Sforim leaves it up to the reader to figure out what the narrator means. The only caveat I will add is that the story does assume a knowledge of Jewish culture, nothing that isn’t easy enough to look up, though I think it’s possible to understand the story without doing so. Much of the story’s humor is embedded in that cultural knowledge. **§§§** [The True Glory of the Maccabean Revolt: What Liberty was Fought For?](https://www.commentary.org/articles/theodor-gaster/the-true-glory-of-the-maccabean-revoltwhat-liberty-was-fought-for/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Theodor Gaster: > *Thus, the \[Maccabean Revolt\] had two objectives. First, it was designed to safeguard the actual identity of the Jews… Second, the resistance was designed to safeguard the constitutional status quo. In this, Mattathias and his followers were championing a cause which, transcending the particular interests of the Jews, extended also to all the national groups within the empire.* Years ago, at a gathering of my wife’s family that happened around Chanukah, a woman who was not Jewish apologized to me for not wishing me a happy holiday because she refused to celebrate an imperialist, nationalist holiday. She did not need to tell me, because I already knew her well enough, that this “apology” emerged from her anti-Zionist critique of the State of Israel and her corresponding support for Palestinian liberation. I did not bother to argue with her for two reasons. First, because I knew that pointing out the ahistorical nature of her position would do no good and, second, because it would be pointless to deny that Jews often do, very publicly, frame the existence of the State of Israel as being precisely the kind of thing that the Maccabees fought for. I have neither heard or read anyone making that kind of argument these days, which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, but I take it as a hopeful sign nonetheless, especially given the ongoing devastation Israel is unapologetically wreaking on the Palestinians. Still, I was glad to come upon this article, from the December 1952 issue of [*Commentary*](https://www.commentary.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*.* Especially towards the end I found much to disagree with (in no small measure because the world is very different seventy plus years after it was published), but Gaster does two things that I think are especially valuable for today. First, as I allude to in the quoted portion above, he points out that the oppressive policies under which the Jews suffered were targeted not only at Jews, but at all religious groups that were not part of Antiochus’ state church, formed in pursuit of (an enforced) political unity that had not previously existed and that he hoped would present “a united front against the ambitions of Rome on the one hand and of the rival power of the Ptolemies on the other…” Second, Gaster reminds us that the Maccabees were neither a majority movement within the Jewish community nor what we would call progressive, or even liberal, in their ambitions. In fact, given the ways in which they forced other Jews to practice as they did, the Maccabees had a lot in common with what the religious extremists of today say they want. It’s important, in other words, not to romanticize the Maccabees by turning them into the kind of liberators we would want them to be; and it is equally important to remember that, while they were unquestionably fighting to free the Jews from Antiochus’ oppression, they also understood, at least according to Gaster’s analysis, that their freedom to practice Judaism on their own terms was inseparable from the freedom of other religious communities to practice their faiths in the same way. **§§§** [Rest in Power: A Running List of the Preventable Deaths Caused by Abortion Bans](https://msmagazine.com/2024/11/04/women-die-abortion-ban-elections-vote/?omhide=true&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fsource=everyaction&emci=138a629f-4ebe-ef11-88ce-0022482a93af&emdi=17e0cddb-a3bf-ef11-88ce-0022482a93af&ceid=1174915), Roxanne Szal: > *These women should be alive today…Ms. is marking \[their\] stories. This article will be updated to mark every single name made public.* I don’t think I need to write much more than that quote. It is important to read through this unconscionably-too-long list and to remember as you do so that, as Szal puts it, “\[T\]hese are likely not the only cases, as there has been a significant increase in maternal mortality rates in states that implement strict abortion bans.”Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See All these images are posted on X by [Jewish Art](https://x.com/AlbertBaram?ref=richardjnewman.com): ### Hannukiah, by Randy Suzker [![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fd082c368-cd12-4d1c-b6a5-75da378e8a75_1088x1360-png.jpg)](https://x.com/albertbaram/status/1866784444285174263?s=12&t=UnvMGpEYC-hUGr0es%5F2XKw&ref=richardjnewman.com) **§§§** ## Hanukkah, by Karin Foreman [![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f250e3097-e7e5-4e81-b2ae-0b0cea92f08f_1088x856-png.jpg)](https://x.com/albertbaram/status/1866783384644751818?s=12&t=UnvMGpEYC-hUGr0es%5F2XKw&ref=richardjnewman.com) **§§§** ### Rabbi Hillel, by Arthur Szyk Note the difference between the way Hillel states “The Golden Rule,” in the negative (Do not unto your neighbor), and the positive statement that is more commonly quoted (Do unto your neighbor). [![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f8952a8c2-17e0-48d8-a29d-deb6dbba3d19_1088x1692-png.jpg)](https://x.com/albertbaram/status/1864608973543838068?s=12&t=UnvMGpEYC-hUGr0es%5F2XKw&ref=richardjnewman.com) **§§§** ### Kletzmer #1, by Itzchak Fleisheker (IZIK) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fec078f8e-44e8-4d39-91a3-98e2e937fc3b_1088x1567-png.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ### **Sevivon Sov, Sov, Sov - Kenny Ellis** **§§§** ### **Applesauce vs. Sour Cream - The Leevees** **§§§** ### **Ocho kandelikas - Pink Martini ft. China Forbes, Ari Shapiro, Storm Large and Cantor Ida Rae Cahana** **§§§** ### **Hanukkah Dance - Woody Guthrie** --- # Four Things About Me My father and I did not speak for about ten years, from the time I was twenty-one or twenty-two until I was in my early thirties. Much had changed in my life during that time–I’d gotten married, for one–and so there was a lot about me that my father didn’t know. One of the ways I tried to catch him up on the person I’d become, as it were, was to give him a sheaf of poems that I’d written during those years. I had no idea how he would receive them or what he would think of my being a poet—he worked on Wall Street and was not much for the arts—but the conversation we ended up having surprised me in a way I could never have anticipated. We were walking somewhere in Manhattan, when he turned to me and said—and I promise you this is how my father really talked—“I read your poems. I also gave them to Alline \[his wife\] to read, since, you know, I’m not much of a reader. She and I talked about it, and I have to ask you a question. It’s kind of a joke, but it’s also not, if you know what I mean. So here’s the question, and I guess I’ll understand if you don’t want to answer at all, but remember, I am kind of joking when I ask this, even though I’m also being very serious. There’s a line in one of the poems you wrote when you were teaching in Korea, something about ‘the bodies I have buried in my imagination.’ Did you actually kill someone when you were teaching there?” The poem itself is long gone, and I remember nothing else about it except that line, so I can’t tell you whose bodies they were, if they were identified at all, or what happened to them. All I can say, since I know I did not commit murder while living in Seoul, is that they were, and should have been clearly recognizable as, a metaphor. My father, however, was not interested in talking about why or how he had misread my poem. All he wanted to know was whether I’d left a pile of bodies back in Korea when I came back to the United States. So I reassured him that I hadn’t, and that was the first of only two times that we ever discussed my work as a writer. **§§§** The second time my father and I talked about my writing, was in the Union Square Barnes & Noble. We were standing in the children’s section, watching my son lead my wife around to the different bookshelves. He loved bookstores, my son, so much so that when we took him to the ones closer to our home, we were often the last customers in the store. Anyway, I needed to use the bathroom, which was on the same floor as the poetry section, so when I was finished, I went to spend a few minutes checking the shelves, just to see if there was anything interesting. I was happily surprised to see a copy of [*Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust*](https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810115569/beyond-lament/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* an anthology in which some of my poems had been published. I took the book upstairs to show my father, thinking he’d get a kick out of seeing my name in a book being sold in an actual bookstore. I handed the book to him, opened to the page where he could see my name. He smiled, made a show reading one of the poems—in reality I could see that he’d scanned the page and nothing more—and said, “Wow, Rich, that’s really deep.” Then my father did something that I still don’t fully comprehend. He closed the book, glanced left, then right, and then left again. Leaning towards me as he held open the left side of his London Fog raincoat, he gestured with his eyes towards the inside pocket, saying sotto voce, “You know, Richie, if I were a younger man…” and he inclined his head ever so slightly to the left, making it clear, if I hadn’t gotten it before, that the impulse to steal the book that he was choosing not to act on was a sign of respect for the fact that my work had been published within it. That was the last time I ever spoke with my father about my poetry. **§§§** It’s one thing to know that sexist erasure exists, to read about it, learn about its mechanisms, and so on. It’s quite another thing to watch as it happens before your eyes. Built in the 1920s, the co-op where I live in New York City is a historical landmark that went into receivership in the 1930s, during the Depression, and remained a rental property until the 1970s, when a group of tenants organized themselves to transform the place once again into a co-op. My grandmother was central to that effort. Not only was she involved in the whole process of incorporation; she was also the co-op’s first manager and the first president of the board. She was also intimately involved in the Garden Committee from its inception. The co-op recently celebrated its 100th year anniversary with a big celebration that included not only a party for shareholders, but, given our buildings’ historical significance, proclamations from local politicians. In the run-up to the celebration, one of the organizers got in touch with me to ask if I had any pictures of the grounds from my grandmother’s time. I did not. Based on that question, though, I assumed that the organizers—some of whom were old enough to know better than I how deeply involved my grandmother had been—were of course going to include her in whatever programming they had planned. I was wrong. On the day of the celebration, as I walked around, I met more than a few people who remembered my grandmother and all the work she did. Some of them had known me when I was a little boy. When it came time for the speeches, however, and for the proclamations, not one person mentioned my grandmother’s name among the list of men who were being remembered, nor did any of the people who knew her back then seem to notice, until I mentioned it to one of them. She was appropriately surprised and embarrassed by the omission, and she said she was going to rectify the situation. I have not heard from her about it, though, and so I am assuming nothing was done. What is clear to me, though, is that, had my grandmother, the only woman among the men who’d been honored, also been a man, she would not have been left out in the first place. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-7/ Last updated: 2024-12-20T14:39:59.000Z > We must not fear repetition in poetry, > because sweet speech is pleasant in the repetition. *—Nasir Khusraw, translated by Alice C. Hunsberger* ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-6/ Last updated: 2024-12-15T02:27:10.000Z > "It is \[an\] irony of oppression that the solution chosen to eliminate an enemy often guarantees that enemy's enduring fame. \[N\]o one knows the names of \[Nasir Khusraw's\] oppressors, but his poems...speak across centuries...to anyone who has \[known\] war, oppression or terror." —Alice Hunberger, [*Nasir Khusraw: The Ruby of Badakhshan*](https://www.iis.ac.uk/publications-listing/2000/nasir-khusraw-the-ruby-of-badakhshan/?ref=richardjnewman.com) ### Four By Four #32 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-32/ Last updated: 2025-01-06T12:33:59.000Z # Four Things To Read [*Summer People*](https://camcatbooks.com/Books/S/Summer-People?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Sara Hosey: This YA mystery tells the story of how Christmas Miller, a seventeen-year-old with ADHD, helps to save her upstate New York community, and at least potentially to begin to save the increasingly polluted lake at its center. A couple of things stood out for me. The tale is *very* well plotted, especially the way it holds until almost the very end the tension between Christmas and her best friend Lexi—the result of a falling out near the beginning of the novel—by keeping that tension almost wholly within the ADHD-shaped processing that goes on in Christmas’ mind. Indeed, overall, one of the more moving aspects of the way Hosey has crafted the narrative is the way she allows the plot to unfold through Christmas’ eyes so that the reader’s understanding of what is going on is shaped by the character’s ADHD—or at least that was my reading experience and one of the things that kept me turning the pages. It’s also impressive how many really important issues Hosey weaves seamlessly into the narrative, including climate change, homophobia, drug and alcohol addiction, the gentrification of upstate New York (though this is perhaps the most subtle), and how we view people with learning disabilities like ADHD. If you’re an adult reader, don’t let the YA label put you off. The story is a good one on its own terms, but if you want to be reminded what it was like to be a teenager, this is worth reading; and it’s definitely a book worth giving to a teen, especially one with ADHD, who I am sure would appreciate reading a book in which someone like them turns out to be the hero. **§§§** [Joan of Arc: A symbol of fascism or feminism?](https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/64733/1/joan-of-arc-symbol-of-fascism-or-feminism-chappell-roan-lorde-fiona-apple?utm%5Fsource=sfmc&utm%5Fmedium=nypr-email&utm%5Fcampaign=Newsletter+-+Early+Addition+-+20240927&utm%5Fterm=or&utm%5Fid=378562&sfmc%5Fid=99545566&utm%5Fcontent=2024927&nypr%5Fmember=Unknown), by Halima Jibril: > *“Despite her short time on earth, Joan continues to have a long and complex afterlife. She has been everything: a proto-feminist, a rebellious teenager, a genderqueer martyr, a pious young woman, and, alarmingly, a symbol of far-right nationalism. Her legacy is complex and multifaceted, often viewed through a narrow lens – either feminist or fascist.”* I haven’t thought seriously about Joan of Arc and what she stood/stands for in decades, not since I read, of all things, Andrea Dworkin’s [*Intercourse*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/intercourse-andrea-dworkin/12383022?ean=9780465017522&ref=richardjnewman.com) back in the late 1980s. In chapter 6, titled “Virginity,” Dworkin writes about Joan of Arc’s decision to remain a virgin as > *a self-conscious and militant repudiation of the common lot of the female with its intrinsic low status…Her virginity was an essential element of her virility, her autonomy, her rebellious and intransigent self-definition. Virginity was freedom from the real meaning of being female; it was not just another style of being female.* Dworkin’s focus in that chapter is a kind of cultural history of the idea of female virginity, but the use she makes of Joan of Arc as an icon of feminist rebellion against the patriarchy fits perfectly into the history Jibril traces in her article. The part of the article that was new to me is how the right wing in France has used Joan of Arc as a symbol of its fascist agenda. **§§§** [Tentative Thoughts On The Jewish Claim To A "Religious Abortion”](https://reason.com/volokh/2022/06/20/tentative-thoughts-on-the-jewish-claim-to-a-religious-abortion/?ref=richardjnewman.com), Josh Blackman: > *For Christians, perhaps, quantifying the consequences of committing a sin is easier. For Jews, however, the issue is far more complicated. Judaism is not a centralized religion. There is no Jewish equivalent of a Pope. We often speak of “Orthodox,” “Conservative,” and “Reform” Jews, but even within these categories, there is no official or standardized set of teachings. Every Congregation, indeed, every Rabbi, may follow the teachings in different fashions. Moreover, every Jew can look to faith in his own fashion. And there is no obligation to be consistent. A Jew could hold one opinion in the morning, and then change his mind over lunch, and go back to the original position after dinner. The old saw, Two Jews, Three Opinions, is apt.* This article is from 2022\. It was written in response to a challenge brought by Congregation L’Dor Va-Dor, a synagogue in Palm Beach County, Florida, against the constitutionality of what were then the state’s new abortion restrictions. Basically, the congregation’s argument centered on the fact that Judaism does not prohibit abortion in the same way that Christianity does and that, since there are situations in which Judaism mandates abortion, or at least makes it religiously available to women in ways that Christianity does not, a law that makes abortion illegal would violate Jewish women’s religious freedom. (Two books that are worth consulting if you’re interested in the differences between Jewish and Christian positions on abortion are [*Marital Relations, Birth Control, and Abortion in Jewish Law*](https://www.amazon.com/Marital-Relations-Control-Abortion-Jewish/dp/0805204385?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by David M. Feldman and [*Women and Jewish Law*](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/13337/women-and-jewish-law-by-rachel-biale/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Rachel Biale. The differences are significant and worth knowing.) Independently of whether or not the synagogue’s claim has any legal merit, though, what I find deeply disturbing about this article is how blithely dismissive Blackman is, in the paragraph I’ve quoted above, of Judaism and the religious culture intrinsic to it and the way he tries later on in the article—intentionally or not—to define Orthodox Judaism as somehow more authentic than any other form of Jewish religious practice. It is part of a troubling trend I have seen elsewhere in which the Orthodox are defined—and sometimes define themselves—as the “true” Jews, basically stripping, or trying to strip, Jewish identity from the rest of us. I am sure Blackman would say this is not what he was trying to do, but his reasoning throughout the article, at least as I read it, is implicitly Christological, by which I mean it takes Christianity as the normative framework to apply to all religious practices. Judaism, simply put, does not, not in any of its sects, fit that framing. **§§§** [It’s Time to Talk About Pornography, Scholars Say](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/science/pornography-adolescents-teenagers.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.hE4.4DfS.x%5F5RT0Gl3P11&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), Matt Richtel: > *In February, Dr. \[Beáta\] Böthe was an author of a paper that found that some types of pornography could affect the sexual well-being of viewers.* [*The study*](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38319285/?ref=richardjnewman.com#:~:text=Results%20of%20path%20analysis%20indicated,associated%20with%20lower%20sexual%20satisfaction)*, a survey of 827 young adults, found that people who watched passionate or romantic pornography reported higher sexual satisfaction in their relationships, whereas watching “power, control and rough-sex pornography was associated with lower sexual satisfaction.” (The study also noted that the passionate, romantic and multipartner material was more widely viewed than the harder-core categories.)* While it is long past time that we should be talking openly about what the scholars Richtel talked to call “porn literacy,” what I find most interesting, and frustrating, about this article is the challenge of creating any kind of coherent picture from the very different results of the various studies that Richtel cites. So, for example, in addition to the one I quoted above, there is the 2021 [study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34811657/?ref=richardjnewman.com) of 630 Dutch, which found that “adolescents who watched more pornography engaged in more advanced sexual behaviors at a younger age” but could not determine “whether more sexually advanced adolescents were drawn to pornography or whether the pornography drove their behavior.” Then there is the fact that, according to the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention](https://www.cdc.gov/yrbs/results/index.html?ref=richardjnewman.com), “as pornography use has grown among American adolescents, young people are waiting longer on average to experiment with actual sex.” Then, when you consider that, according to a [2023 survey](https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/teens-and-pornography?ref=richardjnewman.com) of adolescents by Common Sense Media, Americans first see online porn when they are 12 and that 73% of those 17 and under have seen it, and that more than half of those who watch porn “reported seeing violence, including rape, choking or someone in pain,” how do you not wonder how to make sense of what the studies tell us. One [paper](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36650009/?ref=richardjnewman.com) cited by Richtel suggests getting primary care providers involved in “assessing \[pornography\] use and providing sexual health education.” I understand the impulse, but I am very leery of what the unintended consequences could be of medicalizing pornography use in that way. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See These images, all in the public domain, are from the [Metropolitan Museum of Art](https://www.metmuseum.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com). ### A Corset from Early 20th Century France, Labeled “Mmes Nyesta & Dupré, 2 rue Volnay, Paris” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f72193594-bb2f-4744-a26c-236f2d48ec47_1350x2579-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ## Two Women Friends Reclining, Gustav Klimt, 1905–06 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f5e79a03a-a350-48a3-a44e-b792183624fe_3780x2422-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Rape II, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Date: 1911 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f89989e68-1896-490b-af16-8879d5c14612_2658x3699-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Two Studies of a Reclining Man, Wilhelm Lehmbruck , ca. 1903 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f7a7864f9-f165-45fa-bec9-d3d3e8da9cc2_3902x2715-jpeg.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ### **311 - Mountain Top** **§§§** ### **Kristin Scott Benson - Foggy Mountain Rock** **§§§** ### **The Shvesters - Zug Es Mir Nokh A Mol** “Zog es mir nokh amol,” with lyrics by Jacob Jacobs, is a song from Ellstein and Israel Rosenberg’s operetta Der berditchever khosn (The Bridegroom from Berditchev). You can find a synopsis of the show [here](https://www.milkenarchive.org/music/volumes/view/great-songs-of-the-american-yiddish-stage/work/zog-es-mir-nokh-amol/?ref=richardjnewman.com). It’s an interesting look in to a Jewish way of life that doesn’t really exist anymore, at least not in the mainstream. I’ve put a translation of the lyrics below the video. If I would only be fit to find favor in your eyes, the whole world would already be mine. I would sing “Hatikvah” \[Become a Zionist\] and would even go to the mikvah \[be religious\], just so you will be together with me. I would cut a deal to become a slave to your father, like Jacob was to Laban. I would suffer all kinds of terror and would even milk the cows, so long as I would always be able to see you. Tell me again, oh, tell me again, for I’d like to hear those beautiful words from you. Tell it to me again, oh, tell it to me again, for your words bring me joy and give me constant encouragement. My heart is overflowing with such great joy of having lived to hear such words from you. Tell it to me again, oh, tell me again. Oh, my heart, my dear, Tell it to me again. —translated by Eliyahu Mishulovin & Adam J. Levitin **§§§** ### **Jorge Ben Jor, Take It Easy My Brother Charles** --- # Four Things About Me I wrote about the first time I got high back in [Four By Four #12](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-12/). I was seventeen, which was late among my peers, and I asked my friend Joey to get some pot for us. We smoked it in my bedroom one afternoon when no one else was home. I did not feel a thing, which Joey told me was normal, saying that if I wanted to try again, I should just let him know. I don’t remember when or where the second time was, but I do know that, again, it was just Joey and me and that, this time, I did get high. I didn’t like it or dislike it, but the feeling was interesting, and I do remember thinking that it would be nice not to be the one always turning down the joints that got passed around when my friends hung out. One day, two of the girls who lived in our development—one was named Kim; I don’t remember who the other one was—asked me if I wanted to smoke with them. I said yes, but instead of the mildly pleasurable experience I’d come to expect, what I went through was scary enough that it put me off getting high pretty much for good. I don’t remember much in detail, but at some point after we’d finished the joint the girls and I shared, I began to believe, truly, that my heart was slowing down and that if I wasn’t careful—if, for example, I fell asleep—it would stop beating and I would die. I remember going home, closing my door, and pacing the length of my room, rubbing my arms and legs to keep the circulation going. I was terrified. I have no memory of what happened between the moments of my pacing and whenever the high wore off, but when I saw Kim the next day and told her about my experience, she informed me that she and her friend had “dusted” the pot, meaning that they’d laced it with [angel dust](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phencyclidine?ref=richardjnewman.com). That was my introduction to PCP (the abbreviation for phenylcyclohexyl piperidine, which is angel dust’s chemical name), a drug that at least one of my high school classmates would OD on the year of our graduation. I stopped smoking pot after that, with one or two exceptions. Each of those times, though, I felt like I was having flashbacks, and so I stopped smoking entirely. **§§§** When I was in eighth and ninth grades, my friend Amy and I would pass notes in math class, but we didn’t write those notes on slips of paper. We actually had a notebook we passed back and forth between us. The first notebook we used had a green cover and so we called it our “little green notebook.” I don’t remember who that first one belonged to, but I’m pretty sure that I bought the second one because I remember being in a store somewhere trying to find one the same shade of green as the first. I don’t remember if we ever got caught, but I do remember Amy loving the music of Chicago, which I came to love too, especially, once I started playing bass baritone bugle in my hometown drum and bugle corps. Amy and I connected for a while on Facebook, where I was surprised to learn that she had not only been a Dead Head at some point after high school, but that she had also chosen to live an orthodox life in Israel. She moved there, she told me, though I have no idea how long ago, because of the unrepentant and persistent antisemitism she, and particularly her children, experienced where she and her family were living. [I could identify with that feeling](https://www.richardjnewman.com/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are/), but I was surprised that she’d become orthodox. I remember her being quite a rebel when we were kids. **§§§** When I was in college I worked part-time as an advisor for a local Jewish center’s youth group. I was maybe twenty years old and just beginning to question the narrative I’d been taught about Israel and the Palestine. I don’t remember when or why, but at some point while I was still working there, the director of the youth group and I were having a discussion about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. I was making a point that had something to do with how Israel exploited Palestinian labor. I didn’t put it in those terms, of course—I wouldn’t have known those terms back then—but I know I said something about the low wages the Palestinians were forced to accept. In any event, what has stuck in my mind all these years is the youth director’s response. “I’ll say this to you here because it’s an internal conversation. You’re right that it’s not fair”—I am paraphrasing, of course—“but if that’s what Israel needs to do to build itself up, then that’s what we need to do.” It was the first time I’d heard anyone, much less a Jewish adult, admit that Israel was anything other than morally correct in its treatment of the Palestinians, but what was shocking to me was how easily he endorsed that behavior as a necessary evil we as Jews should be willing to live with. In some ways, the evolution of my views on Israel and Palestine began with this conversation. **§§§** When my son was little, my wife and I made the conscious decision that he should learn to speak Persian, which is my wife’s native language, especially so that he would be able to communicate with his grandparents and other relatives who did not speak English. At the time, I learned enough Persian that we could speak only, or at least primarily, Persian with our son, though once he got to be about four years old, not only was my Persian insufficient for our communication needs. He started not to accept Persian from me at all. Two things have stuck with me from that time. First, the number of people who worried that my son would grow up to speak English with an accent because he spoke Persian first. They were well-intended of course—or at least they thought they were—but the response is actually an irrational one, borne more of the fear that someone like my son would be marked by his “flawed” speech as not fully American, and at least implicitly as not white, than of any real knowledge of how child language acquisition works. The second thing that has stuck with me is the number of people, all of them non-Jews, who wanted to know why I did not insist that he also learn Hebrew, the assumption being that, because I am Jewish, Hebrew is somehow my language in the same way that Persian is my wife’s. Unpacking the assumptions knotted into that question is probably an essay unto itself, but they are the same assumptions, I think, that underlie the line some people have used to defend themselves against charges of antisemitism: “I can’t be antisemitic; I support Israel.” --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-5/ Last updated: 2024-12-09T19:51:46.000Z _No content available._ ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-4/ Last updated: 2024-12-09T19:45:15.000Z *from* “Reading Matsuo Bashō,” by Gemma Gorga (translated by Sharon Dolin): > I wonder: how many syllables must I remove > to make a perfect haiku from my life? ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-3/ Last updated: 2024-12-06T21:55:03.000Z From “Joyeux Noël” by Gemma Gorga (translated by Sharon Dolin): > While you try ordering yourself in the midst of the disorder > of my hands, the afternoon melts like a clump of snow. ### Four By Four #31 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-31/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:11:28.000Z # Four Things To Read [*All The Ways We Lied*](https://turnerpublishing.com/collections/books-new-releases/products/all-the-ways-we-lied?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Aida Zilelian: The last sentence of this novel is “Because after all, there was freedom in being loved.” When I read those words, I felt keenly how much I enjoyed and was moved by the winding path along which the novel earns that sentiment. The story revolves around a family that is, in many ways, on the verge of falling apart. The narrative traces the path by which they manage to stay connected to and committed to and loving of each other by individuating, finding out who they are as people not wholly defined by their (sometimes comically rendered) deeply dysfunctional family dynamic. If you’ve ever had to figure out how to love someone who seems hell bent on making it difficult to love them—and especially if you have any experience, vicarious or otherwise, with how that dynamic can play out in an immigrant family—you will both enjoy and identify with the four women, a mother and three sisters, who are the main characters of this book. **§§§** [*The Room Where I Was Born*](https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/2773.htm?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Brian Teare: When CavanKerry Press published my first book, [*The Silence of Men*](https://www.cavankerrypress.org/product/the-silence-of-men/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* in 2006, I thought it was also the first book of poems explicitly to take on the experience of being a male survivor of childhood sexual violence. I was wrong. Brian Teare’s *The Room Where I was Born,* which I just finished and which won the 2003 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, preceded mine by, obviously, three years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we dealt with the subject matter in very different ways. Teare is concerned in his book with making poems that give form and meaning to the ways in which childhood sexual violence disrupts, corrupts, warps, and otherwise undoes the survivor’s sense of reality. Those poems are about naming that experience as much as they are about naming the experience of violation itself. *The Room Where I Was Born* also explores Teare’s coming to terms with being gay in the context of the sexual violation he experienced and the homophobia of both the place where he grew up and our culture at large. I am glad to have read this book, which was recommended to me by Rob Arnold, the executive director of Poets House. **§§§** [The Spectre of Patriarchy](https://www.corrispondenzaromana.it/international-news/the-spectre-of-the-patriarchy/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Roberto de Mattei: > *At this point, Prof Ricolfi poses an obvious question: how can one speak of a patriarchal society when the figure of the father has disappeared not only from the family but from society more generally?* Mattei wrote this piece in response to an editorial in the Italian newspaper *I’ll Messaggero,* by Professor Luca Ricolfi, a sociologist, who believes that “in Western societies the distinctive traits of patriarchal societies have almost entirely disappeared.” Ricolfi goes on to argue that violence against women is the “result…of the defeat of patriarchy.” It’s an important argument to understand, if only because I predict we are going to hear it more and more frequently here in the States in the months and years to come. **§§§** [Facing 8 Years in Prison, a Director Flees Iran](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/22/magazine/mohammad-rasoulof-iran-sacred-fig.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.cU4.vmWS.qYZKsgs2DtcG&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Amir Ahmadi Arian: > *“*[*\[The Seed of The\] Sacred Fig*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FSeed%5Fof%5Fthe%5FSacred%5FFig?ref=richardjnewman.com)*” offers \[a\] provocative exploration of…the myriad injustices Iranian women have to endure in their daily lives. “In my early movies, women were far from the center,” Rasoulof says. “At one point I looked back and noticed that I had not created a single round, compelling female character. I knew very little about women’s lives, and I decided to rectify that.”* This article, which tells the story of Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s career and his decision to escape from Iran, is also notable for its brief history of Iranian cinema since the Islamic Revolution in 1979\. It’s worth reading for both. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See All images are from the New York Public Library’s Collection of[ Ellis Island Photographs](https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/photographs-of-ellis-island-1902-1913?ref=richardjnewman.com#/?tab=about) taken between 1902 and 1913 and are in the public domain. ### A group of immigrants, most wearing fezzes, surrounding a large vessel which is decorated with the star and crescent symbol of the Moslem religion and the Ottoman Turks ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f5cd93bdd-3c9e-40ac-bf5b-3d398588b223_1600x1158-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ## Group photograph captioned 'Hungarian Gypsies all of whom were deported' in The New York Times, Sunday Feb. 12, 1905 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fe1b91b89-ad1d-46ee-bf54-2726ee33103c_3100x2320-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Immigrants undergoing medical examination ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f95133cb8-59ea-48b5-9510-5255f89cbd93_1600x1239-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### The pens at Ellis Island, Registry Room (or Great Hall). These people have passed the first mental inspection. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fa741b4e3-c81a-41f9-863d-de1d41644af3_1600x1191-jpeg.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ### **Charles Valentin Alkan - 25 Préludes, Op.31: No. 8, La chanson de la folle au bord de la mer** **§§§** ### **Egberto Gismonti - Maracatu** **§§§** ### **Fatoumata Diawara - Sonkolon** **§§§** ### **Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Push the Sky Away** --- # Four Things About Me The first time I remember hearing the word *period* used to refer to menstruation I was in fifth. That week, the girls had been show a [filmstrips](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filmstrip?ref=richardjnewman.com) about puberty. (The boys, because we were considered less mature than the girls, would not see it till the following year.) My friends and I were hanging out in the courtyard of the garden apartments where we lived, and one of the girls—I’m pretty sure it was Gina—started teasing us that boys “didn’t know what a period was.” I don’t remember anything about the rest of the conversation, except that Gina did eventually tell me—and I think she may have told only me—that it meant the monthly bleeding that began when a girl reached puberty. In my memory, this was not actually news to me, though I don’t remember why I knew about it. I had never before heard it called a period, though, and that seemed more strange to me than the biological fact itself. **§§§** Another encounter that I had with menstruation, probably around the same time, was at our neighborhood’s public pool. I have a clear memory of a Black girl in a yellow bathing suit walking with her mother away from the side of the deep end where I was swimming, while trying to cover with one hand the bright red stain that it was impossible to miss near her butt. Given how white and racist our neighborhood was, I find it hard to imagine that the girl and her mother were actually from the neighborhood—and, in fact, I am surprised that I have no memory of anyone saying anything to them. In my memory, though I have no idea how reliable this is, the girl is the daughter of my mother’s friend Vivian, who had come for a visit. What I remember most clearly, is feeling tremendous sympathy for how embarrassed the girl must have been as she and her mother walked to where their towels were so the girl could wrap one around her waist; and I remember as well feeling strongly how different my own body was from hers and how incomprehensible her experience seemed to me. **§§§** I fell in love in my twenties with a woman I was in a relationship with for around seven years. We met at the summer camp where we were both counselors and we very quickly became good friends. She was not-quite-yet-engaged to the man she thought she was going to marry; but she was, she explained, also seeing another guy who worked at camp, because she wanted to make sure that the first guy really was the one she wanted to marry. We were both very clear as our friendship developed that we did not want to turn that triangle into a square. Still, the more we talked, the closer we became, and she and I eventually ended up together. That didn’t happen at camp, though. We fell in love after engaging in what would have been a perfectly conventional Victorian courtship. After camp was over—and this went on for a couple of year, if I remember correctly—we wrote long letters in which we revealed ourselves in ways we would not have been able, and likely would have chosen not, to do in person. That kind of letter writing, not just between lovers, but between friends as well, was still common during my lifetime. I miss it. Email just doesn’t cut it. **§§§** I wrote in [Four by Four #11](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-11/) about Rabbi Wehl, the gemara rebbe in whose class I first learned the lesson of “loving the questions.” When it came to the question of how committed his students were to living his version of an authentic Jewish life, however, Reb Wehl could be a real son-of-a-bitch. At least once a week during the fall—or at least it was that frequent in my memory—he would go on a rant about how shameful it was (a [shonda](https://jel.jewish-languages.org/words/499?ref=richardjnewman.com)!) that our parents would spend twenty or thirty dollars on a turkey for Thanksgiving, but they wouldn’t spare a dime for a set of [Mishneh Torah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishneh%5FTorah?ref=richardjnewman.com), [Maimonides](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maimonides?ref=richardjnewman.com)’ attempt to write a comprehensive treatment of all of Jewish law, including those laws that only applied when the temple stood in Jerusalem. At some point that year—this was 10th grade—he found a bookseller willing to sell his students a five volume set for five dollars. He put so much pressure on us that there was no way not buy a set, which I was reluctant to do because my Hebrew was nowhere near good enough for me to be able to read the book on my own. So I convinced my mother to give me the money. Every once in a while I would try to read it and then give up. The books stayed on my shelf for a long time before I got rid of them. While I am sure I did not throw them in the garbage, I have no memory of what actually happened to them. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #30 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-30/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:16:56.000Z # Writing News My translation of “Ibn Abd al-Aziz Sacrifices A Jewel,” which is from [*Bustan*](https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/bustan-sadi?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by [Saadi of Shiraz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saadi%5FShirazi?ref=richardjnewman.com) was publised recently in [The Loch Raven Review](https://thelochravenreview.net/nine-persian-language-poets-mehdi-akhavan-sales-mahsati-ganjavi-siavash-kasrai-esmail-khoi-sheida-mohamadi-fereydun-moshiri-rumi-saadi-mushrifuddin-muslih-ibn-abdullah-shirazi-and-ahmad/?ref=richardjnewman.com#Saadi). (The link will take you to the section of the issue devoted to Persian literature, but you need to scroll down three poems to come to mine.) The poem speaks to our current moment in a variety of ways, I think, but most clearly in terms of the ever growing wealth disparities in this country and around the world. This is the poem’s final couplet: > Those who value virtue will never buy > with others’ pain and sorrow their own joy. --- # Four Things To Read [Bernie Would Have Won](https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/bernie-would-have-won?r=1gwysa&triedRedirect=true&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Krystal Ball: > *“The bottom line is this: Democrats are still trying to run a neoliberal campaign in a post-neoliberal era. In other words, 2016 Bernie was right.”* I’ve stopped reading and listening to most of the analyses purporting to explain the scale of Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump in the presidential election, not because I think they are wrong, but because they often seem more interested in whatever stake they have in their specific explanation then in whether or not the explanation itself moves forward the larger conversation that clearly needs to happen. (John Stewart did a good job of skewering this towards the end of this clip from [The Daily Show](https://youtu.be/TKBJoj4XyFc?si=MJ8Yx6g8mmXEglAH&ref=richardjnewman.com).) I know I’m being somewhat reductive here, because it’s not like sexism and racism and homophobia and the Biden administration’s enabling of Israel’s decimation of Gaza and its people, along with all of the other reasons being given for why not enough people who showed up at the polls chose not to vote for Harris, are irrelevant. Nonetheless, too few people are taking seriously the argument that Ball makes in this brief essay, which is that Harris lost because the Democrats rejected back in 2016 Bernie Sanders’ class-based analysis as a viable foundation for a presidential campaign. Ball makes a distinction between Trump’s populism and Sanders’ that I think is worth thinking carefully about. Because “right-wing populism embraces capital,” she wrote, “…it posed no real threat to the monied interests that are so influential within the party structures…The Republican donor class \[may not have been\] thrilled with \[Trump\] but they did not view him as an existential threat to their class interests.” Meanwhile “Bernie’s party takeover did pose an existential threat—both to \[Democratic\] party elites who he openly antagonized and to the party’s big money backers. The bottom line of the Wall Street financiers and corporate titans was explicitly threatened.” That’s why, Ball asserts, “His rise would simply not be allowed. Not in 2016 and not in 2020.” That difference mattered back then and its specter haunted this election as well. **§§§** [Why Do Some States Protect Women While Others Enable Abuse?](https://www.ggd.world/p/why-do-some-states-protect-women?publication%5Fid=1385611&post%5Fid=150615223&isFreemail=true&r=1gwysa&triedRedirect=true&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Alice Evans: > *“Sexual liberation did not guarantee female safety. Young women wanted to enjoy the night like their male peers, but it remained very much a man’s world. Rapes and murders were frequently reported across major cities. A woman who attracted attention only had herself to blame: “What was she wearing?”, “Why was she out so late?” Objectors were derided as killjoys. This tension between growing freedom and persistent danger revealed a crucial truth: women needed both the liberty to move freely and the protection of strong institutions willing to defend their rights.”* Evans goes on to demonstrate that a primary reason the violent crime rate in the United States decreased, at least prior to 2014, including violence against women, was the fact that state institutions took seriously the notion that violence against women was not acceptable. In the rest of the piece, she goes on to talk about the relationship in several places—Russia, India, China, South Korea, and Latin America—between the relative success of campaigns against gender-based violence and the stance taken by governmental institutions, not just towards women’s rights, but towards democratic society in general. She also makes the point that even in countries where progress has been real, it is not inevitable, something to pay careful attention these days as the right both intensifies its attacks on women’s rights and celebrates notions of manhood and masculinity that are part and parcel of women’s subjugation. **§§§** [Whispers](https://arablit.org/2024/11/06/a-whisper-from-sudanese-poet-kamal-elgizouli/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Kamal Elgizouli (translated by Adil Babakir): > *It’s not murder that I dread.* > *Not even a tragic end.* > *Nor this door being blown down outright,* > *or them storming in at midnight,* > *their naked guns in full sight.* > *No.* > *Not festering wounds, streams of blood,* > *or the wall dotted with fragments of my skull.* > *What I fear the most, I have to say,* > *is fear per se…* I needed this poem. It is easy to give in to fear these days. Donald Trump’s election, precisely because it was enabled by so many people voting against their own long-term self-interests, arguably embodies it. The lines that hit me strongest were there: “You are destined to die—and so are they./No one is exempt.” I’d prefer to let the poem speak for itself. I hope you will take a few minutes to read it. **§§§** [‘Verbally Assaulted’ After ‘Shut It Down’ Reversal, U. of Michigan Student-Government Reps Demand Leaders Resign](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/65mql67sy9rwwlppj7fjr/Verbally-Assaulted-After-Shut-It-Down-Reversal-U.-of-Michigan-Student-Government-Reps-Demand-Leaders-Resign.pdf?rlkey=bcfezyliojpwsq3kdev61izfh&dl=0&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Katherine Mangan: > *“The vote to restore funding, on October 8, had been a direct rebuke to the president of the Central Student Government, Alifa Chowdhury, who had carried through on an unusual campaign promise. She and the vice president, Elias Atkinson, were elected along with two dozen other representatives, on a platform called “Shut It Down.” It promised to deny funding to student groups unless and until regents agreed to their demands that they divest the university’s endowment from companies with economic ties to Israel. Similar demands have been at the center of nationwide campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war since last spring.”* This article, along with another one published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “[U. of Michigan Student Government Impeaches President, VP for ‘Inciting Violence’ Over Student-Fee Dispute](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ym0oxkuab29vb9irttr8e/U.-of-Michigan-Student-Government-Impeaches-President-VP-for-Inciting-Violence-Over-Student-Fee-Dispute.pdf?rlkey=4xoejrrdskm0jto6qziygwkzt&dl=0&ref=richardjnewman.com),” also by Katherine Mangan follow up on something I shared with you back in [Issue 26](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-26/): “[At Michigan, Activists Take Over and Shut Down Student Government](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/27/us/umich-gaza-protests-student-government.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.LU4.cNjA.rywKEfufhLtu&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com).” I wrote then that I was fascinated by the then-newly elected student government’s tactic of holding student-club money hostage until the school divested from all Israel-related investments, not least because of the way it seemed to echo the strategy used in this country by the right to gain control of local government in order to push its ideological agenda. I wanted to share these follow-up articles with you. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See All images are from the [Metropolitan Museum of Art](http://www.metmuseum.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) and are in the public domain. ### Cupid with Two Doves Artist: [Toussaint Dubreuil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toussaint%5FDubreuil?ref=richardjnewman.com) (French, Paris ca. 1561–1602 Paris) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f61fff5db-ba68-4e70-8828-119e4d1b60f3_2939x3466-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ## The Pancake Woman, 1635 [Rembrandt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rembrandt?ref=richardjnewman.com) (Rembrandt van Rijn) (Dutch, Leiden 1606–1669 Amsterdam) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fe70ae106-1c4d-4f49-9943-007cdde8292a_2522x3525-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Turtle Pendant Costa Rica, 10th–16th century, from the [Chiriqui](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veraguas%5Fculture?ref=richardjnewman.com) culture ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2ffd219ef1-ee5a-4566-8ffd-8019f4043ac5_3943x4000-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Design for Wagon, no. 887b Manufacturer: [Brewster & Co.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster%5F%26%5FCo.?ref=richardjnewman.com) (American, New York), ca. 1860, by William J. Rensler (artist) American, 1891 - 1946\. Of all American carriage manufacturers, none was as highly regarded for design, finish and quality as Brewster & Company. They won many awards for outstanding workmanship, including the Legion d’Honneur (Legion of Honor) at the 1878 Paris Exposition (3rd World’s Fair). In appreciation for this achievement the Carriage Builders’ National Association presented them with a gold enameled Tiffany & Company plaque and autograph book signed by leading American carriage builders, both now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2feb7a3309-40d7-47cd-8015-c357a8d40e2a_2806x2035-jpeg.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ### Dream On - Postmodern Jukebox (Aerosmith Cover) **§§§** ### Enrico Pieranunzi - Un sueño más (feat. Marc Johnson,Paul McCandless) **§§§** ### Stayin' Alive - Postmodern Jukebox (The Bee Gees Cover) **§§§** ### The Roches - Hallelujah Chorus --- # Four Things About Me I held two jobs after I dropped out of Syracuse University's Creative Writing MA program, each of which I have written about before. First, I was a Jewish Campus Professional for B'nai Brith Hillel/JACY, advising two Hillel groups on two different campuses. I left that job because my girlfriend at the time was not Jewish and I did not feel right promoting the organization's position against interfaith dating when I was actively violating it. (Interestingly, the woman who first got me into Jewish community work tried to persuade me that it would be okay for me to do that. She thought the value I brought to the community outweighed the fact that I was violating one of its most basic tenets.) Second, I worked as a writer for a competitive intelligence business, producing a database for CEOs to use in making strategic technology decisions for their businesses. I left that job because I realized I was not interested in working in a corporate environment and that, despite how unhappy I’d been teaching freshman composition as a Teaching Assistant at Syracuse, I really did want to teach. So, in 1986, I decided to pursue the linguistics half of my undergraduate double major—the other half was English—but instead of studying to be a linguist, I decided to get my MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). **§§§** I knew I wanted to teach college, but back then just about every ad for a higher ed ESL instructor that I saw asked, in addition to the degree I’d just earned, for a year’s experience teaching abroad. Those programs wanted their faculty to have experienced at least a little bit of what it’s like to live in a country where you don’t speak the language, which I still think is a worthwhile requirement for someone who wants to teach ESL. Anyway, that’s how I ended up at the English Training Center in Seoul, South Korea. I actually applied for positions in a host of other places around the world, but I landed the job I did—in Yeoksam-dong, right outside the subway station—because I answered an ad in \*The New York Times\* placed by the aunt of the guy who ran the school. She worked at the Museum of Natural History and I remember that she interviewed me in her office. At the time, I knew nothing about Korea except that there had been a war there, that the United States had army bases in South Korea, and that the hit TV show M\\\*A\\\*S\*H was a satire that used the Korean War to make statements about the insanity of war in general. **§§§** After I finished my MA, before I went to Korea, I taught advanced ESL composition as an adjunct at a four year college not far from where I lived. One of my most vivid memories from what time is of one of my colleagues coming to me with the paper of a student whose writing, in her view, was so removed from anything resembling reality that the only possible explanation was that the student was psychotic. (She was, I have to stress, not being ironic in the least. She truly believed the student must have been having a psychotic break when he wrote the essay.) She gave me the paper to read more as a curiosity than anything else, but I realized as soon as I started reading that the features of the paper that my colleague thought represented a break with reality were in fact quite common errors committed by speakers of Vietnamese when they first began to write in English. Clearly, the student has been misplaced into a regular composition class. I don’t remember what happened when I tried to explain this to my colleague, but it was certainly not my last encounter with the kinds of biases English Department faculty could bring to ESL writing. **§§§** Nassau Community College, where I teach now, hired me soon after I came back from Korea. One of the first positions I held within my department was as ESL Placement Coordinator. Simply put, my charge was to make sure that ESL students were placed in classes appropriate to their level of writing competence and to make decisions when a student was misplaced about which class to move them to. Once, a faculty member came to me with two diagnostic essays by students he said clearly did not belong in his class. I remember very clearly what he said. “They’re Spanish speakers, you know, and you know the kinds of errors Spanish speakers make: leaving off past tense verb ending, reversing adjective-noun word order, screwing up subject-verb agreement. In my class, they’ll never pass.” I took the papers from him, but when I read them, I discovered that one of these “Spanish speakers” was in fact from Jamaica. It actually said so in her essay. The other “Spanish speaker” turned out to be from Haiti, and her essay, which was almost letter-perfect, contained a single grammatical error. She’d misused the perfect infinitive continuous. (“To have been eating,” for example.) I would like to think that things are different now—and, to be fair, I think they are better—but I still hear stories from ESL students about how professors mistreat them because they are not natively fluent in English. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #29 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-29/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:18:03.000Z . ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f50341be0-7c51-472a-b062-c86c8ebf3f3f_3885x2592-jpeg.jpg) Photo by [Jordan Graff](https://unsplash.com/@jordankgraff?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/beige-and-yellow-5-board-oxR-HvB98uE?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash) # Four Things To Read ### One Book [*Doors tae Naewye*](https://luath.co.uk/products/doors-tae-naewye?srsltid=AfmBOooBggLm7H%5F1YGErdTBOlGx7gFnXYM6CjPWB08z5IKOvRNr5-8yS&ref=richardjnewman.com), by [Christie Williamson](https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/christie-williamson/?ref=richardjnewman.com): Written primarily in [Shetlandic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shetland%5Fdialect?ref=richardjnewman.com), a dialect of Scots that is spoken in Shetland, an archipelago off Scotland’s north coast, this is Williamson’s second book. (The first is [*Oo an Feddirs*](https://luath.co.uk/products/oo-an-feddirs?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* which also contains a fair number of poems in Shetlandic.) Each Shetlandic poem is accompanied by a translation, printed in smaller, italicized text with slashes and double slashes to indicate line and stanza breaks. I wish the publisher had been able to print the translations on facing pages, though, because they are beautiful in their own right and being able to read them typeset as poems would help to give the reader a better sense of the syntactic, rhythmic, and sonic movements in the original. Williamson uses line breaks to great effect in this regard, for example, and the music he achieves melds the personal and the political into poems that, as often as not, command several readings. I met Christie Williamson before the pandemic shutdown, when he came to the States to be part of the annual poetry dinner held at the now defunct Roger Smith Hotel. I also brought him out to Nassau Community College, where I teach, to give a reading for our Creative Writing Program. We exchanged books afterwards, but I did not get a copy of *Doors tae Naewye* until my wife and I made a trip to Scotland over the summer and I was lucky enough to get to see Christie while were in Glasgow, before we made out way down to London for a family wedding. I was happy and more than a little bit humbled to find the title of my book incorporated into the first poem in this one: > **Dawn** > > In LaGuardia I read > *The Silence Of Men.* > My case is checked, > devices safe and close > to hand. I wait. > > I see a guy—be could be anything > from forty to seventy-five. Dreads > hang loose around his neck. > This guy has lived. > > I see the torn rags > that just keep his feet off the ground, > taking step after step, always > forward—to what? > > I think of the heavy shoes > I paid those bastards at American > to carry. I want to dig them out, say > “Here you go buddy—walk a mile.” > > Like all these dreams it slips > away as quickly as it came. > I sit, with ten kilos of books > and not one word to say. **§§§** ### Three Articles [Octopuses are now punching fish in the face. This video shows exactly why.](https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/octopus-and-fish-work-together-to-catch-prey?ref=richardjnewman.com) by Beki Hooper: > *Individuals in the group do not share what they kill, but each group member increases the likelihood of making a kill by working together. Teamwork is therefore beneficial for everyone. That is, until individuals try to exploit the group by catching prey without helping to find it or flush it. The octopuses do not put up with this behaviour, though. They punish the cheaters by punching them with their tentacles.* Hooper reports on a study, published in [Nature Ecology & Evolution](https://www.nature.com/natecolevol/?ref=richardjnewman.com) of underwater multi-species hunting groups in which [*Octopus cyanea*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus%5Fcyanea?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* a species that is normally solitary, works with different kinds of fish to find prey. The roles within the group are pretty well defined. The fish decide in which direction the group should search for prey, while the octopus flushes the prey out of its hiding spot, but when “individuals try to exploit the group by catching prey without helping to find it or flush it,” the octopus assume the role of enforcer and punches the offending member. There are two videos in the article, one of an octopus punching misbehaving fish and one of the octopus and the fish hunting together. It’s in some ways a scientific version of the videos you see on social media of different species of animals befriending and cooperating with each other, but, as Hooper points out, the study raises some really interesting questions, among them the nature of octopus social intelligence and how the members of the hunting party communicate with each other, which scientists theorize might have to do with “octopus skin patterns.” **§§§** [Black Hole](https://juliebindel.substack.com/p/black-hole), by Robert Jensen: > *Some years are a complete blank, others are fragmented and sketchy at best. I have, literally, no recollection of the first six years of my life. From age six to eleven, it’s a jumble of disconnected fragments. Starting at twelve, I can start to accumulate enough fragments to piece together a tentative narrative, albeit with big gaps. And there’s one really big gap when I was fifteen, my sophomore year in high school; that year is completely blank. Starting with the year I was sixteen, I have something that seems to approximate the kind of memory most people taken for granted.* [Jensen](https://robertwjensen.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com), whose work is worth checking out, perhaps especially his feminist writing, takes on in this essay—a guest post on [Julie Bindel’s Substack](https://juliebindel.substack.com/)—the way in which the abuse he suffered as a child has impacted his memory. For me, the most poignant part is when he considers whether it is better to know or not the things that he has blocked from memory and how comparing what it means not to know/remember to the situations of people who do know/remember can lead to some pretty counterintuitive feelings. **§§§** [She Exposed a Prestigious Medical Journal’s Silence on the Holocaust. Now She’s Asking About Gaza](https://theintercept.com/2024/10/17/new-england-journal-medicine-israel-gaza-hospitals/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Jonah Valdez: > *“Is the silence of \[The New England Journal Of Medicine\] regarding the pulverization of the health care system in Gaza, and Israel’s relentless attack on health care workers and the creation of a public health and humanitarian disaster and the weaponization of starvation similar or different to its silence during the Holocaust?” Abi-Rached said toward the end of her talk, joining the symposium virtually from Paris. “What explains the erasure of the predicament of Palestinians in the pages of the journal? What do we mean by the political determinants of health if we precisely ignore the plight, the health, and well-being of marginalized and vulnerable populations?”* Comparisons of Israel’s war in Gaza to the Holocaust are often facile or straightforwardly (and even antisemtically) manipulative, not because what Israel is doing is not genocidal, but because singling out the Nazi’s campaign against the Jews as the point of comparison, when there are other genocides which would serve equally well, implicates all Jews worldwide in a collective responsibility and accountability for what the Israeli government is doing. The comparison Jonah Valdez reports on here, however, is well worth thinking about, since it is ultimately about institutional response to genocide—in this case on the part one of the longest-running and most prestigious medical publications in the country—regardless of who the perpetrators and victims happen to be. Joelle M. Abi-Rached and Allan M. Brandt published an article called “[Nazism and the Journal](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2307319?ref=richardjnewman.com)” in the March 2024 issue of [The New England Journal of Medicine](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2307319?ref=richardjnewman.com).” Part of “an invited series by independent historians, focused on biases and injustice that the *Journal* has historically helped to perpetuate,” Abi-Rached and Brandt’s piece focused on the *Journal’s* choice to remain silent about the role played by the Nazi health care system in furthering the Nazi’s genocidal program. The authors were invited to speak about their findings at a symposium last week, and it was during that symposium that Abi-Rached asked the questions I quoted above. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See All images are from the [National Gallery of Art](https://www.nga.gov/?ref=richardjnewman.com) and are in the public domain. ### Portrait of a Woman - 2nd Century Egypt ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f63e8936b-de45-4299-94d9-c550872c7db0_1395x4096-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ## Portrait of A Lady [Rogier van der Weyden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogier%5Fvan%5Fder%5FWeyden?ref=richardjnewman.com), Netherlandish, 1399/1400 - 1464 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f08f7c3ab-1b94-4157-b2fe-726e037cc3fa_2994x4096-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Portrait of a Woman Rhodes & Carter (artist) American, 1890s - 1910s ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f865c737f-7a65-4f1a-94b5-7f1d8468b208_2937x4096-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Mr. and Mrs. William J. Rensler (artist) American, 1891 - 1946 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2ff6f475ac-beb6-4a90-94bc-ddda498d8aad_2472x4096-jpeg.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ### Giora Feidman - The King of Klezmer - Sholem Alekhem, Rov Feidman **§§§** ### Blood Orange - Sutphin Boulevard **§§§** ### Bela Fleck & The Flecktones - Life in Eleven **§§§** ### Baiuca - Morriña --- # Four Things About Me When I returned in 1989 from my year of teaching in South Korea, I stayed at my grandmother’s house while I looked for a job and a place to live. A friend from Seoul, a Korean woman, came to stay with me there for a couple of days before going to the university where she would be pursuing a PhD in English literature. One evening, I said I would cook dinner. My friend was incredulous. She didn’t think I would be able to do it. At the time–I have no idea what it’s like now–cooking in Korea was absolutely “women’s work” and so Korean men generally didn’t do it. I remember laughing as my friend stood in the kitchen absolutely engrossed by the fact not only that I knew where everything was, but also that I knew how to peel and slice and onion, how to mince garlic, and how to do whatever else it was that the meal required. (I don’t remember what I cooked.) Eventually, satisfied that I really did know what I was doing, she went into the living room to read until the meal was ready. The last thing I prepared, which she didn’t see me doing, was the rice, and, like I had learned from my mother and grandmother, I cooked Minute Rice. (Or maybe it was Uncle Ben’s. In any event, it was one of the brands of instant rice.) When I put the rice down in front of my friend, she spooned a small portion onto her plate, poked at it with her fork, put some in her mouth, and frowned. “This isn’t rice,” she said, the disappointment dripping from her voice. At first, I didn’t understand what she meant, so I brought the box from the kitchen to prove to her that it was indeed rice, though I could not imagine what else she might have thought that it was. What I realized from the ensuing conversation was that, despite my having eaten Korean rice for a year, I’d never really thought about how different it was from the rice I was used to having at home; and it was *very* different. It had a different taste, a different texture, a different body. Nor had I thought much at all about why one of the questions Koreans ask when they want to know if you’ve eaten a meal translates literally as, “Have you eaten rice?” The way I understood my friend’s explanation was that it’s not so much that rice *is* the meal as much as, without rice, there is no meal, and instant rice just doesn’t pass muster in such a cultural context. **§§§** When I was a kid—I don’t remember how young I was—my mother had a friend named Rose who lived on our building. Our apartment was on the ground level, and Rose’s was on the top floor, I think. Rose was also a single mother. She had two kids, a daughter Patti, with whom I became good friends, and a son, whose name I’ve forgotten. Rose had a boyfriend, whose name was Joe. I remember once Joe took us—me and my brother, Patti and her brother—to Jones Beach at night, something I’d never done before. I don’t if I am making this up, but I have a memory of us talking off our shoes and socks, rolling up our pants, and walking ankle deep into the water. What I know for sure is that we had fun. I have no recollection of who told me—probably it was my mother—but one day they found Rose dead in her closet, stabbed sixteen times in the chest with a serrated knife. Everyone was sure Joe did it, but he had an alibi, and so if he did do it, or if he paid someone else to do it, he got away with it. Patti and her brother moved away, of course, and I saw Patti only once more, when for some reason—I don’t know how long afterwards—she showed up in the development where we lived. I had no idea how to talk to her, and so we did not reconnect at all, and I never saw her again. My other enduring memory of what happened after Rose was murdered is of another woman in our building standing just inside our front door, holding a basket filled with laundry. She’d come in to hide from Joe, who I guess came back to get his things from the apartment and whom she was absolutely sure was the killer. Now I wonder, based on what I remember of her behavior, if she’d actually seen something and had good reason to be afraid that Joe would have come after her if given the chance. **§§§** When I was young, I collected coins like my grandfather and stamps like my stepfather. Neither one stuck as a hobby. There was, though, a coin and stamp dealer named Woody who had a store in our neighborhood. I loved to go there and look at what he had in the display cases, fantasizing about getting for my collection some of the truly valuable coins and/or stamps that he had there. I also really liked listening to him talk about the different ways he had found—that he implied I might be able to find as well—those rare “specimens that were still out in the wild,” as he described it. It was because of those discussions, as much as anything I learned from my grandfather, that I developed the habit of checking every coin I lay my hands on for its date and its condition. I did that for years, even after I stopped collecting, occasionally finding a [Buffalo Nickel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo%5Fnickel?ref=richardjnewman.com) or a [Mercury Dime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury%5Fdime?ref=richardjnewman.com), though never one that was worth much more than their five or ten cent face value. I have not seen either of those in a very, very long time, but I also don’t really look anymore. **§§§** I was very interested in fortune telling when I was in my early teens. I remember having a book that had instructions on how to read palms, tea leaves, and tarot cards, and I think it may have had a section on the I Ching. I don’t remember what I actually believed about these methods of divining the future, but I found them fascinating. I don’t remember when or why my interest fell away, but when I think about them now, I try to understand them as providing a framework for and giving structure to self-reflection; and when I think about it like that, I’m not so sure they are, at least for the people who take them seriously, either more or less meaningful than any of the other systems humans have designed to help themselves live decent lives. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled-2/ Last updated: 2024-10-19T15:16:28.000Z From [Fletcher’s Field](https://www.columbapoetry.com/webster.html?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Derek Webster in @columba\_poetry: > All these years, I have lived as if a thought > could sink me like a paper boat > and have tried to trace back the creek > that carried me out to sea. ### (Untitled) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/microblog/untitled/ Last updated: 2024-10-19T15:14:26.000Z ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2024/10/82nd_Street-Jackson_Heights_Station.JPG) ### Four By Four #28 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-28/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:18:35.000Z . ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fdd2011bd-d67b-4c81-ab0f-092eb21011da_4288x2848-jpeg.jpg) Photo by [davide ragusa](https://unsplash.com/@davideragusa?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/worms-eye-view-of-four-stone-structures-during-daytime-slgtMF8EjYE?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash) --- # Four Things To Read [One Year](https://jewishcurrents.org/newsletter/october-7-2024?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Arielle Angel: > *In the Guardian, Naomi Klein details the myriad ways that October 7th has been memorialized with the intent not to heal, but to retraumatize—or to spread the trauma to the diaspora like a virus, creating an identification with the Israeli victim that can be used as justification for limitless Israeli force. Klein speaks of memorialization, not mourning; she delineates the ways in which these diverge, with the former intentionally crowding out the latter. Indeed, for all the criticism directed toward the left broadly—and Jewish leftists, in particular—for not mourning 10/7 sufficiently, it seems clear that Jewish society writ large has, over the last year, demonstrated a failure to mourn. How else to explain the sacrifice of the hostages on the altar of vengeance? To account for the insistence on 10/7’s continuity with the Holocaust even as Jews hold opposite positions in regards to state power?”* Angel is the editor in chief of [*Jewish Currents*](www.jewishcurrents.org)*,* and I find this very pointed moment in her essay on the anniversary of Hamas’ October 7th attack both persuasive and moving, and to be sufficient reason to read the whole thing. One doesn’t have to agree with her, in whole or in part, to see that her position is one you have to take seriously. **§§§** [Breaking In: The challenges of making it in the publishing industry from prison](https://prismreports.org/2024/09/16/breaking-in-the-challenges-of-making-it-in-the-publishing-industry-from-prison/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Lyle C. May: > *”Less understood are the challenges and barriers imposed on incarcerated writers by the actual publishing industry, where editors, publishers, and agents rarely judge the merit of our work and instead fixate on false ideas about what our confinement may mean for the work we’re capable of producing. For us, success is much harder to come by than it should be.* I didn’t pay much attention to the issues surrounding incarcerated writers until I was asked by Pen America in 2019 if I’d be willing to make First Tuesdays part of its “Break Out” project, a joint endeavor with the Poetry Project “to (re)integrate incarcerated writers into literary community.” I agreed and in September 2019 and February 2020, First Tuesdays incorporated the work of two incarcerated poets, [Edward Ji](https://firsttuesdays.net/first-tuesday-joins-pen-s-break-out-initiative?ref=richardjnewman.com) and [Peter Dunne](https://firsttuesdays.net/two-first-tuesdays-regulars-read-an-incarcerated-writer-s-work-as-part-of-pen-s-and-the-poetry?ref=richardjnewman.com), into our monthly readings. Unfortunately, the pandemic shutdown happened the month after we included Dunne’s work and the potential for further collaboration fizzled out pretty quickly. May’s article, though, has reminded me of the importance of this issue—and that fact that I needed this reminder is an indication of how easy it is to forget these writers and what their voices bring to the table—which is why I encourage you to read it. If you care about writing, literary or otherwise, and the power of the printed word to change lives and contribute to the just transformation of the society in which we live, then the issue of how we treat incarcerated writers and their work needs to be part of your thinking. **§§§** [What Translators Talk About When They Talk About Love](https://www.usawa.in/matchbox/what-translators-talk-about-when-they-talk-about-love/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Sonakshi Srivastava: > *Love is an attempt at reconciling, accommodating, and acknowledging differences, an attempt at not giving up just yet. Forking away from indifference, love is an exercise in self-reflection. And what better way then, than prompting our translators to talk about their craft by pivoting the question on love? What if they were to talk about the challenges they face(d) while translating a particular noun, a particular verb, a particular idiom through the productive force of love?* This is an absolutely fascinating literary listicle of sorts, twenty eight translators giving short meditations on “the first word that they loved translating, how they arrived at that particular translation, and how they decided that it was the ‘right’ choice by working through the labyrinth of love and its valences.” **§§§** [A Legal Justification for Genocide](https://jewishcurrents.org/human-shields-gaza-israel-a-legal-justification-for-genocide?token=jpy1dXyIOePAKYuxytD2CNyc7RECCPj0&ref=richardjnewman.com), Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon: > *Israel is not alone in using the human shielding allegation to justify violence against civilians; this strategy has previously been seen in conflicts ranging from the Vietnam War to the war against ISIS. However, the intensity and scope of how Israel has mobilized the human shields accusation in the past year is unprecedented. Parties alleging the use of human shields have typically restricted the charge to limited territorial areas; in contrast, Israel has cited Hamas’s underground tunnel system to cast every square inch of Gaza as a human shield.* Back in [Four By Four #20](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-20/), I included an article, also from Jewish Currents, called [A closer look at the Gaza casualty data](https://goodauthority.org/news/gaza-casualty-data/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Marc Lynch and Sarah Parkinson. In that article, Lynch and Parkinson pointed out that Israel’s casualty estimates “posit\[ed\] all men in Gaza as Hamas combatants,” leading to a serious undercounting of the civilian casualties caused by Israel’s genocidal onslaught. It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand designed to undermine charges of genocide and humanize what Israel is doing as a necessary measure in combating the inhumanity of terrorists and their supporters. In the piece I linked to above, Perugini and Gordon address another facet of that strategy. “According to the laws of armed conflict,” they write, “the warring party that uses human shields, rather than the party that kills them, tends to be guilty of a war crime.” In other words, when it is true that one side in a war uses a hospital or an apartment building or a school that is occupied both by civilians and by legitimate military targets in order to force their enemy into killing of those civilians if it wants to attack those targets, the side that used those civilians as a shield is legally understood to be responsible for their deaths, not the side which actually killed them. By declaring what is essentially all of Gaza to be a human shield, Israel may not be trying to hide civilian casualties the way it does by declaring all men in Gaza to be combatants, but it is attempting to shift the blame and legal accountability for those civilian casualties it cannot deny onto Hamas. It makes me think of something [Golda Meir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golda%5FMeir?ref=richardjnewman.com) said in [1969](https://libquotes.com/golda-meir/quote/lbr6b1j?ref=richardjnewman.com): > *When peace comes, we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.* While these words were cynical when Meir said them, claiming for Israel a moral high ground I don’t think it ever actually held, I can, sadly, imagine Benjamin Netanyahu expressing a similar sentiment if and when Israel is ever able to declare victory over Hamas. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See ## Ethel Reed American graphic designer Ethel Reed (1874-1912) rose to fame at the early age of eighteen as an acclaimed poster designer. To everyone's perplex, she disappeared from historical records a few years later. Strongly influenced by the Art Nouveau movement and Japonisme, her artworks usually captured female figures and floral motifs along with the use of negative space and stark contrast between the figure and the background. She was also, as this article in [ARTnews](https://www.artnews.com/feature/ethel-reed-poster-house-1234620259/?ref=richardjnewman.com) by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei demonstrates, a very interesting woman: > By the standards of her day, [Ethel Reed](https://www.artnews.com/t/ethel-reed/?ref=richardjnewman.com) was an impractical woman. Born in 1874, she wished to live independently, supporting herself with her art. Worse, she wanted to have sex with whom she wanted, when she wanted. Against all odds, she managed to live as she wished, becoming a nationally known illustrator with lovers to spare. But it was not to last, and Reed suffered an early, tragic death in 1912, before she even turned 40. Here is a sample of some of her work: ### Arabella and Araminta Stories (1895) - Art Nouveau poster of twin blonde girls ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f21581380-c4f7-4ebc-992c-28619bfae2d1_1980x3500-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ## The Boston Sunday Herald (1895–1901) - vintage poster of a woman reading a newspaper ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2ff476458a-6af5-4a25-81cc-33a8fe594bfa_2437x3500-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### Jacques Damour (1896) poster of a man and a woman ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f613a7efb-ccba-4ca8-92fa-8a511e3ba1d8_2342x3501-jpeg.jpg) **§§§** ### The House of the Trees (ca.1895) vintage poster of a woman seated on lawn ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f6369dc80-0ff1-481e-8f99-783d83166acf_797x1520-jpeg.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ### Two Podcasts Normally, I reserve this section for music, but I recently listened to two podcast that I thought worth sharing. For some reason, Substack is not allowing me to embed the podcast from Spotify or any other platform, so all I have for you are the links. I hope you will give them a listen. I think you’ll find them worthwhile: [Talking About Antisemitism](https://jewishcurrents.org/talking-about-antisemitism?ref=richardjnewman.com): On The Nose is [Jewish Current’s](https://jewishcurrents.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) podcast. I wanted to share this episode with you because, while the left-wing publication is unapologetically critical of Israel, including the way charges of antisemitism are deployed to mute, discredit, or otherwise undermine that critique, this episode discusses the fact that antisemitism is nonetheless real, that it appears on both the left and the right—though in far greater quantity and virulence on the right—and that it is necessary to acknowledge and confront it as such, though perhaps differently depending on whether it comes from the left or the right. I found parts of the episode unsatisfying less because I disagree with what is said than because I thought the conversation about how to engage antisemitism when it comes from the left lacked both a level of specificity and a willingness at least to suggest that there is a line, or a point, beyond which that engagement becomes at best counterproductive and, at worst, self-destructive. Nonetheless, I think the episode is thought-provoking and well-worth listening to. [An Introduction to the Talmud](https://literatureandhistory.com/episode-104-introduction-to-the-talmud/?ref=richardjnewman.com): One of the motivations for the above episode of On The Nose was the fact that there have been social media posts and more arguing that the Talmud provides justification for what Israel is doing in Gaza. (I’ve tracked down some of them, though I’m not going to link to them because I don’t want to give them any traffic. They’re not hard to find if you want to Google them.) This got me to thinking about the difficulties I’ve had in the past trying to explain what the Talmud actually is and how it functions within Judaism to people who don’t know. This episode from the [Literature and History](http://www.literatureandhistory.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) podcast does a marvelous job of explaining just that. It’s long, and if you don’t want to listen, there’s a transcript on the episode web page, but it’s worth it. **§§§** ### Az Der Rebbe Zingt This song was originally written to make fun of Chasidic Jews and what others saw as the slavish and unthinking way they followed their rebbes. Over time, though, it became an affectionate portrait of the fervor and sincerity with which they worshipped. I didn’t know this about the song until I read this [article](https://forward.com/forverts-in-english/530235/leonard-cohen-yiddish-folk-song/?ref=richardjnewman.com) about Leonard Cohen’s version. **§§§** ### It Is A Legacy - Pierce Pettis # Four Things About Me For most of my life, people have thought I was older than I was, mostly because I started losing my hair very young, at fifteen, so that, by the time I was an undergraduate in college, I was pretty much bald. I don’t know why, but this did not cause me the kind of anxiety hair loss stereotypically causes men. I remember, for example, a guy I worked with for a while when I was in my twenties—he was at least five years older than I was—who agonized over every strand of hair he found in his hair brush. He even told me once he would not drive on the highway with his window open because he was convinced the wind was making him lose his hair even more quickly than he already was, which, at least to my eyes, didn’t seem to be very quickly at all. Anyway, the fact that I looked older was often an advantage, since it meant that people treated me more respectfully, and even deferentially, than they would have if they’d known my true age. One time, though, when I was a college freshman, it decidedly did not. There was a party in my dorm and I was waiting on line to get a beer from the keg we’d set up in the kitchen. (The drinking age was eighteen back then.) A woman I recognized from orientation got online behind me. I was not surprised when she introduced herself as if she didn’t recognize me, since we’d been in different groups and hadn’t interacted. I introduced myself and we started making small talk. It became very clear very quickly, however, that she was interested in more than conversation. Eventually, she put her hand warmly on my arm and asked, “So, what subject do you teach here?” She thought I was a professor, which I found funny in an endearing sort of way, but she was mortified, rejected any attempt I made to turn the misunderstanding towards the possibility of our getting to know each other, and, after I reminded her that we’d met briefly at freshman orientation, she left the party. I never saw her again. **§§§** When I was a kid, I took magic lessons from a guy named Sam Winiger in the back of the convenience store he owned not far from where I lived. I’d ride my bike to his store on Saturdays around 4 PM, and he’d teach me sleight of hand. The first trick I remember learning was how to make a [Superball](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super%5FBall?ref=richardjnewman.com) change colors, which I’d watched him perform for his customers. He also taught me how to make toothpicks pass through each other, how to make a card I was holding disappear with a flick of my hand, and how to tie a knot in a piece of rope with one hand. In order to make the moves I needed to make to do those tricks look natural, I practiced them for hours in front of a mirror, complete with the accompanying patter, acting as my own audience. The point was to be able to make the moves without actually watching my hands, allowing me to do the tricks while looking at and talking to the audience, which is what made possible the misdirection that kept their attention away from the sleight-of-hand the trick required. This was my first experience in learning the discipline of a craft, a life lesson that has served me well as a poet. The one thing he said during our lessons that has stayed with me all these years is also a guiding principle I have carried with me. I thought I’d figured out how he did a vanishing trick he showed me. When I tried to expose the secret, and it turned out I was wrong, I was angry and disappointed in myself. “One of the most important things about being a magician,” he said, “is that you should never forget how to enjoy a good trick.” I learned later that Sam was a member of a group of magicians known as [The Long Island Mystics](https://www.limystics.com/mystic-s-history?ref=richardjnewman.com). **§§§** I don’t know how old I was when George, the man who was my stepfather for a few years, took my brother and me to the [Palisades Amusement Park](https://www.palisadespark.com/history.html?ref=richardjnewman.com), but one memory of that trip is permanently etched into my memory: trying to find my way through the [Crazy Crystals Glass House](http://www.palisadespark.com/rides/CrazyCrystals.html?ref=richardjnewman.com), maze of mirrors. My brother found his way pretty quickly, but I kept banging my head into dead ends, so much so that I think I actually raised a small bump on my forehead. At one point, I thought I had succeeded because I walked back out into the park, but it turned out that I’d found my way back to the entrance. I didn’t want to go back in, but George told me I had to get through the right way, just like my brother, so I went back in and kept hitting my head, until the park attendant came in and led me out. I think I might have been crying. I was mortified, of course, especially because my little brother had outdone me, and George did not let me off the hook. He teased me about this for the rest of the day. **§§§** I took piano as an elective in my senior year of high school. I had never before taken piano lessons, though I’d been playing in my own, self-taught way for a couple of years. The woman who taught the class—I think her name was Mrs. Wilde—thought I had real potential and she encouraged me to play for the class’ recital a piece that I initially thought was way beyond my ability, Ernesto Lecuona’s [Malagueña](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malague%C3%B1a%5F%28song%29?ref=richardjnewman.com). I still have the [sheet music](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/qqwlgwygw7ouf63v96phj/%5Fmalaguena-copy.jpeg?rlkey=rbnle0l9t1k6rqer0g71k3xjf&dl=0&ref=richardjnewman.com). It was nothing like this [professional performance](https://youtu.be/32sRuMDRDGQ?si=zDH1nKwUv0VbXnWP&ref=richardjnewman.com), of course, but it was the first time I had ever worked my way through an entire piece of music by reading the notes and learning to play them. I remember how hard I worked to learn the piece and how happy and proud I was to be able to play it for an audience. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #27 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-27/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:19:05.000Z # Writing News A poem of mine, “[Sunset](https://issuu.com/humanaobscura/docs/humanaobscura%5Fissue10%5Fdigital/52?ref=richardjnewman.com),” was just published in [*Humana Obscura*](https://issuu.com/humanaobscura/docs/humanaobscura%5Fissue10%5Fdigital/52?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* a lovely literary journal that I recommend to you all. --- # Four Things To Read [I Was Wrong About Trigger Warnings](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/trigger-warnings-feminism-teen-girls-mental-health/674759/?gift=9L5E0%5F00dQA8ldt%5F3rAKn9oBfUwkbD2wneyQCwWPJ44&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share), by Jill Filipovic: *“Most of the experts I spoke with were careful to distinguish between an individual student asking a professor for a specific accommodation to help them manage a past trauma, and a cultural inclination to avoid challenging or upsetting situations entirely.”* As a teacher, I have never liked trigger warnings, not because I think there is no merit in the idea that students deserve fair warning that they are going to be reading “difficult” or “problematic” texts, but because the warnings themselves have always seemed to me a sign of pedagogical laziness. Good teaching, it seems to me, calls for instructors to put that kind of material in context for students, providing them beforehand with a critical framework with which to approach the text, especially when it comes to the difficult or problematic aspects of the work in question. My own experience has been that students who might need an accommodation—up to and including the chance to read a different text—or even just a reassuring conversation about the one that has been assigned, are more likely to approach me if I provide that kind of framework than if I give one of the canned trigger warnings that have become so common. Filipovic’s essay doesn’t deal so much with what I have just described, but it’s a thoughtful consideration of this subject nonetheless, and worth reading. (I will also add that I think it’s similarly lazy pedagogically if the only texts one can assign that deal with what we might broadly label “trigger-warning-appropriate subjects” are those that center trauma and therefore primarily invite teaching strategies that do the same in the classroom.) [Aunt Taibele](https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/language-literature-culture/yiddish-translation/aunt-taibele?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn, translated from Yiddish by Miranda Cooper: *“She hated going to celebrations as much as she loved going to funerals. For her, going to a wedding or a bris was a punishment. At parties she would sit hidden in a corner and watch the happy family members with a sour expression; it got on her nerves to see young people merrymaking and beaming with joy, and she would sneak quietly out of the hall.”* [Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn](https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/hamer-jacklyn-sarah?ref=richardjnewman.com) (1905–1975) was born in Nowo-Radomsk (today Radomsko), Poland. Her work, according to Cooper’s introduction was “radical for its time: it is feminist simply in its implicit assertion of the literary value of women’s domestic and emotional lives.” It is worth mentioning that the end of the story incorporates a Jewish folk tradition we would today find deeply problematic: plague weddings, known as mageyfe khasenes or shvartse khasenes (literally [black wedding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%5Fwedding?ref=richardjnewman.com). This superstitious ritual involved marrying people on the margins of society to one another in an effort to ward off the plague. I’d never heard of this tradition till I read this story, but a Google search revealed this article in [Tablet](https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/plague-weddings?ref=richardjnewman.com), which gives a history of the custom. [The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass](https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-blue-collar-jobs-of-philip-glass?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Ted Gioia: *“His family was opposed to his music career. They feared he would turn out like Uncle Harry, a dental school dropout who worked as a drummer in vaudeville and Borscht Belt hotels. So how did Glass pay his way at Juilliard? Glass, like the musicians mocked in the song ‘On Broadway,’ took a Greyhound bus back home to Baltimore. But he didn’t stay there for long—just five months. He made enough money in that time to pay for his New York education. But that’s only because this intrepid 20-year-old aspiring composer somehow convinced Bethlehem Steel to give him a job at their plant in Sparrows Point, Maryland.”* What I resonate with most in this article is the respect Gioia expresses both for Glass’ commitment to his art and the humility that is embodied not just in the kind of work Glass did to support himself, but in the way he embraced that work as an equally, if differently, valuable part of who he was. I especially appreciated the story Gioia quotes from a 2001 interview Glass gave to [The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/nov/24/arts.highereducation1?ref=richardjnewman.com): > *I had gone to install a dishwasher in a loft in SoHo. While working, I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”* [The Lost Art of Waiting](https://www.thefp.com/p/americans-more-impatient?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Christine Rosen: *“To be kept waiting is generally viewed as a negative experience; to make someone wait often denotes hierarchy, dominance, or power in a relationship.”* Rosen troubles this notion by talking about how waiting can be a positive experience, using as examples people whose happiness, according to a Dutch study, was rooted in the pleasurable anticipation of a vacation they were planning, not in having taken the vacation in and of itself. She also makes some interesting connections between what she doesn’t quite call a culture of impatience with the ever-increasing speeds at which digital technology offers up its content. The article made me think of the [Slow Food Movement](https://www.slowfood.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com). Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See These images are all from the Library of Congress and are in the public domain. ## Sheet music cover for “The Popular Fire Song” An elegy for the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire. (Source: Heskes, Irene, Yiddish American Popular Songs, 1895-1950) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f27b47992-e899-48b8-82fc-85cff0f7c21d_843x1081-jpeg.jpg) ## Cover of *Fancy’s Sketchbook:* First Published Work by an American Jewish Woman Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Penina Moise (1797-1880) became a widely published author and poet. A deeply religious woman, she composed hymns for use in prayer service as well as this book of poetry, which includes poems on biblical themes and on contemporary Jewish life. Few copies survive of Moise's collection of verse. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f8a172d04-b509-4f58-9ba7-0c75b0314d8a_942x1286-jpeg.jpg) ## Window of a Jewish religious shop on Broom Street Taken by the photographer Marjory Collins (1912-1985), probably in August 1942. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f858fc515-a069-4483-9711-4bc31502e32d_969x1024-jpeg.jpg) ## A Portrait of Two Girls Wearing Banners with Slogan “Abolish Child Slavery!!” in English and Yiddish Probably taken during May 1, 1909 labor parade in New York City. Published in *American women: a Library of Congress guide for the study of women's history and culture in the United States*, edited by Sheridan Harvey \[et al.\]. Washington: Library of Congress, 2001, p. 347. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f9b83c771-48e5-48c8-8a0b-a2ef6c0a235e_1024x699-jpeg.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ## “5784” by Six13 This is just to say an early Shanah Tovah! to all who celebrate. ## Yer Blue Hair, by Alfonso Vélez ## If Something Breaks, by Front Country ## Barton Hollow, by The Civil Wars --- # Four Things About Me Recently, I was looking through some old photographs and I found a bunch from when my brother and I were little and we would spend big chunks of our summer at the place my grandparents had in upstate New York. I hadn’t thought for a long time about how we used to run around naked in the grass, sometimes taking rain showers, if the weather was warm and the rain gentle enough; sometimes splashing around in the kiddie pool we had; sometimes playing in the water from the sprinkler my grandmother used to water the lawn. I look at those pictures now and they seem so innocent. My brother and I were laughing together, having a good time, in the completely unselfconscious way children have of being in their bodies, whether clothed or naked. Then I think about how these pictures would be received if they were taken today. Would the person who took them, probably my mother, be reported as a possible child pornographer, the way Sally Mann was flagged for her very professional, very artistic [pictures](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immediate%5FFamily%5F%28book%29?ref=richardjnewman.com) of her own children? Probably they would be; and if they were, what would it take for my mother to demonstrate she was not sexually exploiting her children. I am well aware of the dangers pedophiles pose, of just how ubiquitous child pornography is if you know where to look for it, of the damage sexual exploitation does to children. No one has to convince me of the need to be vigilant, but it makes me sad that someone now might look at these pictures that are more than fifty year old and find the act of having taken them in the first place to be a questionable act at best. To me, that means, for all our vigilance, we have lost something that was worth preserving. I taught a couple of sections of freshman composition as a graduate TA when I was at Syracuse University. One time—and I know this sounds like something out of a movie satirizing the kind of story I am going to tell you, but it actually happened this way—a young woman sitting in the second row, almost directly in front of me, started blinking at me and pursing her lips. I did not notice at first, but once I did, it became very distracting, especially because, in my own naivety, I could not figure out why she was doing it. The fact that she might have been trying to flirt with me was the farthest thing from my mind. Eventually, though, it dawned on me that this was exactly what she was doing, and a range of emotions flooded through me. I was indignant, embarrassed, a little bit flattered, and profoundly uncertain about whether and how to respond. Finally, because I was finding it more and more difficult to ignore her and stay focused on whatever the lesson was, I looked straight at her and blurted out, “Are you blowing kisses at me?” She, of course, was mortified and, if I remember correctly, left the room and never came back to class. While it’s silly to wish for a do-over for something like this—which took place, after all, forty years ago—I do sometimes wonder what happened to that woman after she left the room. It feels odd to say now that I hope she was not seriously scarred by my insensitivity, but that is how I feel. That year, we were forced to teach from a book called \*The Practical Stylist,\* by Sheridan Baker, which I hated, not the book per se, but the way we were expected to teach from it. It wasn’t that I thought I knew better than Baker about what good writing was, or about what it took to craft an argument, but I distrusted from the start the slavish way we were expected to adhere to the text in our classrooms. We were given little room for flexibility and experimentation in how we taught the material—at least if we wanted to get a good teaching evaluation and a passing grade from the professor, whose name I have forgotten, who supervised the TAs and taught our practicum. Even back then, before I really knew what I was talking about, I had the same doubts about teaching Baker’s five paragraph essay, including what he called “the concession paragraph,” that I had about the pass-fail, in class, five paragraph final essay exams ESL students have to take at my institution in order to move up a level in their classes: almost nowhere else in the world but an English Department will they ever have to write like that. My brother’s name—he died in a car accident a very long time ago—was Paul. So, Paul Newman. I don’t remember how old we were when we discovered that he shared that name with a very famous movie star, but when we did, we decided to make some money by selling “Paul Newman’s” autograph for $.25 a piece. This was back when a quarter actually bought you a candy bar at the corner store. I have no memory of how many we actually sold, except that I know we sold some, nor do I remember which adult found us out, though I know someone did, or if we were forced to give the money back. I do wish, though, that I could recall the whole thing in more detail. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #26 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-26/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:19:28.000Z # Four Things To Read #### **One Book** [*The Great Dismissal: Memoir of the Cultural Demolition Derby, 2015–22*](https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/great-dismissal-9781501392283/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Henry Sussman: *”\[I\]t is more urgent than ever for us to explore and articulate the commonalities of the professoriate and other university workers with journalists, librarians, school directors, dramaturges, and managers, editors, therapists, and clinicians of various stripes, and even attorneys (in their capacity as ‘counselors’). What this rather amorphous conglomerate of vocations holds in common is the dissemination of literacy—the act of inculcating others into the articulate, differentiating, and modulating capabilities within the panoply of language systems and social codes. The combined effect of these varied roles and functions is nothing other than the distribution of empowerment—outfitting neighbors to full cultural enfranchisement.”* The central, crucial importance of literacy in all its various guises as the only foundation from which an adequate response might be launched against the right-wing onslaught against what it means to be literate, as Sussman defines it here, is the core theme of this book. The book itself is not easy reading, nor is it intended to be. Sussman gathers into essays, along with a few poems, a broad enough range of cultural analysis that one reading is certainly not enough fully to grasp what he’s talking about. My own experience of one reading is this: At the beginning of the book, Sussman elucidates that value of the kind of meticulously close reading practiced by Derrida—who was Sussman’s teacher—and other cultural theorists and then goes on to illustrate how this way of reading plays out in four books that he then uses throughout these essays as touchstones not only of analysis, but also of the potential for change: [*Dark Money*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/dark-money-the-hidden-history-of-the-billionaires-behind-the-rise-of-the-radical-right-jane-mayer/9799702?ean=9780307947901&ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Jane Mayer; [*The Age of Surveillance Capitalism*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-the-fight-for-a-human-future-at-the-new-frontier-of-power-shoshana-zuboff/9240225?ean=9781541758001&ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Shoshana Zuboff; [*Foxocracy: Inside the Network’s Playbook of Tribal Warfare*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/foxocracy-inside-the-network-s-playbook-of-tribal-warfare-tobin-smith/9019892?ean=9781635766615&ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Tobin Smith; and [*The Cruelty Is The Point*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-cruelty-is-the-point-why-trump-s-america-endures-adam-serwer/18530607?ean=9780593230824&ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Adam Serwer. Sussman draws from many more sources than these—journalists, columnists, sociologists, theorists—but, at least in my first reading, the issues raised by these four books (money, technology, the media, the United States’ history of oppression, and how the right has marshaled them all to its cause(s)) form the infrastructure of his argument. *The Great Dismissal* is well-worth reading. #### **Three Articles** “[At Michigan, Activists Take Over and Shut Down Student Government](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/27/us/umich-gaza-protests-student-government.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.LU4.cNjA.rywKEfufhLtu&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com),” by Halina Bennet: *"At the University of Michigan, many student activities are usually funded or subsidized by the Central Student Government, known as C.S.G., an elected undergraduate and graduate council that decides how to dole out roughly $1.3 million annually to about 400 groups. But last spring, pro-Palestinian activists, running under the Shut It Down party, won control over the student government. They immediately moved to withhold funding for all activities, until the university committed to divest from companies that profit from Israel’s war in Gaza.”* I am fascinated by Shut It Down’s strategy, which one the one hand feels not so different in principle from workers seizing the means of production, while at the same time being reminiscent of the way the right has increased its power and influence by running in and winning local elections. I know there are those who will argue that what Shut It Down did crosses a line, though it’s not clear to me what that line is. It’s not just that I am personally sympathetic to the idea that people should not be able to turn a blind eye not only to what Israel is doing in Gaza, but also to the ways the institutions in which we are implicated support Israel’s actions, tacitly or otherwise. Whether you agree that what Israel is doing in Gaza is technically a genocide or not—and I am not insensitive to the political complexities embedded in the use of that term—to argue that Israel’s actions do not call for some kind of deviation from business as usual is ultimately to argue, on some level, for the normalization of those actions. I also want to add did find the group’s relative silence, as reported in the article, concerning, though, to be fair, the new semester has only just started. It will be interesting to see if there is any follow-up coverage. “[The Fallacy of the Literary Citizen](https://onlypoems.substack.com/p/the-fallacy-of-the-literary-citizen),” an interview with Alina Stefanescu published in [The Only Poems Newsletter](https://onlypoems.substack.com/): *"As a concept, literary citizenship acknowledges the duties of citizenship (however those are constructed or interpreted) vis a vis the Republic of Letters, while downplaying the underlying inequality between various passports and citizenship regimes. Obviously, some literary citizens are freer than others—but the concept wallpapers over such distinctions…Let’s imagine a concept of literary community that refuses the hierarchical power dynamics of states. A concept that reconfigures solidarities in defiance of nation-state citizenship rather than accepting that vision for the future.”* When I teach creative writing, I always include two or three “literary citizenship” assignments which ask students to participate in literary activities of one sort or another, including but not limited to going to a reading, reading at an open mic, submitting work to the student literary magazine, or becoming involved in producing the magazine. If I remember correctly, I chose to use the term “literary citizenship” to make the assignments congruent with a similar requirement creative majors have to fulfill in order to receive their degree. For me, the term is connected both to the notion that one purpose of public education—and I teach at a public institution—is to prepare students for meaningful, critical, substantive citizenship and to the fact that public eduction has been one of the most powerful democratizing forces in the history of this country. (One reason it is now under attack from the right.) In this interview, Stefanescu troubles that notion in important ways by making visible how the term *citizenship*validates, in both its denotations and connotations, hierarchies of worth and systems of oppression and exclusion. Ultimately, she raises the question of how the notion of literary citizenship shapes what we understand the cultural role of literature to be and whether or not that is in fact the role we want our work to play. Her argument is well worth taking the time to think about. “[The Internet Is Not Forever: 38% of Web Pages From 2013 No Longer Exist](https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-internet-is-not-forever-38-of-web-pages-from-2013-no-longer-exist?ref=richardjnewman.com),” by Rob Pegoraro: *“A new study on the state of link rot suggests that a floppy disk might have better odds of surviving the next decade with its information intact than a web page published today. The Pew Research Center finds that 38% of the pages extant in 2013 were no longer accessible in October 2023 and that a quarter of the pages that were online at some point over that period have now vanished.”* Pegoraro points to this [study](https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/?ref=richardjnewman.com) and the phenomenon it captures should concern all of us as the world becomes more and more embedded and invested in, as well as dependent on, digital media. I don’t have much to say about this other than that I think it’s important to be informed about phenomenon, even though the overwhelming majority of us are in no position to do much of anything about it. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See [Richard Roland Holst](https://www.escherinhetpaleis.nl/escher-today/richard-roland-holst/?lang=en&ref=richardjnewman.com) (1868-19368) was a man of many talents, an author, sculptor, etcher, glass painter, professor, illustrator, lithographer, furniture designer, painter, draftsman, muralist and more. Born into a wealthy Dutch family, he still had an understanding for the life of the working class. A trend among young artists in the Symbolist movement was to convey social messages and not only focus on monetizing. Holst used his social commitment in his art as well as politically in the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. As a professor at Rijksakademie he promoted his artisanal and ethical ideology to his students. He believed that art had an important role to play in society as it had the ability to reach the whole population. ## A Farmer Standing Near A Hay-Stack (1889) Original from the Rijksmuseum. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fca280842-7213-4026-88f5-25f8206eff18_3497x2591-jpeg-1.jpg) ## Head Of The Blindfolded Justitia Designed for the marble decoration in the Supreme Court in The Hague (1868–1938). Original from the Rijksmuseum. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f3fe52935-e77a-4e2c-b862-b095e69eab15_2788x3500-jpeg-1.jpg) ## Horse Head (1881) Original from the Rijksmuseum. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f2722e880-ea28-4810-99bb-6d18aeb5ddc2_2405x3500-jpeg-1.jpg) ## **The Industry (1878-1938)** Original from the Rijksmuseum. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f86eb3474-e8f6-43f5-a675-194c3673a237_3500x2333-jpeg-1.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ## Jackson, Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash ## Manssa Cise, Habib Koité ## New Old Age, Peter Erskine ## Oxygène, Part 2, Jean Michel Jarre --- # Four Things About Me I’ve only been in one fistfight, ever. I was in third grade. We’d just moved into the neighborhood and one of my classmates asked me during recess what my religion was. I told him. The next day, when we were choosing up sides for a recess game of dodgeball, he told me I couldn’t play because his parents told him he wasn’t allowed to play with Jews. I don’t know if the fight I’m telling you about happened then or if it happened some time after that, but I remember being shoved into the center of a schoolyard circle of boys. “He’s a Jew! Punch him in the face!” I heard someone call out. I tried to break out of the circle, but they pushed me back into the center where I had no choice but to face off not with the boy I just told you about, but with the toughest boy in the class. (Both of them happened to be named John.) I don’t remember if he swung first or if I did, but I know I connected with his jaw and that blood started to trickle down his chin. The other boys saw it as well and, all of us suddenly horrified, we quickly dispersed. I have no recollection of what happened next, only that the blood turned out to be from a scab on his chin that I broke and not from any serious damage that I’d done to the boy’s face. The experience, though, frightened me enough that I have managed, even in situations where it might have been justified—and when I was younger and still living in that neighborhood there were more than a few of those—I have managed never to hit someone like that again. I remember when I started not to believe in a god. I was in my late teens or early twenties, sitting in shul on either Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur and listening to the rabbi’s sermon. He was talking about the “[Al Cheit](https://www.chabad.org/library/article%5Fcdo/aid/6577/jewish/Text-of-Al-Chet.htm?ref=richardjnewman.com),” the communally recited confessional prayer, each line of which is addressed to God and begins “For the sin we have committed before You.” I don’t remember exactly what he said, but he connected it to the lines from the [Avinu Malkeinu](https://www.chabad.org/library/article%5Fcdo/aid/4491743/jewish/Avinu-Malkeinu-HebrewEnglish-Text.htm?ref=richardjnewman.com#AvinuMalkeinu) that are recited between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, in which the congregation, again communally, asks God to: “\[I\]nscribe us in the book of good life, …in the book of redemption and deliverance, …in the book of livelihood and sustenance, …in the book of merits, …in the book of pardon and forgiveness.” I suddenly had this image of God as a bookkeeper, complete with a green tinted visor, tallying up everyone’s sins and good deeds on a balance sheet. The image reminded me, frankly, of what God might look like in a Monty Python skit, if the members of Month Python had been Jewish. No matter how hard I tried—and I did try—I could not get that metaphor out of my head, which made it increasingly difficult to take the idea of God–of a god, of any god–very seriously. I was suspended from school in eleventh grade for cutting class with all the girls in my grade. The boys in my class–this was when I was in yeshiva–were scheduled to take a class trip to a yeshiva in Lakewood, New Jersey. I don’t remember which one. For some reason that I also don’t remember, I was not able to go on the trip with them. Since our morning classes, which were religious studies, were segregated by gender, that meant I spent the morning by myself with nothing to do but shoot baskets and fiddle around on the piano that was on the stage in the room that did triple duty as a gym, a dining hall, and an auditorium. When it came time for the afternoon classes, the girls and I decided not to go, since more than half the class wasn’t there. We got caught because the boys’ bus broke down after stopping, I think in Brooklyn, so they could get a blessing from [Rabbi Moshe Feinstein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moshe%5FFeinstein?ref=richardjnewman.com). The bus got fixed in time for them to go to first period math. The girls and I, of course, were conspicuous by our absence. We were suspended and told we could not go back to class until our parents came in to speak with the principal of secular studies. My mother couldn’t do that because she worked, so she had to make an early morning appointment with the dean of the school, according to whom the bigger problem wasn’t that I had cut classes, but that I had been alone with all the girls in the class without any supervision. He couldn’t bring himself even to suggest to my mother that I had done anything sexually inappropriate, though, so all he said was, “I want you to know that your son is a real mensch. He made a mistake. I am sure he will never do that again.” That was it. I walked my mother out of the building to her car and, as soon as we got outside, she started laughing. “What were you actually suspended for?” I had a serious girlfriend when I was in my twenties. Early on in our relationship, she asked me what I thought our home should be like if we ever decided to get married. It told her that, assuming we could afford it, we should have a place with three bedrooms, one that we shared and two more so we could each have our own private space, in case we wanted to sleep alone or if we wanted to work late into the night—at the time, she thought she would be an artist and I knew I was going to be a writer—and we didn’t want to disturb the other’s sleep by climbing into bed with them. She was horrified. “That is the most unromantic thing I have ever heard,” she said. A few years later, though, when the possibility of us living together and maybe getting married was becoming more and more real, she brought the subject up again. “The more I think about it now,” she said, “the more I like your idea of us having separate rooms in addition to the one we share.” I don’t remember if she told me what changed her mind, but it didn’t really matter in the end. We broke up not too long after that. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### T'shuvah URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/tshuvah-2/ Last updated: 2026-02-16T03:19:40.000Z > *Richard Jeffrey Newman’s T’shuvah (“repentance” or “atonement” in Hebrew) draws its spiritual, erotic, and musical elements from many sources: Orthodox Judaism, Islamic mysticism, Renaissance sonnets, classical Persian ghazals and rubaiyat, and his experience of South Korea, Iran, and the five boroughs of New York City. All of these are called upon to illuminate the process of arriving at (and returning to) a self that has finally come to terms with an experience of violent childhood sexual abuse.* —Elizabeth T. Gray Jr. in [*American Book Review*](https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/article/982143?ref=richardjnewman.com) Etymologically, t’shuvah (תשובה) it comes from the root meaning “to return.” One way to understand the logic of that etymology is this: if sin alienates you from both God and yourself, then atoning for sin means returning to yourself as a starting point for deepening your commitment to the life God wants you to lead. The poems in [*T’shuvah*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2023/09/07/tshuvah/?ref=richard-jeffrey-newman.ghost.io) apply this framing to the question of what it means to “return” from the alienation that is inherent in surviving sexual violence, with the caveat, of course, that a survivor of sexual violence has committed no sin and that neither the moralizing nature nor the implicit politics of the phrase “the life God wants you to lead” need by definition to be part of anyone’s healing. *T’shuvah* completes the exploration that runs through *The Silence Of Men* and *Words For What Those Men Have Done,* turning the three books into a trilogy*.* - Elizabeth T. Gray Jr. reviewed *T'shuvah* in American Book Review. You can read the full review: [Elizabeth Gray's Review of T'shuvahElizabeth Gray's Review of T'shuvah.pdf273 KBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2026/02/Elizabeth-Gray-s-Review-of-T-shuvah.pdf "Download") - Read Christina M. Rau’s review of *T'shuvah* on [Whale Road Review](https://www.whaleroadreview.com/richard-jeffrey-newman/?ref=richardjnewman.com): “Eloquent and challenging, the poems in *T’Shuvah* encourage, inspire, and remind us that healing is possible; catharsis is the greatest return.” I encourage you to buy *T'shuvah* directly from the publisher, [Fernwood Press](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2023/09/07/tshuvah/?ref=richardjnewman.com), because it’s important to support small presses. If you would like a signed copy, contact me [directly](https://www.richardjnewman.com/contact/). - **Buy from the publisher,** [**Fernwood Press**](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2023/09/07/tshuvah/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**.** - **Buy a signed copy** [**directly from me**](https://www.richardjnewman.com/contact/)**.** ### Praise for *T’shuvah* #### "With survival comes shame but also the possibility of connection and beauty. While Newman explores in this book the underpinnings of t’shuvah, the Jewish tradition of acceptance, reconciliation, and forgiveness, the impulse transcends a specific spiritual experience and speaks to us all. Follow him on his path, and it will become yours." ****Andrea Carter Brown, author of** ***September 12** #### "What does the interior journey of a man who survives sexual violence feel like? Open Richard Jeffrey Newman's book, let him gently take your hand, enter a world of image, of sound, of pain and redemption, of wonder. When he lets go of your hand, he will leave you with salve for your wounded heart, like this: 'What draws you forward/through the faith you’ve lost will not desert you.'" ****David Lisak, Ph.D., Vice Chair, 1in6 Board of Directors, Leader of The Bristlecone Project** #### "**T’shuvah* searches, with relentless beauty, for the truth of what we feel most deeply, pulsing with an awareness of loss as tangible as its celebration of faith, and of love — reminding us that “deceit begins when touch fails.” Sensual, visceral, yet warmly conversational, these poems reunite us with our own yearnings, paying tender tribute to all that can be touched, and lived, and remembered." ****Nandana Dev Sen, translator of** ***Acrobat: Poems by Nabaneeta Dev Sen** #### Richard Jeffrey Newman’s **T’shuvah,* once again, provides us with haunting images of our multi-faceted, complex world. Vacillating between a close first-person point of view, an expansive omniscient perspective, and every take of the world in between, Newman steers the reader on the interior journeys of speakers with incessant questions for our consideration. This is extraordinary work that propels us to think of the world in alternate takes, in meaningful possibility, and ultimately, in the context of redemption. A brilliant addition to the canon. ****Jacqueline Jones LaMon, author of** ***What Water Knows** ### Words For What Those Men Have Done URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/words-for-what-those-men-have-done/ Last updated: 2024-11-24T18:12:14.000Z Published in 2017 by [Guernica Editions](https://guernicaeditions.com/en-us/products/words-for-what-those-men-have-done?ref=richardjnewman.com), *Words For What Those Men Have Done* continues my exploration, begun in *The Silence Of Men,* of how surviving childhood sexual violence has shaped my life as man, impacting how I understand, personally and politically, my own manhood and masculinity, my sexuality, what it means to be a friend, a lover, a husband, and a father. The animating question at the center of this book is *What does it means for a man who has survived sexual violence to commit himself never to standing on the same side of gender and sexual politics as the men who violated him?* Unfortunately, *Words For What Those Men Have Done* is officially out of print, though Guernica Editions has a few copies left. If you're interested in one, I encourage you to buy [directly from them](https://guernicaeditions.com/en-us/products/words-for-what-those-men-have-done?ref=richardjnewman.com), since it's important to support small presses. If, on the other hand, you would like to get a signed copy, please [contact me directly](https://www.richardjnewman.com/contact/). - **Buy from the publisher, [Guernica Editions](https://guernicaeditions.com/en-us/products/words-for-what-those-men-have-done?ref=richardjnewman.com).** - **Buy a signed copy [directly from me](https://www.richardjnewman.com/contact/).** ### Reviews #### "When sex is used to violate a human being, it cripples the soul. In response to such violation, Richard Newman has written **Words For What Those Men Have Done* as a message to his son, who will one day need to make a decision regarding his allegiance to the victim or the violator. In poem after poem, Newman delves into the nature of violence, and the most startling is the poet facing his own violation, wondering how to love despite being traumatized and how to love without violating another." ****Pramila Venkateswaran, author of** ***The Singer of Alleppey** #### "In many ways, this collection represents a man’s 'Me-too,' a reminder that one doesn’t have to be female to have one’s life blighted by a predatory man in a position of greater power. Of course, thousands of boys harmed by unscrupulous priests could deliver this reminder, but few have felt empowered to do so; even fewer, as far as I know,have been poets...As I opened \[Words For What Those Men Have Done\], I steeled myself against lurid accounts of damaged woman and children. I turned out to be right in guessing the gist of the book, but wrong in arming myself against it. One of \[Newman's\] strengths lies in good pacing. The poet does not belabor the news we hear every day about the victimization of women and children everywhere. This poet has the humanity, mastery, and tact to make his words a source of enrichment." Read the whole review below. ****Sarah White,** ***American Book Review** [Sarah White's Review of Words For What Those Men Have Donein American Book ReviewSarah White's Review of Words For What Those Men Have Done.pdf694 KBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2024/11/Sarah-White-s-Review-of-Words-For-What-Those-Men-Have-Done.pdf "Download") ### The Silence Of Men URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/the-silence-of-men/ Last updated: 2025-06-21T22:36:08.000Z Published in 2006 by [CavanKerry](https://www.cavankerrypress.org/product/the-silence-of-men/?ref=richardjnewman.com) Press,*The Silence of Men* explores what it means to be a man who breaks the silences in which society all-too-often forces men to exist, in particular the silencing of men who have been sexually victimized, as I was, during childhood. In his Foreword, Yusef Komunyakaa wrote, > *\[T\]he speaker in this collection suggests that we are responsible for what we know, for what we’ve witnessed and dreamt, and for what we don’t say to ourselves and each other…\[T\]here’s a moral gesture at the heart of this collection, but the poetry isn’t moralistic or didactic. In fact, when the narrator says, ‘I’m not being hard on myself,’ we know that the whole journey has been about freedom, renewal, and release.”* I encourage you to buy *The Silence of Men* directly from [CavanKerry Press](https://www.cavankerrypress.org/product/the-silence-of-men/?ref=richardjnewman.com), since it's important to support small presses. If, on the other hand, you would like to get signed copy, please [contact me directly](https://www.richardjnewman.com/contact/). - **Buy from the publisher,** [**CavanKerry Press**](https://www.cavankerrypress.org/product/the-silence-of-men/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**.** - **Buy a signed copy** [**directly from me**](https://www.richardjnewman.com/contact/)**.** ### Reviews #### “Newman...explores the space between old-fashioned male silence and contemporary male sound and presents poems that force us to rethink the place of poetry in masculinity studies. Newman’s poems explore the tension between insensitivity and sensitivity through art, and show us what happens when a feeling man grapples with the problems of being a man today.” Read the full review below. ****Fred Gardaphe, in** ***Men and Masculinities** [Fred Gardaphe's Review of The Silence Of Menin Men and MasculinitiesFred Gardaphe's Review of The Silence Of Men.pdf27 KBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2024/11/Fred-Gardaphe-s-Review-of-The-Silence-Of-Men.pdf "Download") #### “Social construction of reality begins in the cradle, and Newman’s poems return repeatedly to this theme, even though it leads so often to 'The silence between us \[which\] is the silence of men.' Here 'disfigured manhood' becomes precisely an indicator of what we might term disfigured 'humanhood,' for I could imagine such a volume (perhaps I’ve read it already) being written from a woman’s perspective.” Read the full review below. ****William G. Doty,** ***Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality** [William G. Doty's Review of The Silence Of Menin Journal of Men, Mascuilnities and SpiritualityWilliam G. Doty's Review of The Silence Of Men.pdf179 KBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2024/11/William-G.-Doty-s-Review-of-The-Silence-Of-Men.pdf "Download") #### “Just as I finished reading **The Silence of Men*...a new friend confided that he’d learned a secret about his father—a secret that shook the foundation on which he’d built his life. He said he wanted to write about it, but didn’t know where to start. I recommended your book.” Read the whole letter on [The Great American Pinup](https://greatamericanpinup.blogspot.com/2006/09/silence-of-men-open-letter-to-richard.html?ref=richardjnewman.com). ****Shawn, “The Silence Of Men: An Open Letter To Richard Jeffrey Newman,” on** [****The Great American Pinup**](https://greatamericanpinup.blogspot.com/2006/09/silence-of-men-open-letter-to-richard.html?ref=richardjnewman.com)****.** ### ### Four By Four #25 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-25/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:19:48.000Z # Four Things To Read **One Book** [Days When I Hide My Corpse In A Cardboard Box](https://www.zephyrpress.org/product-page/days-when-i-hide-my-corpse-in-a-cardboard-box?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Lok Fung, translated by Eleanor Goodman: Lok Fung is the pseudonym of Natalia S. H. Chan, a poet from Hong Kong. Eleanor Goodman, who read for [First Tuesdays](https://mailchi.mp/f823ca690246/first-tuesdays-presents-eleanor-goodman-june-7-2022?e=%5BUNIQID%5D&ref=richardjnewman.com) back in 2022, is a Research Associate at the Harvard University Fairbank Center with numerous translations of contemporary Chinese literature to her credit. As I read this book, navigating the syntactic moves and disjunctions that the almost complete lack of punctuation make visible, I kept thinking about how Goodman focused in her introduction on Fong’s “artistic obsession” with dance. While Goodman’s focus is on dance in the content of Fong’s work, however, I found myself thinking about the way the lack of punctuation in the poems turns the movement of the language into a kind of dance. What I mean is this: the lack of punctuation forces the reader to figure out the syntactical relationship between the clauses and phrases in a poem, in particular where the sentence boundaries are, in the same way that, because there is no obvious “punctuation” in a dance, the audience needs to discern for themselves the interior structure of the movements being performed before them, not just the boundaries–where one section ends and another begins–but also the syntax, because there is a way in which dance, like poetry, cannot help but be linear, that connects and creates relationships between and among movements across those boundaries. I also want to tell you about one other moment in my experience of reading this book. The final poem, “Tale of a Modern Day Knight,” ends with these lines: perhaps it’s a circle, a pattern, a letter/even a riddle, a line of poetry/but I know it absolutely isn’t/a vow.“ I almost never have the experience of finishing a book of poems and feeling the final poem ”click“ into place like a final puzzle piece, but I felt these lines like that. Many of the poems in this book, perhaps all of them, seemed to me to be about proposing what things ”might be“ in order to illuminate by implication what the speaker knows for sure, and wants the reader to know for sure, that they are not. Here, for example, are two lines from ”October in the City: A Book of Amnesia:“ *When the sick city lies down and becomes an occupied stone/the canals of the body stir the consciousness awake*. This is my entirely intuitive response, but, for me, the subtext of these lines, and of much of the book as a whole, mirrors the structure of the lines from ”Tale of a Modern Day Knight:" *perhaps this is what the city is and perhaps this is what living in that city feels like, but knowing this means we know for sure that the city and its inhabitants are not \[and then you need to fill in the blank here with your understanding.* Each of the poems in this book seems to me to be a journey through some variation of that proposition. It’s a journey worth taking. **Three Articles** [In a Poem, Just Who Is ‘the Speaker,’ Anyway?](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/books/review/on-poetry-who-is-the-speaker.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.BE4.m-SB.Bp7jp19dm2qO&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Elisa Gabbert: *“The question here, the one I think my friend was asking, is this: Does our use of “the speaker” as shorthand — for responsible readership, respectful acknowledgment of distance between poet and text — sort of let us off the hook? Does it give us an excuse to think less deeply than we might about degrees of persona and spokenness in any given poem?”* I like this question a lot, and I like the way Gabbert teases out the implications of using the term “speaker,” as opposed to persona, as a way of acknowledging the distance between the person writing a poem and the voice that person constructs to speak in and through a poem. It’s not quite, as she suggests a persona, the way the speaker in a dramatic monologue, a la Robert Browning, is a persona, but it is, or at least can be, as she says elsewhere, a way that “the poem always gives my own I, my mind’s I, the magic ability to say things I wouldn’t in speech or in prose.” In my own work/practice, I don’t experience this as magic, though I understand why someone else might. Rather, for me, the poem is a field, or a context, or a staging area, or a path where I can say the things I need to say, whether they are autobiographically true or not, to map the emotional territory the poem explores. I was at a conference recently where a poet, speaking about the way her work reflected her autobiography, said explicitly, “I am the speaker of my poems,” claiming the gap between poet and speaker-of-the-poem as part of who she is. I’m not sure she was saying that everything in her poems is factually, autobiographically, true, but if that was what she meant, then I think she was being disingenuous about herself and her art. If, on the other hand, she meant that the speaker of her poems is no less a part of her than her factual, autobiographical self, and that it can therefore be meaningfully talked about *as* her, then I think she said something very much worth thinking more deeply about. [The Poet Who Commands a Rebel Army](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/16/world/asia/myanmar-poet-ko-maung-saungkha.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.CE4.PqDl.wZgajXwLEyfN&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Hannah Beech: *“The commander, Ko Maung Saungkha, has raised an army of 1,000 soldiers. But his background is not military. Instead, he is a poet, one of at least three who are leading rebel forces in Myanmar and inspiring young people to fight on the front lines of the brutal civil war.”*W. H. Auden wrote in “[In Memory of W. B. Yeats](https://poets.org/poem/memory-w-b-yeats?ref=richardjnewman.com)” that “poetry makes nothing happen,” which has always sounded to me very much like the Daoist exhortation to “do nothing,” which, as I understand it, is not a call to inaction, but rather a call against trying to force something specific to happen; and Auden seems to see poetry in a similar vein, because he goes on to say that poetry “survives” as, or because it is, “a way of happening.” It’s interesting to think about that in the context of what Beech reports on in this article about a Myanmar poet, Ko Maung Saungkha, who has become a military leader in the war against that country’s dictatorship. “Myanmar,” Beech writes, “is a country entranced by poetry. Poets are celebrities, accorded the kind of adulation that, in other places, might be showered on actors or athletes. And verse, delivered in punchy rhymes made easy by the Burmese language, has long been political, used to galvanize the masses.” Myanmar, in other words, seems to be a country where poetry can indeed make something happen, and the government seems to know that. “Since the coup,” Beech goes one, “at least [half a dozen poets have been killed](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/world/asia/myanmar-poets.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.Gk4.57xo.F1TGawQyQhRi&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), as the military junta crushes dissent. More than 30 poets were imprisoned in the aftermath of the coup, according to the National Poets’ Union.” [A 12-Minute Show, Played Only Once, Just Might Live Forever](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/style/bluecoat-drum-corps-championship.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.E04.LEjW.g1-iulMybZQx&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Chris Almeida: *“This is modern drum corps. It is a competition for mostly college-age students, but the groups are not affiliated with any schools. When they are in season, the corps consume the lives of their members — perfecting a single performance, and then continuing to drill it until it is somewhere beyond perfection. Rehearsals last up to 12 hours a day, and intense tours dominate the performers’ lives in July before culminating in a world championship in Indianapolis…The activity is a study in passion — or perhaps delusion. It is not easy. It does not make money. It does not clearly translate to a career. And it ends; groups like the Bluecoats that compete in Drum Corps International’s world-class division are made up exclusively of participants under the age of 22.”* I wrote a little bit in [Four by Four #19](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-19/) about playing bass baritone bugle in my neighborhood drum corps when I was a teenager. I don’t think, though, that I have ever seen drum corps get the kind of coverage that it gets in this article, which comes pretty close to describing what drum corps do as pursuing art for art’s sake. The point made by the title is worth unpacking a little bit, since it is true that each drum corps performance is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, except for the encore performance that the world champion corps gets to play. Putting that performance together is a nearly non-transactional experience for the young people who participate, which I thought about a lot while reading the article, given how transactional life in general has become, especially in the college classrooms where I teach. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See All these images, taken from the [Metropolitan Museum of Art](https://www.metmuseum.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com), are in the public domain. ## **Ecorché- Torso of a Male Cadaver** [Eugène Delacroix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne%5FDelacroix?ref=richardjnewman.com), French, 1828? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fce50dfb9-6ce5-431d-9636-728ce92fe063_2463x3910-jpeg.jpg) The posthumous sale of the contents of Delacroix’s studio contained 126 of his anatomical drawings. None of the known surviving examples are dated, and Delacroix never mentioned the practice in written accounts. However, a drawing by the sculptor Henri de Triqueti of a corpse in a pose similar to this one records Delacroix’s presence with him at a hospital in June 1828\. This work may derive from that same visit. Triqueti’s testimony makes clear that this was not an activity restricted to Delacroix’s student years. By this time, Delacroix had exhibited paintings in three Salons and earned considerable renown. ### Portable diptych sundial Probably by Charles Bloud, ca. 1666–80 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fe10182ce-a479-4308-aa95-f2f06e696d81_1732x1872-jpeg.jpg) Although Charles Bloud (1653-1699) was the inventor of this variety of azimuth sundial, several other Dieppe sundial makers, including Gabriel Bloud and Jacques Senecal, are known to have made and signed similar sundials. The principle by which their sundials worked is based on a variation in the magnetic declination of the area around Dieppe which existed for only a short period in the seventeenth century, beginning about 1666. ## Songs of Innocence- The Little Boy Found William Blake, 1789, printed ca. 1825 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fd4df2c17-e162-4ec7-979e-577218bce920_3201x3511-jpeg.jpg) Blake etched twenty-seven printing plates for [Songs of Innocence](https://www.blakearchive.org/work/songsie?ref=richardjnewman.com) in 1789, completing those for the Songs of Experience in 1794\. He then printed and hand-colored copies of the combined sets over succeeding decades as patrons ordered them, each one visually distinct. Verse and image work together to celebrate poetic inspiration and reveal aspects of the divine as expressed through nature. The poetic voice is often that of a child, whose emotions range from delight to fear, with darker feelings usually resolved in the earlier Songs of Innocence by adult intervention. This first group of Songs was shaped by the heady early days of the French Revolution, when British liberals and radicals believed that true reform was imminent on both sides of the Channel. The artist Edward Calvert met Blake around 1825 and commissioned this copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience soon thereafter. These richly decorated pages, with their deeply saturated hues and distinctive ornamental borders, reveal Blake’s late vision and the order is established by small red numbers at upper right. ## **Study of the left hand and arm of Meditation** [Auguste Rodin](https://rodinmuseum.org/collection/about-auguste-rodin?ref=richardjnewman.com), modeled ca. 1894, cast before 1912 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f5487d603-ed49-4722-b0dd-219701a66f64_4000x2960-jpeg.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To Each of these pieces is from [The Blue Notebooks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FBlue%5FNotebooks?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Max Richter. Richter originally composed the piece in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and described it "a protest album about Iraq, a meditation on violence – both the violence that I had personally experienced around me as a child and the violence of war, at the utter futility of so much armed conflict." Perhaps these four selections will inspire you to listen to the entire album. ## **The Blue Notebooks** ## Shadow Journal ## On The Nature of Daylight ### **Horizon Variations** --- # Four Things About Me I am afraid of roller coasters, of any amusement park ride designed to leave your stomach in your mouth or make you dizzy or both at the same time. I have no idea why, but I remember very clearly being at Coney Island with my father and my brother when he and were little boys. We were on some kind of tilting and spinning ride and I was crying. I have this memory of my father reaching over and trying to comfort me, reassuring me that it would be over soon, though of course it wasn’t over sooner enough; and I remember clearly feeling betrayed. He had talked me into trying the ride by saying that it wouldn’t go very fast, that it spun very slowly, and that he’d be right next to me the whole time. It went way too fast; the spinning made me nauseous; and while it was true that he sat next to me, that fact did absolutely nothing to calm the fear and near panic that set in almost as soon as the ride started. I get my love of reading from my mother. I only remember the titles of two books that I pulled from the shelves that were in our living room—[*The Other*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FOther%5F%28Tryon%5Fnovel%29?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Thomas Tryon, which gave me nightmares, and [*The World Is Made Of Glass*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FWorld%5FIs%5FMade%5Fof%5FGlass?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Morris West, which I also wrote about in [Four by Four #21](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-21/)—but I knew reading was important to her and that sense of importance is what I absorbed as much as anything else. (I know I read more than those two books—she had, for example, some volumes of Victorian pornography that I know I read—but I don’t remember the titles.) When I was a graduate student in Syracuse University’s Creative Writing MA program in the mid-1980s, my friends and I used to go dancing at a place called, appropriately enough, POETS, which stood for Put Off Everything Till Saturday. I still think that’s a cool name for a bar with a dance floor in a college town. My wife, though, receives a mail order catalogue for women’s clothing–the old fashioned kind, in the mail–and its title is *Poetry,* which is bad enough, but, as far as I can tell, there is nothing in the interior of the catalogue that capitalizes on the title in any way, shape, or form. Here’s an example of what the cover looks like: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2ff314a7e9-0756-4dd9-811d-e965e57609bf_3024x4032-jpeg.jpg) When I was in seventh grade—my teacher’s name was Mr. Kaiser—I won second place in my junior high school’s science fair. Using, if i remember correctly, a piece of meat, I grew a culture in a petrie dish, documenting how long it took for me to be able to see microorganisms through the microscope we had in our classroom. Then I froze the culture and documented how long it took after I thawed it out for microorganisms to reappear. I must have articulated a hypothesis I was trying to prove, though I don’t remember what it was, and so I don’t remember what I thought the experiment showed, but I know that I called it an experiment in cryobiology. Back then, my primary academic interest was science, not English, though it was a toss up as to whether I would pursue biology or—I was also learning to write programs in Basic—computer science. I was very disappointed, therefore, when I switched schools and went to yeshiva. Unlike the junior high school I’d attended the previous year, they had no computers. Their computer science program consisted of teaching us how to program using Fortran punch cards. They also didn’t have microscopes or any of the other equipment we had in the junior high school, and I did *not* like the woman who was our science teacher. I don’t know if I would have ended up a literature person anyway, but those two factors nudged me in that direction and, by the time I graduated, there was no question that writing and literature were my primary academic interests. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #24 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-24/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:20:10.000Z # A Correction and A Request In the last issue of [*It All Connects*](https://itallconnects.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/147158540?referrer=%2Fpublish%2Fposts)*,* I shared with you a poem from my second, *Words For What Those Men Have Done.* Some of you, I know, clicked on the link that took you to the website for Guernica Editions, which published the book in 2017\. Unfortunately—and I forgot to account for this when I sent my newsletter out—the book is now out of print. If you clicked on the link thinking you might be interested in getting a copy of the book, please consider [contacting me directly](mailto:richardjeffreynewman@icloud.com). (You can also simply reply to this email.) I have copies of the book and I’ll be happy to discuss getting one to you. Also, if you, or anyone you know, has connections with a publisher that is willing to discuss putting books that have gone out of print back on the market, I’d love to discuss *Words For What Those Men Have Done With You.* Circumstances made it impossible for me to do the kind of promotion the book deserved when it came out, and I do think, in part because I think the poems in it [have become relevant again](https://itallconnects.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/147158540?referrer=%2Fpublish%2Fposts), it’s a book that should be out there. You can read a review of the book [here](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/iim37oq9bdw5qdq4gjfy3/sarah%5Fwhite%5Fthose%5Fwords%5Fthose%5Fmen.pdf?rlkey=4lrjmkxllb1spcje5og4a929l&dl=0&ref=richardjnewman.com). # Four Things To Read [Why Do People Make Music?](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/15/science/universal-music-evolution.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.BE4.XH3-.vGL0tKM55Krd&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Carl Zimmer: “Across cultures, the researchers found, songs share certain features not found in speech, suggesting that Darwin might have been right: Despite its diversity today, music might have evolved in our distant ancestors.” There is a reason people call music “the universal language.” Put any number of musicians in a room together, with their instruments, and even if they cannot communicate any other way, they will find some way of making music together. This article summarizes a [study](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adm9797?ref=richardjnewman.com)which suggests that there may be a set of acoustical features shared by all sung music, regardless of its culture of origin. Zimmer also links to [another study](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.01.069?ref=richardjnewman.com) which found that there are neurons in the brain that “only responded to singing — not speech or music played on instruments.” When I was getting my MA in TESOL—and my MA was really an applied linguistics degree—one of the more fascinating topics of discussion in the field was the search for language universals, features shared by all languages. The question of why people make music and the possibility that there are “music universals” seems to me part of the same overall discussion. The beginning of [yet another study](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.29.526133v1?ref=richardjnewman.com) Zimmer links to suggests that it is: “Humans produce two primary forms of vocal communication: speaking and singing. What is the basis for these two categories? Is the distinction between them based primarily on culturally specific, learned features, or do consistent acoustical cues exist that reliably distinguish speech and song worldwide?” In terms of language universals here are two: all known languages have nouns and verbs and all spoken languages have sounds that can be divided into vowels and consonants. The question then becomes: Do those two facts tell us anything truly meaningful about who we are as human beings? [The Icelandic love secret: should we all try ‘sex before coffee’?](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/aug/07/icelandic-love-secret-sex-before-coffee?sfmc%5Fid=99545566&nypr%5Fmember=Unknown&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Zoe Williams: “’Sex before coffee’ is the go-to cliche of Scandinavian romantic habits, but in each country it means something different. In Sweden, it’s shorthand for quite an upfront, efficient dating style. Only in Iceland is it meant literally: whatever happens— whether you end up having coffee another day, or more sex, or moving in together, or pretending it never happened—any possible romantic permutation will start with sex rather than a date.” An interesting article that unpacks some of the cultural reasons Icelandic culture is so relaxed, matter-of-fact, and in many ways distinctly egalitarian when it comes to sex. What I found most interesting is when Williams gets to the *but:* “It’s better to be young, in a country where everyone knows everyone and constantly takes their clothes off, than not young.” There’s also some fascinating analysis of the fact that Iceland’s population is so small, under 400,000, making it truly a place where “everyone knows and/or is related to everyone,” and how that impacts the dating/sex/relationship scene. I was intrigued to read one woman’s critique of Iceland’s gender roles. A woman named Gudrun is quoted: “Yes, we had the first female president, but women and their roles in the household, it’s very old-fashioned, at least when you’re 50.” I’m not sure if she means that roles become traditional once a woman reaches that age, or if she’s making a statement about (or about the need for) generational change, but it does make the point that power in sexual/gendered relationship gets negotiated one way or the other no matter what the context is. [Palestinian Islamic Jihad: “Oslo Is Over”](https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/oslo-is-over?publication%5Fid=2510348&post%5Fid=146643956&isFreemail=true&r=1gwysa&triedRedirect=true&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Jeremy Scahill: "The West had its issues with the Jews. In short, it could be said that antisemitism is a European problem that did not exist in the East. It was solved, however, at the expense of the Palestinian people and the region. The Zionist project is not about the Jews in the first place. Rather, it is a Western colonization project that aims to control the region and preclude its independence and development." This is a quote from Dr. Mohammed Al-Hindi's response to the first question Jeremy Scahill asked in this interview. Al-Hindi is the second highest-ranking official in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and reading his responses to Scahill’s questions is the first time I have had a chance, as the introduction to the interview states, "to examine the perspectives of a top figure in the current Palestinian armed resistance." There's a lot to chew on. One of the things I have been chewing on for while now is how to come to terms with the fact that Al-Hindi's reading of "the Zionist project" as a Western one that has nothing to do with the Jews can be, if you look at it from outside the kind of Jewish education I received, a totally supportable reading. I'm not suggesting it is the only reading, or that it is, necessarily, the most accurate reading; but if you think about the fact that the West, and certainly Western Europe, has not been the most hospitable place for the Jews, and that the West is far more powerful than the Jews, then the ways in which Jewish self-interest and the self-interest of the West coincide in Zionism can certainly seem to be more about the West's manipulation of Jewish self-interest than an honest support of it. I also think it's important to acknowledge that there are Jews who have the same, or a similar analysis. (I think as well that what Al-Hindi says about antisemitism being a European problem needs to be unpacked, since it's not like there was no such thing as Jew-hatred in the Muslim world, even if it did not take the same historical form as European antisemitism.) I also find the way Al-Hindi talks about his organization's resistance being rooted in Islam fascinating, since I think there are real parallels between the way that idea gets played out (in some of Hamas' rhetoric as well) and the way many Jews not only will talk about Zionism being rooted in a Jewish connection to the land that is, almost inevitably traced back to Judaism, but will then go on the frame Zionism as a "Jewish civil rights movement," as, in other words, a form of resistance against oppression. About that I want to say two additional things: First, it is important to acknowledge the fact that Jewish lives in Europe were legally circumscribed in ways that are parallel to what African Americans experienced in the United States up until the civil rights movement. So, while the terms "civil rights movement" when applied to Zionism, which originated in Europe, may be anachronistic in some ways, it is, or can be, metaphorically apt. Second, I am not trying to suggest an equivalence between how Al-Hindi and others root Palestinian resistance in Islam and the way some Jews root Zionism in Judaism, especially if we are talking about Zionism as embodied in the policies and actions of the Israeli government, but I am intrigued by the ways in which each group connects the notion of peoplehood back to religious tradition. [The Paris Olympics Are A Lesson In Greenwashing](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-paris-olympics-are-a-lesson-in-greenwashing/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Jules Boykoff: "Yet in the city where global leaders signed a [landmark agreement](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/paris-agreement-offers-new-climate-covenant-with-future/?ref=richardjnewman.com) in 2015 to limit postindustrial global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we’re getting a recycled version of [green capitalism](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-cup-in-qatar-is-a-climate-catastrophe/?ref=richardjnewman.com)that is oblivious in its incrementalism, vague with its methodology and loose with its accountability. It’s too late for Paris, but if the Olympic organizers truly want to be sustainable, the Games need to reduce their size, limit the number of tourists who travel from afar, thoroughly greenify their capacious supply chains and open up their eco-books for bona fide accountability. Until then, the Olympics are a greenwash, a pale bit of lip service delivered at a time when climatological facts demand a systematic transformation in splendid Technicolor." Boykoff takes a tough look at the environmental impact of the Olympic games, acknowledging the "significant sustainability strides" made by the Paris Olympics,but focusing on a report by Carbon Watch and Éclaricies, two environmental organizations, that criticizes organizers for their "lack of transparency and precision." There are details in the essay that I understand in principle—like the idea that a renewable energy certificate does not necessarily translate into the "actual procurement of renewable energy"—and details that are crystal clear in all senses, like the environmental damage the Olympic games created in Tahiti, which is where the surfing competition took place. Overall, the article, for me, was a good illustration of how complicated, politically and logistically, tackling environmental issues really is. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See ## **Cupid wrestling with Pan, amongst the clouds, with two allegorical women seated at left** [Jacob Matham](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search?q=Jacob%20Matham&perPage=20&sortBy=Relevance&offset=0&pageSize=0&ref=richardjnewman.com) (Netherlandish), After [Cavaliere d'Arpino (Giuseppe Cesari)](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search?q=Cavaliere%20d%27Arpino%20%28Giuseppe%20Cesari%29&perPage=20&sortBy=Relevance&offset=0&pageSize=0&ref=richardjnewman.com) Italian Publisher [Hendrick Goltzius](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search?q=Hendrick%20Goltzius&perPage=20&sortBy=Relevance&offset=0&pageSize=0&ref=richardjnewman.com) (Netherlandish), 1598–1632 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f32ba2af5-0cf1-466f-9525-8cf261bfd909_3168x2151-jpeg.jpg) ### A Rider and a Dead Horse in a Landscape Artist: Gustave Doré (French, Strasbourg 1832–1883 Paris) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f54428326-064b-4e76-849d-95cb8c1fc16a_2667x3345-jpeg.jpg) ## Maffet Ledger: Drawing, 1874–81 Oklahoma, Southern and Northern Cheyenne, The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Purchase, Nelson A. Rockefeller Gift, 1968 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f485d1355-c540-4dfb-9c9b-af9479581539_3947x2055-jpeg.jpg) ## **Vanneaux et Sarcelles** [Félix Bracquemond](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search?q=F%C3%A9lix%20Bracquemond&perPage=20&sortBy=Relevance&offset=0&pageSize=0&ref=richardjnewman.com) French 1862 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f7e876c2a-7b70-4d6c-9d63-7598dd590ec7_2663x3768-jpeg.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ## **Three Pieces for Four Hands: No. 2, Stokes** By Philip Glass, on *Alexandre Theraud and Friends* ## Crystal Silence: Chick Corea ## Sandman: America ### **The Gallows From Gaspard De La Nuit (Le Gibet), Maurice Ravel** --- # Four Things About Me I played a lot of sports when I was younger. I was starting center on my high school basketball team, though when I switched from yeshiva to public school, I was too short for that position and made the team as a second-string forward. The school’s football coach tried to lure me with promises of potential college scholarships to try out as a wide receiver, since I was tall enough, could jump pretty high, and was a fast runner. I wasn’t interested in the rigorous practice schedule; it would have interfered with too much else that I wanted to be able to do, like march in the drum & bugle corp. I didn’t play college sports, except on my dorm’s soccer and football intramural teams. I played goalie for the former and took a turn at quarterback for the latter, except that one of my dorm mates complained that I threw the ball too hard. It’s funny how stereotypes work, though. People have assumed both because I am a college English professor and that I am not a sports fan—at least not anymore; I used to enjoy following the New York teams—that I’ve never played sports and/or that I don’t enjoy watching the games, as if the only way one can enjoy sports is to care about which team wins. I was a very serious chess player as a teenager. Along with two friends, Michael and Robbie, I studied books of openings to the point where I knew their names and the moves by heart; I learned middle-game strategy; and I became quite adept at mating my opponent with as many different combinations of pieces as possible. Michael, Robbie, and I played regularly, and talked chess for hours. Only Robbie, if I remember correctly, went beyond that and actually got rated, though I have no idea what his rating was. I’m not sure why I stopped playing. I have on occasion played friends and really enjoyed it, but I can feel how much I’ve lost in terms of discipline, of being able to see moves ahead, to hold in my head the different moves my opponent might make, and, in general, the desire to win. Maybe that would all come back to me if I put my mind to it, I don’t know, but even as I write this, I can feel that I’m not really motivated in that direction. I met my first Holocaust denier when I was in high school. After seventh grade, I’d switched from the public schools in my neighborhood to the yeshiva which I attended till my junior year. The yeshiva did not have a twelfth grade. Instead, you could choose between going to Israel to learn in a yeshiva there for a year or enrolling in an early college program, where you learned Torah in the morning and took college classes in the afternoon. I decided to do neither and returned to my local high school for my senior year. It was a strange experience. Before I switched schools I had been one of two, or maybe three, top students in the class, and when I returned, the classmates who had been at the top with me, and who were still at the top, were concerned that my grades would be high enough to upset their rankings and that I might even bump the girl whom everyone was sure would be the valedictorian out of that honor. For this reason, among others, they viewed me with suspicion and many would have nothing to do with me. Eventually, though, a girl named Joan invited to her house for dinner. I don’t remember anything about how the invitation came about, or that there was any particular chemistry between us—romantic/sexual or otherwise—but I do remember liking her. I also don’t remember how the subject of the Holocaust came up, but I can still see her father shaking his head at the head of the table and saying, “There’s no way the Germans killed six million Jews. Maybe a couple of thousand is all.” I have a vague memory that he launched into an explanation of how he came to that conclusion, but the sense memory I have of that moment is an overwhelming nausea. I recall nothing else about that dinner, except that I know I did not walk out. I think Joan attempted to correct her father, or at least to change the subject, but I’m not sure. I do know, though, that Joan and I never became friends after that, which was too bad. She was the first of my classmates, and the only girl, who tried to befriend me in that way. My best friend that year was a guy named Tony. We were so close that everyone thought we were gay. I don’t know that we would ever have become lovers, but I definitely loved him. One day, when we were sitting in my room, he turned to me and said, “People are talking about us. They’re saying we’re too close.” This was news to me, though when I look back I am not surprised that I didn’t hear about it. I was too new to the school to be connected in that way to any of the various gossip networks. “Who cares what people think,” I said. “We’re friends.” His eyes went wide with a kind of sadness I don’t think I’d ever seen before. “Maybe they’re right,” he almost whispered. “Maybe we are too close.” We never talked about it again, but when we were both home from college after our freshman year, we met up at a local bar—this was back when the drinking age was eighteen—where we’d hung out a lot. I thought it was going to be just the two of us, but he brought his girlfriend with him. I remember nothing about that evening—not what we talked about, not whether I liked his girlfriend—except that it was awkward, as if he and I were strangers meeting for the first time, and I think that was the last time we spoke. Years later, we connected briefly on Facebook and I found out he was married to a man. One more bit of the story: During my freshman year of college I ended up standing in line at the registrar with the girl who sat next to me in English class. “You know,” she said, “everyone thought you and Tony were gay. That’s why none of the girls who thought you were cute ever flirted with you.” I didn’t know how to respond to that, but I don’t think ever saw or spoke to her again. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Three Poems Of Mine That Should Never Again Have Become As Relevant As They Are Now URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/three-poems-of-mine-that-should-never/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:20:41.000Z **When I first shared these poems with you** in June 2022—two from [*The Silence of Men*](https://cavankerrypress.org/product/the-silence-of-men/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=three-poems-of-mine-that-should-never-have-become) and one from [*Words For What Those Men Have Done*](https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771832090?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=three-poems-of-mine-that-should-never-have-become)*—*this is how I introduced them: > Sometimes you publish a poem in response to the current moment, whatever that may be, and then the moment passes, and the poem no longer feels as urgent as it once did. In our current moment, as the right begins its prosecution of what are essentially two wars, one on the reproductive autonomy of anyone who can get pregnant and one on LGBTQ folks, three poems of mine have suddenly become more relevant than they ever should have been in the first place. Well, in light of both the overturning of *Roe v. Wade* in the *Dobbs* decision and the ways that J. D. Vance’s vice-presidential candidacy crystallizes the right’s agenda, the poems feel even more (and enragingly) relevant than they did two years ago. Each is a response to the right’s drive to police as out of bounds the bodies of all those who do not conform to its holy writ, the heteronormative social script, but I think the poems also address, at least subtextually, the ways in which that policing is imposed on those of us who are cisgendered and heterosexual, an aspect of state-sanctioned sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia that often goes unremarked. I hope, if the poems move you, that you will consider sharing them. Poetry is not the only way, but it is one important way that we can speak truth to power, whether the power we are speaking to is the one we are resisting or the power within ourselves from which we draw the strength for that resistance. --- Thank you for reading It All Connects.... This post is public so feel free to share it. --- **These two poems from *The Silence of Men*** emerged from my reading of [*Back Rooms: Voices from the Illegal Abortion Era*](https://books.google.com/books/about/Back%5FRooms.html?id=-JQEAQAAIAAJ&utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=three-poems-of-mine-that-should-never-have-become), edited by Ellen Messer and Kathryn E. May. The first one, “Melissa’s Story,” is spoken by a woman who pays a doctor for an illegal abortion. I think it speaks for itself: > **Melissa’s Story** > > The doctor gave instructions like a spy: > *Be there, seven pm, on the dot.* > *If you’re not, I’m gone. Don’t even think about* > *another appointment. Got it?* That day, > of course, there was traffic, and the money > had to be in small, old bills. *You will get* > *in my car as if we were lovers. At the spot,* > *you’ll step out first. Walk when and where I say.* > *Make a mistake and I leave. Understood?* > I did. Somehow it went without a snag, > and there I was, legs open on a bed, > with a man crouched between them like a dog. > > He reached into me and scraped away the life > I’d almost made, not yet mine to give. --- Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. --- **The second poem from *The Silence of Men*,** “Bill’s Story,” is spoken by a man some non-specified but significant number of years after his pregnant girlfriend was sent against her will, and against what the couple wanted for themselves, to what used to be called a home for unwed mothers, where she was forced to put the child they conceived up for adoption. While I think this poem also speaks for itself, and while in practical terms at least, we are no doubt farther away from men having to live Bill’s experience than we are from people who can get pregnant having to live Melissa’s, I do want to say that I wrote “Bill’s Story” because I think it’s important to give voice to experiences like his, which embody a rarely acknowledged stake that those of us who can’t get pregnant have in reproductive autonomy. **Bill’s Story** He talked about her like she was a boat. *You just loaded the ship, son. Where the wind* *takes it is out of your hands, hear? She’ll find* *a port to dock in. Just be glad you got* *what you wanted without getting shot.* Her parents were no better, as if I’d planned to make her pregnant. We begged them not to send her away. Once she was gone, they moved out. Not long after the birth-month, her single letter came: *I named him Bill. Then they took him.* Years later, I drove to where the postmark pointed. No one would speak to me. I still hope, though. My son is old enough to look, and I deserve to tell him who I am. --- Thank you for reading It All Connects.... This post is public so feel free to share it. --- **The poem I want to share with you** from *Words For What Those Men Have Done* is called “It Must Include The Body.” It is rooted in an actual conversation I had with my son before marriage equality became the law of the lands. The poem takes a while to get where it’s going, so just go with the flow of it. **It Must Include the Body** Belly like a watermelon stuffed up the front of her white cotton summer dress, the pregnant woman at the corner turns her back to me to face the direction she’ll cross the street in, and what she’s wearing flares from the waist down in a twirl that settles along the line of her hips till only the hem that falls to just above her ankles is still rippling, a flag waving surrender to this late September day. My eyes lift to her shoulders, follow the contour the fabric traces down from the loops through which her tanned arms emerge to the curve of her butt cheeks that bounce lightly as she steps back, just avoiding the taxi pulling up fast to the curb where she’s standing. She’s as tall as me or taller, black hair tied tight in a braid pointing like a compass to the small of her back, and her dress is not unlike the one you wore the night we wandered the beach, till the boardwalk lights were stars blinking at our backs and the campfires scattered across the sand were the signal flames of a distant town. The moon over the ocean cast our shadows behind us. You leaned against me, the blue cloth of what you were wearing bunched in my left hand. With my right, I found you wet, though *wet* doesn’t really do it justice. You half-purred a laugh as I stroked and pulled and gently parted the hair you let grow in once the lover who kept you shaved was gone. Lifting your face to mine, you whispered that the breeze was like the water’s breath just before it touched its tongue to you, and when I kissed the lips you shaped those words with, you came, calling your pleasure out to the open sea for the wind and tide to carry who-knows-where. Walking back to our hotel, I thought how you have only ever called it your vagina. Then, later, while you slept, I tried to list the rhyming words I’d need to write a sonnet, but China, Carolina, trichina, and angina were the best I could do. The off-rhymes— Montana, banana, cabana—were no better, but then I heard that New Yawk accent you love to mimic: designah, finah, minah, reclinah—that last one bringing back to me the woman from the conference, who worried over two more whiskeys than either of us should have had that three kids had made her “roomier down there” than any man other than the husband she’d been needing to leave for years would want, and so she hadn’t left him. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this,” she said, blushing that the man she planned to make the next night the only other man ever to touch her might think he should be moving “furniture in down there, not his dick.” “If a man cares that much about size,” I told her, “he doesn’t deserve an adulterous woman.” The light turns green, and the mother-to-be who started these lines crosses First Avenue into the rest of her life, the crowd she moves with large enough that the left turn I have to wait for will get me to our son’s school five minutes later than the fifteen he’s already missed. “But *why* does George Bush care if two men get married?” he asks from the back seat, giving voice yet again to last night’s bedtime conversation. “I know a man’s penis fits a woman’s vagina, but that’s not love; and people love babies, but babies aren’t love; and two women, if they get married, each one can have a baby, but even that’s not love. Two men can’t, but if they love each other, so what? You don’t marry a body; you marry a person. Bush doesn’t get this? He’s an idiot!” Our boy takes my hand for the few steps leading up to the building’s entrance, letting go, as has become his habit, just shy of the security guard’s line of sight. “Seriously,” he says, “when I get home you need to explain this to me.” Then he’s running fast as he can past the front desk, arms and legs pumping, backpack swinging, the long hair that some still take for a girl’s bouncing with each stride up around his head. I get back into the driver’s seat, turn the key, put the car in reverse. With my foot on the brake, my eyes in the rearview mirror stare back at me what I know is true: if you will not love the body, you cannot love the person. I’m glad our son can’t yet imagine that. --- Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #23 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-23/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:21:05.000Z # Four Things To Read ***One Book*** [*Let Us Believe In the Beginning Of The Cold Season: Selected Poems of Forough Farrokhzad*](https://www.ndbooks.com/book/let-us-believe-in-the-beginning-of-the-cold-season/?ref=richardjnewman.com), translated by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.: [Forough Farrokhzad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forugh%5FFarrokhzad?ref=richardjnewman.com) is one of Iran’s most important contemporary poets, both because of her vision—she dared to write unapologetically out of her own experience as a woman—and her craft, which broke new ground for Iranian verse in a whole lot of ways. Her life—the Wikipedia article I linked to above is a good place to start—was cut short by a car accident when she was thirty-two and she is one of those artists about whom it is impossible not to wonder what she would have accomplished had she not died so young. One of the things I admire about Elizabeth Gray’s translations is that they do not have the trace of romanticism/sentimentality that I detect in some of the other translations I have read. One thing I have learned about myself as a reader is that I tend to find connections between poets and writers that others do not necessarily see. I have heard Farrokhzad called Iran’s Sylvia Plath, and I understand why people would reach for that comparison, but the poet whose work came to my mind the most while I was reading this book was June Jordan. I have not yet thought very deeply about why, so I will offer here an intuitive leap that has primarily to do with craft. Jordan wrote somewhere—though I can’t find it now—about the concept of vertical rhythm, by which she means how the language moves itself down the page in a sort of contrapuntal relationship to the horizontal rhythm in each line. Gray’s translations, it seemed to me as I read, created precisely that kind of rhythm. I asked her about this, and this is what she wrote: “\[Farrokhzad\] uses syntax, especially parallel syntactical constructions that align with/ her line breaks or stanzas, to propel…the rhythm of the work forward…It’s often far more complex than mere anaphora.” I can’t speak to the original Persian, of course, but I think Gray’s translations capture that aspect of Farrokhzad’s poetry beautifully. ***Three Articles*** [Boiling Macaroni in Space? You’ll Need a Weirdly Shaped Pot](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/astronauts-would-need-an-unusual-pot-to-boil-food-in-space/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Andrew Chapman: “On Earth, gravity keeps water at the bottom of a pot. In microgravity, however, keeping water contained within the pot so it doesn’t float away is a big issue. But water molecules are also attracted to each other, and to any surface they touch; when water is weightless, capillary action and surface tension can have a much larger influence on keeping water in one area within the pot.” An interesting article about a potential solution to a problem that will have to be solved if we want to be able “to think about a life in space that is as much about thriving…as it is about surviving.” [Kamala Harris and the Threat of a Woman’s Laugh](https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2024/07/kamala-harris-laugh-trump-sexism/679215/?gift=9L5E0%5F00dQA8ldt%5F3rAKn-7CznvCgWcyAMZyd9jxPns&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share), by Sophie Gilbert: “In insisting that Harris’s laugh is somehow a sign of psychological depravity or narcotic-induced lack of inhibitions, conservatives are doing their best to couple Harris in people’s subconscious with a specific reaction: disgust.” A quick but interesting read on how the politics of disgust has been, and continues to be, deployed by conservatives against women who seek political power. Nor is this phenomenon restricted to the United States and west. The Taliban [beat women](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/laurabushtext%5F111701.html?ref=richardjnewman.com) who were seen laughing in public and, as Gilbert points out, as recently as 2014, a former Turkish deputy prime minister suggested that women not laugh in public, since their laughter could be read as a sign of “moral corruption.” [New York’s First Black Librarians Changed the Way We Read](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/19/arts/harlem-renaissance-librarians-libraries-books-literature.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.-U0.WJPD.ZehdQkppkyh4&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Jennifer Schuessler: “For Black librarians of the period, librarianship wasn’t just about hosting writers or connecting books with patrons. It was also about creating an intellectual infrastructure that made Black materials visible — and findable — in the first place.” This article not only makes visible the first Black women librarians and the role they played in building “communities of readers” for Black writers and scholars; it also shows how these women transformed library cataloging systems in ways that had profound political implications that went far beyond issues of race. Shuessler’s piece is especially important today when libraries are increasingly under attack by the right. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See ### The Plate Mansion by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) A traditional Japanese Ukyio-e style illustration of traditional Japanese folklore ghost, Okiku. Original from Library of Congress. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fef105ed0-c475-455f-91b2-7d697f84a192_1429x2014-jpeg.jpg) ## Astronomical chart illustration of the Monoceros, Canis Minor and the Atelier Typographique. By Sidney Hall (1831) Original from Library of Congress. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fea90d247-f37b-4301-8b92-690820ba21b0_3500x2450-jpeg.jpg) ## Tulip, by Johan Teyler (1648-1709). Original from The Rijksmuseum. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f6170eecb-8114-4d20-86e5-2673cee8faec_2656x3500-jpeg.jpg) ## Magnolia Branch with Four Flowers (ca. 1910-1925). Original from the Rijksmuseum. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fb3a8adb6-33da-45db-8117-5f3b096321dc_2845x2363-jpeg.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ## **Boat to Nowhere - Anoushka Shankar** ## Glen Gould - Ombres (Shadows) A composition by [Barbara Pentland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara%5FPentland?ref=richardjnewman.com) ### **The Path To The Bridge** The epigraph to [*T’shuvah*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2023/09/07/tshuvah/?ref=richardjnewman.com)is the lyric to a song, [*Kol Ha’Olam Kulo*](https://youtu.be/GxiFABQLMLw?si=6IHewIennF-UdYyj&ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* that I learned when I was in high school. (The link will take you to a version by [Ofra Haza](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ofra%5FHaza?ref=richardjnewman.com).) The words—כל העולם כולו גשר צר מאוד, והעיקר - לא לפחד כלל (*Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar me’od, veha’ikar lo le’fached klal*)—which were adapted by [Baruch Chait](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch%5FChait?ref=richardjnewman.com) from a saying by [Rabbi Nachman of Breslov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nachman%5Fof%5FBreslov?ref=richardjnewman.com), mean, roughly, “All the world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be overwhelmed by fear.” It’s a song I’ve been playing on the piano for a long time and it came to mean a lot to me while I was writing *T’shuvah.* I recorded this improvisation on my iPhone. I’ve called it “The Path To The Bridge” because the melody to the song itself does not appear until the very end. ## The Bridge Is A Blues This is also an improvisation on *Kol Ha’olam Kulo,* but played on a different piano and in a very different style. --- # Four Things About Me I expected to encounter profound cultural differences when I went to Seoul, South Korea to teach English for the 1986–87 academic year. One thing I did not anticipate at all, however—and this shows you how deep ethnocentric thinking runs—was that I would also experience what it was like to be a racial minority. I don’t remember how long I’d been in the country before it hit me that I did not see my face reflected back at me pretty much anywhere in Korean society—not in the people I saw on the street or rode the subway with; not in the faces and bodies I saw in magazines and on TV (though the Armed Forces Korea Network (AFKN) and the western movies that played in some theaters were obvious exceptions); not in the faces of the men and women who were part of my life, as students, friends, and/or lovers—but I do remember very clearly looking at myself in the mirror after a long night of being out with my friends and realizing that I’d forgotten what I looked like, that my western features seemed strange to me, “off” somehow. It’s not that I didn’t know what it was like to be a minority. As a Jew who’d experienced antisemitism, violent and otherwise for a good portion of my life, I knew that all too well. I had never experienced, however, what it was like to be defined as Other based solely on the inescapable facts of my physical appearance. Not that this experience was at all equivalent to what people of color experience here in the United States—I did not, for example, have to worry about racist violence of any sort—but I did learn what it was like to be feared and fetishized because of my appearance. More than once when I was riding the train, a baby started crying after taking one look at my face; and I also had the experience of older women coming up to me and, without asking permission, stroking what was then the thick black hair on my arms. Once, when I was out dancing with some friends and a woman started flirting with me, one of my friends, Jun Won, told me to be careful, that she was probably only interested in “riding the white horse,” a bucket-list kind of idiom that Korean men used back then—I don’t know if it is still current—for having sex with a white woman, but which, he explained, could apply to Korean women as well. The woman’s friends pulled her away because they’d decided to go to another club, so I have not idea if Jun Won was right. The only thing I remember about the first poem I wrote in which I explicitly confronted my experience as a survivor childhood sexual violence are the last two lines—*Your image fades./You cannot know.*—but I do not remember to whom they were addressed or the context in which the speaker of the poem said them. I wrote the poem in 1985, not too long after I dropped out of Syracuse University’s MA in Creative Writing. I sent it to Philip Booth, who’d led our second-semester workshop. I don’t know if he knew how far ahead of its time his response was, but reading it even all these years later can still bring tears to my eyes: > *That’s in all ways an important poem for you to have written, yes. And it’s a very considerable poem by any standard. What it means to have written it, to have found such terms for such experience, I don’t want to presume to guess. The important thing now is that you have done it, that is no longer entirely inside you but out there on the page, an act of courage and an event in its own right, a way of exploring in order to come to terms, to arrive in order—again—to begin.* The other thing I remember is not about the poem itself, but about how the editor of a journal to which I submitted it responded. I don’t recall the exact wording, but he’d written it on the back his rejection slip, which in my memory was blue. It went something like this, “You can call me whatever kind of heartless monster you want, but don’t ever submit another poem to this journal again.” While I’m sure I listened to him in the years immediately following that response, since I don’t remember the name of the journal and have no idea if it’s still in existence, I have no way of knowing if a time came when I did submit there again. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #22 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-22/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:21:33.000Z # Shameless Self-Promotion Back in April, [The\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_Experiment](https://www.theblankexperiment.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) premiered composer [Owen Bloomfield’s](https://www.owenbloomfield.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) setting of “Do Not Wish For Any Other Life,” a sequence that makes up the second section of my recent book of poems, [*T’shuvah*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2023/09/07/tshuvah/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*.* I finally posted the video to YouTube. I’ve put the text of the poem in the notes that accompany the video so you can follow along if you like. # Four Things To Read ***One Book*** [*A Common Violence*](https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/a-common-violence-by-pat-falk/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Pat Falk: Pat was my colleague for more than thirty years before she died during the pandemic, if I understood correctly, of post-surgery covid complications. I knew her as a teacher passionate about helping students come to the awareness of themselves that writing can bring, as a deeply committed poet, and as an unapologetic feminist. In this book, her last, she brings all those parts of herself to bear on the question of the violence—political, interpersonal, and within our own bodies—that is an inescapable part of the world we live in. The poems are spare and allusive, locating meaning in descriptions of the physical world that take on the significance of symbol and metaphor; and the truths they arrive at are correspondingly unadorned and beautiful in the simplicity with which they hold both what is dark and difficult and frightening, and what is filled with light and hope. I bought the book soon after it was published in 2019, but such is the way of the to-be-read-pile that I did not read it in time for me to tell her how much I admire it. It’s a book I recommend to you without hesitation. ***Three Articles*** [“The Resistance Will Continue,” Hamas Pledges Amid Gaza Ceasefire Talks](https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/the-resistance-will-continue-hamas?publication%5Fid=2510348&post%5Fid=146483857&isFreemail=true&r=1gwysa&triedRedirect=true&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Jeremy Scahill: “Hamas and Israel appear closer to some form of a Gaza ceasefire deal than at any time since the brief truce last November,” Scahill writes, but then goes on to draw out in detail just how politically complex, fraught, and intractable the situation is and is likely to continue to be over the long term. This article, thought-provoking and in many ways disheartening, is well worth reading. [After Learning Her TA Would Be Paid More Than She Was, This Lecturer Quit](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/6ljzl6thlasp734sz8fgk/After-Learning-Her-TA-Would-Be-Paid-More-Than-She-Was-This-Lecturer-Quit.pdf?rlkey=gbq48i3sj9fyohjqe5tmkrsyl&dl=0&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Adrienne Lu: “Reiterman, who holds a Ph.D. and has taught as a part-time lecturer at the university since 2020, recommended a former student of hers who had just graduated with a bachelor’s degree and would be pursuing a master’s in education. But when administrators started the hiring process and copied Reiterman on the emails, she was shocked to learn that the teaching assistant would earn $3,236 per month — about $300 over Reiterman’s own monthly pay.” The situation discussed in this article illustrates perfectly both the value of union organizing in higher education and what is wrong with the [adjunctification of higher ed](https://progressive.org/op-eds/adjuncts-gig-workers-of-higher-education-kalet-230208/?ref=richardjnewman.com). [What I’m Doing About Alice Munro](https://blgtylr.substack.com/p/what-im-doing-about-alice-munro?r=1gwysa&utm%5Fcampaign=post&utm%5Fmedium=web&triedRedirect=true), by Brandon: “As I read Skinner’s essay, I confess, I did not think of the short stories. I did not think of Alice Munro, the great writer. I did not think of Alice Munro the brilliant spinner of stories that had seen me through periods of alienation and isolation. I did not think of the work or the art, or even what are we going to do with the work now that we know this? My first and only thought was Andrea Skinner’s words, which I believed in their totality.” Andrea Skinner is the daughter of the late [Alice Munro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%5FMunro?ref=richardjnewman.com), a Nobel Laureate whose name I know, of course, but whose work I will confess that I do not. Skinner revealed, in an essay she published in the Toronto Star, not only that her stepfather sexually abused her when she was a child, but that Munro chose to stay with the man even after her daughter disclosed what he did. Adding insult to injury, he did not deny the accusations. Instead, in a letter to the family, he accused Skinner, who was nine-years-old at the time of the abuse, of having seduced him. Skinner used that letter to get her stepfather convicted. Even after that Munro chose to stay with him. (Unfortunately, Skinner’s piece is behind a paywall.) What I find compelling about Brandon’s response to this story is the emotional and intellectual clarity he brings to explaining why he finds the question that so many people are now asking about how to deal with Munro’s art both uninteresting and, ultimately, irrelevant. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See These images are all from a collection that the British Library uploaded to [Flickr](https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/albums?ref=richardjnewman.com). All images in the collection are in the public domain. ### Rudaba and Zal This is an illustration from a 17th century manuscript of the [Shahnameh](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Shah-nameh?ref=richardjnewman.com) originally produced in Isfahan, Iran. It shows [Rudaba](https://human.libretexts.org/Courses/The%5FWestminster%5FSchools/The%5FShahnameh%5F%28The%5FPersian%5FBook%5Fof%5FKings%29?ref=richardjnewman.com), on the roof of her palace with two maids, letting one of her ringlets down to [Zal](https://human.libretexts.org/Courses/The%5FWestminster%5FSchools/The%5FShahnameh%5F%28The%5FPersian%5FBook%5Fof%5FKings%29?ref=richardjnewman.com), who presses it to his cheek. Zal and Rudaba are the parents of [Rostam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rostam?ref=richardjnewman.com), probably the best known hero of the Shahnameh. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fe4a9b891-fc12-453e-85fc-9d304fdb75b4_610x800-jpeg.jpg) ## Illustration of the constellation Pisces By [Marcus Tullius Cicero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicero?ref=richardjnewman.com), circa 820-840 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f63aaf3fe-aa0b-46ff-b005-9d901d0fdb8f_642x800-jpeg.jpg) ## *from* Flore de virtu e de costumi (Flowers of Virtue and of Custom) Detail of a tinted drawing of a woman protecting a unicorn from a hunter, originally published/produced in Northern Italy in the 2nd quarter of the 15th century. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f3a214363-0d8e-4394-af43-965df646a5fc_800x541-jpeg.jpg) ## A miniature painting from a sixteenth century manuscript of Nizami's Khamsa ('Five Poems') [Nizami Ganjavi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nizami%5FGanjavi?ref=richardjnewman.com) is an important poet in the classical Persian canon. This illustration of the owner of a garden discovering maidens bathing in a pool is from a 1595 Indian manuscript of his [Khamsa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khamsa%5Fof%5FNizami?ref=richardjnewman.com), which is made up of five narrative poems. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f1e9ecbdb-3dfb-43b5-923b-929446fa632e_529x799-jpeg.jpg) ### --- # Four Things To Listen To ## **Four Hit Songs From The Year I Was Born** There are so many good songs to pick from, but for some reason these stuck out to me. ### **The Duke Of Earl** ### **The Loco-motion** ### Sealed With a Kiss ### Surfin’ Safari --- # Four Things About Me One thing I can truly say I learned from my father is not to be afraid to try different kinds of foods. When my brother and I were kids, he would. take us to two different Chinese restaurants in Queens. One of them, King Yum–he was friendly with the owner’s son, if I remember who the guy was correctly–is now out of business. The other, Peking House, is, remarkably, still around. I don’t remember any of the less common dishes he ordered, but I can still hear him encouraging us to “try it” before we decided we didn’t like it. He always promised he would send the dish back if we didn’t like it, but I don’t ever remember that happening. To celebrate my bar-mitzvah, my father took me to a restaurant called the [Swiss Pavilion](https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/04/archives/3-superb-swiss-restaurants.html?ref=richardjnewman.com). He ordered escargot–the dish is mentioned in the review at the above link–and when I asked him what it was, he said, “Try it first, then I’ll tell you.” I tried it and I really liked it, though I smile now at the irony of celebrating that particular Jewish rite of passage by eating something as incontrovertibly treif as snails. I do not like coffee and I have not liked since I was a boy and my grandmother, my mother’s mother, who drank her coffee black—Maxwell House, if I remember correctly—offered me a taste, most of which I spit out. My father, or maybe it was his father—I don’t remember which—did the same thing with beer. They were talking in the kitchen of his parents’ apartment, a beer in front of each of them. I was very young, not more than five or six. I walked in and hopped onto my father’s lap. One of them asked me if I wanted to taste what they were drinking. Of course I said yes and I’m assuming it was my father who let me sip from his bottle. I spit it out. I did eventually learn to like some beers, though, especially during the summer I spent in Scotland in 1985, which is also when I learned to like Scotch, but beer has never been my drink of choice. Hanging on the wall of my living room are five abstract paintings by mother’s Aunt Gus. There’s also an abstract stone sculpture of hers sitting on the floor in front of our fireplace and, secreted around the house, sculptures of a family that looks like they might be refugees from something. Some of Aunt Gus’ artwork is in a museum down in Georgia, where she lived. My grandmother, her sister, wanted to be a professional singer and, in fact, did sing on the radio at one point. If I remember correctly what I was told, Jimmy Durante, early in his career, was the accompanist. She was also friends with [Henry Bellamann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry%5FBellamann?ref=richardjnewman.com#Poetry), who inscribed copies of two of his books for her, *The Upward Pass* and *Cups of Illusion.* They now sit on my shelf. I just learned that the poet Robinson Jeffers died on the day I was born. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### For My Son, A Kind Of Prayer URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/for-my-son-a-kind-of-prayer/ Last updated: 2024-11-14T17:05:30.000Z **For My Son, A Kind of Prayer** gathers into a meditation on family and fatherhood poems poems *Words For What Those Men Have Done.* The book makes a lovely gift for the men in your life, all of whom are sons, and perhaps especially for a man who is a father, or who is contemplating fatherhood. I encourage you to buy *For My Son, A Kind Of Prayer* directly from the publisher, [Ghostbird Press](https://www.lulu.com/shop/richard-jeffrey-newman/for-my-son-a-kind-of-prayer/paperback/product-1z4e7g2y.html?page=1&pageSize=4&ref=richardjnewman.com), because it's important to support small presses. If you would like a signed copy, contact me [directly](https://www.richardjnewman.com/contact/). - **Buy from the publisher,** [**Ghostbird Press**](https://www.lulu.com/shop/richard-jeffrey-newman/for-my-son-a-kind-of-prayer/paperback/product-1z4e7g2y.html?page=1&pageSize=4&ref=richardjnewman.com)**.** - **Buy a signed copy** [**directly from me**](https://www.richardjnewman.com/contact/)**.** ### Praise #### "From bearing witness to the fragility of childhood to aching meditations on the complexities of love, Richard Jeffrey Newman's poems pierce the heart with the accuracy of a master Zen archer. The tender voice of a loving father sings in the same chorus as the poet crying out for the voiceless. This collection invites both an interior journey to self-awareness and a fervent call to stand for justice." ****Rob Okun, founding editor, Voice Male Magazine** #### "\[This\] soulful volume of poems embodies a kind of precision that I have come to know and admire in Richard Jeffrey Newman's work. His unflinching exploration of the family dynamic, gender, sex, and sexual violence are honest, authentic, and comes from a place of healing. The poems, coupled with these delicate drawings, wrap us in a 'long brightness.'" ****January Gill O'Neill, author of Misery Islands and Underlife** ### The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi's Shahnameh URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/the-teller-of-tales-stories-from-ferdowsis-shahnameh-2/ Last updated: 2024-11-14T17:06:18.000Z ## From The Introduction Often, if contestedly, called the national epic of Iran, the *Shahnameh,* or *Book of Kings*, was written in the 10th century by Abol-qasem Ferdowsi, who took as his subject the pre-Islamic history of the Iranian people, starting with the creation of the world and ending with the 7th century Muslim Arab conquest of the Persian empire. The poem is called the *Book of Kings*—as opposed to, say, the *Book of Iran*—because Ferdowsi tells Iran’s story by telling the stories of the nation’s monarchs, from the first and mythical king Kayumars to Yazdegerd III, whose reign was the last before the Persian empire fell. These tales, encompassing the reigns of fifty monarchs, are told over the course of more than fifty thousand couplets, making the *Shahnameh* one of the longest poems ever written. The *Shahnameh* can be read, broadly speaking, as the story of Iran’s rise and then its fall as a result of the Muslim conquest. In that context, the stories in *The Teller of Tales* trace the rise and fall and rising again of the mythical Iran that precedes the historical one. If we think in musical terms, these stories function as a kind of overture to the entire epic, introducing the themes that will be developed in the rest of the poem—justice, loyalty, honor, the selfless righteousness of the king and the consequences of betraying those values. Unfortunately, *The Teller Of Tales* is out of print. I am hoping eventually to find another publisher, but, for now, you can download a copy of the uncorrected proof. In exchange, I hope you will consider [subscribing](https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/the-teller-of-tales-stories-from-ferdowsis-shahnameh-2/#/portal/signup) to my newsletter, [*It All Connects*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/blog/)*.* [The Teller of Tales (Uncorrected Proof)Download this file by clicking on the icon at the right.The Teller of Tales (Uncorrected Proof).pdf428 KBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2024/11/The-Teller-of-Tales--Uncorrected-Proof-.pdf "Download") ### Reviews #### "The **Shahnameh* has been previously translated into prose, heroic couplets, and blank verse (standard for dramatic poetry and widely used for narrative poems). Richard Newman has chosen alliterative verse to reflect the original's "rich sonic landscape." The standard form of verse in English until the 11th century, revived again in the 14th century, it employs alliteration -- the repetition of the same sound -- to link lines of poetry. Even though Newman loses the **Shahnameh'*s original rhyme scheme, and does not strictly adhere to the English alliterative form, his translation is creative, smooth, and delightful to read." ****Aria Fani, Director of Persian and Iranian Studies Program at the University of Washington. Read Professor Fani's review** [****here**](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2011/11/the-teller-of-tales-nobility-is-not-in-the-title-but-the-deed.html?ref=richardjnewman.com)****.** #### "Newman’s selection is accurate in presenting the tales he’s chosen to cover. There’s advantage in such a slim volume which slips easily into the coat pocket. Easily read while on the go, Newman presents his versions in such form that honors those whose stories he is representing." ****Patrick James Dunagan and Ava Koohbor in Galatea Resurrects #17, read their full review** [****here**](https://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/teller-of-tales-stories-from-ferodwsis.html?m=0&ref=richardjnewman.com)****.** ### Four By Four #21 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-21/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:21:54.000Z # Four Things To Read ***Two more books by people I know that are on my shelves, but that I hadn’t read yet:*** [*Relations: An Anthology of African and Diaspora Voices*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/relations-an-anthology-of-african-and-diaspora-voices-nana-ekua-brew-hammond/18727204?ean=9780063089044&ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* edited by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond (who read for [First Tuesdays](https://firsttuesdays.net/watch-a-video-of-nana-ekua-brew-hammond-s-reading?ref=richardjnewman.com) back in September 2020): I was in graduate school in the mid-1980s when I was first introduced to the idea that English literature was not the monolith I had learned about as an undergraduate. I don’t remember the name of the course I took in my second semester, but, specifically to break down that monolith, the professor had assigned [*The Deptford Trilogy*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FDeptford%5FTrilogy?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by the Canadian novelist [Robertson Davies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robertson%5FDavies?ref=richardjnewman.com) and two or three of not-yet-Nobel-laureate [Nadine Gordimer’s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadine%5FGordimer?ref=richardjnewman.com) novels, though I don’t remember now which ones. That semester also taught me a lesson in just how stubborn hierarchies can be when you try to break them down. I decided to write one of my papers, maybe even the final one, on a novel that I really liked called [The World Is Made of Glass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FWorld%5FIs%5FMade%5Fof%5FGlass?ref=richardjnewman.com), by the Australian writer [Morris West](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris%5FWest?ref=richardjnewman.com), which I think I remember having taken down from my mother’s shelf before I left for school. I got a B on the paper, one reason for which, the professor told me when I asked to discuss it with him, was that I had chosen a book by a writer “no one had ever heard of.” (Take a look at West’s Wikipedia page. My professor might not have heard of him, but West was certainly no lightweight.) I say this by way of suggesting why Brew-Hammond’s anthology made such an impression on me. I knew something of the poetry being written in Africa through the [New-Generation African Poets](https://africanpoetrybf.unl.edu/book-prize-category/new-generation-african-poets-a-chapbook-box-set-series/?ref=richardjnewman.com), but I had not paid close attention to the entirety of English-language literature being written in Africa and/or by people from Africa who are living in diaspora. (I know that using Africa as a catchall term is in some ways problematic because of all the erasures it contains, but the jacket copy lists twenty-seven countries as the writers’ places of origin and/or residence. I am conserving space.) *Relations* opens a wonderfully multiplicitous set of windows onto that diversity by including work from three genres, poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, and through an admirable eclecticism of subject matter. [*Soundtrack Of A Life: New and Selected Poems by Gil Fagiani*](https://www.amazon.com/Soundtrack-Life-Selected-Fagianii-English/dp/1939693470?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* translated into Italian by Luigi Bonaffini: I met Gil only once, shortly before he was diagnosed with leukemia. We were in the process of scheduling a reading at First Tuesdays, which, sadly, never came about. His illness eventually killed him. I was glad, therefore, when [Maria Lisella](https://poets.org/poet/maria-lisella?ref=richardjnewman.com) gifted me a copy of this book—which I read, obviously, in English, not the Italian translation. (Still, it was interesting to have the Italian on facing pages. Not that I read or speak Italian, but it was interesting once in a while—when I could follow a little bit—to compare the two versions, just to see how differently Italian handles, in syntax, line length, and so on what Gil was writing about.) The book is called *Soundtrack of a Life,* but, for me, the experience of reading it was more like paging through a photo album or a lifelong sequence of paintings. Fagiani’s poems capture moments in time—whether between the speaker and other people, the speaker and a place, or the speaker and himself—framing them the way a good artist does, so that meaning emerges as much from the unstated relationships between and among what the frame contains, as from what is explicitly stated (visible) on the surface. It’s a kind of poem I have a very hard time writing, and it was a real pleasure to spend a couple of days reading the work of someone who makes it appear truly effortless—which we all know is the sign of a true craftsperson. This is a book definitely worth picking up. ***Two Articles*** [The Tyranny of the Female-Orgasm Industrial Complex](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/04/weaponization-female-orgasm/618680/?gift=9L5E0%5F00dQA8ldt%5F3rAKn-2Npi3ir6S4%5FofmMolA7oI&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share), by Katharine Smyth: “The truth is that no one knows for sure why women come, and our descendants may well look back on such theories with as much derision as we do on the treatment of hysteria or the tie between climax and pregnancy. The female orgasm is a kind of Rorschach test—an abstraction upon which each new generation of doctors and scientists can project its worldview, almost always to the benefit of men and their assumptions about normally functioning female sexuality. But if you think the debate over why women have orgasms is complicated, try solving the mystery of why some women don’t have them.” Given Smyth’s assertion that she enjoys sex just fine even though she is anorgasmic, one way of phrasing the central question this piece asks is, “Why do we not trust women’s account of their own pleasure?” The lens she uses, though, about how the female orgasm has been weaponized against women/commodified to the point of there actually being a “female-orgasm industrial complex” made me think of “The Punctureproof Balloon,” the last chapter of David M. Friedman’s [*A Mind Of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%5FMind%5Fof%5FIts%5FOwn:%5FA%5FCultural%5FHistory%5Fof%5Fthe%5FPenis?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* which focuses on Viagra and what could reasonably be called the “erection industrial complex.” It’s a comparison worth exploring. [Why Are There So Few Conservative Professors?](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/h4xda4dfdyocznfqqq9yd/Why-Are-There-So-Few-Conservative-Professors.pdf?rlkey=8oo4d2pr3t02r6nyxmuc9zp5g&dl=0&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Steven M. Teles: “More conspicuously than at any time in living memory, elite higher education has found itself in the political crosshairs. While the Hamas attack on Israel — and the inept response of university leaders — lit the fire, the dry tinder for a political assault on our most prestigious universities has been sitting around for some time. Those who sense more than a whiff of political opportunism and anti-intellectualism in this assault are not mistaken. But the public’s impression that American higher education has grown increasingly closed-minded is undeniably correct. Indeed, concerns about the ideological drift of the university are no longer limited to conservatives, but now include some left-leaning faculty who worry that higher education has become, in the [words](https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-rise-of-the-sectarian-university/?ref=richardjnewman.com) of Gregory Conti, a political philosopher at Princeton, ‘sectarian.’ This mounting sectarianism manifests itself in various aspects of the university, including the scope of debate within and outside the classroom, the growth of campus administration, and the tenor of student life. For a professor like myself, the character of the professoriate is the most salient aspect of the change. And where conservative faculty are concerned, the facts are beyond dispute: Their numbers are low and continue to fall.” This very interesting essay from *The Chronicle of Higher Education* makes an argument worth wrestling with on why it’s important to reverse the left-leaning trajectory of higher education. My usual caveat applies: I don’t agree with everything Teles says, but he makes points about the value of an intellectual inclusivity that proactively includes conservative scholars that I think should not be ignored. An interesting companion piece, also published in *The Chronicle* is “[Will Republicans Save the Humanities](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/j5bi4h7cic1yu21aysmxn/Will-Republicans-Save-the-Humanities.pdf?rlkey=bs7rppa1wenl8mewdogkhtgqk&dl=0&ref=richardjnewman.com),” by Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey. Notably, both these essays see greater ideological inclusivity within the academy as a way of combatting what Teles calls the “political opportunism and anti-intellectualism” at the heart of the current attacks on higher ed. Both pieces, I think, downplay the profoundly reactionary goal of those attacks, but they are worth reading nonetheless. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See ## *from* Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta *The images below are all from the* [*J. Paul Getty Museum*](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103RWD?ref=richardjnewman.com)*.* *In the 1500s, as printing became the most common method of producing books, intellectuals increasingly valued the inventiveness of scribes and the aesthetic qualities of writing. From 1561 to 1562, Georg Bocskay, the Croatian-born court secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, created this Model Book of Calligraphy in Vienna to demonstrate his technical mastery of the immense range of writing styles known to him.* *About thirty years later, Emperor Rudolph II, Ferdinand's grandson, commissioned Joris Hoefnagel to illuminate Bocskay's model book. Hoefnagel added fruit, flowers, and insects to nearly every page, composing them so as to enhance the unity and balance of the page's design. It was one of the most unusual collaborations between scribe and painter in the history of manuscript illumination.* *Because of Hoefnagel's interest in painting objects of nature, his detailed images complement Rudolph II's celebrated Kunstkammer, a cabinet of curiosities that contained bones, shells, fossils, and other natural specimens. Hoefnagel's careful images of nature also influenced the development of Netherlandish still life painting.* *In addition to his fruit and flower illuminations, Hoefnagel added to the Model Book a section on constructing the letters of the alphabet in upper- and lowercase.* ### Guide for Constructing the Letter E *On two grids, Joris Hoefnagel demonstrated the proper form of a capital E , with the proportions of the letter determined by the relation of its parts to squares and arcs. About thirty years after Georg Bocskay finished his Model Book of Calligraphy, Hoefnagel added his Guide to the Construction of Letters to the manuscript. Hoefnagel's Guide uses diagrams to demonstrate how geometric principles might be applied to typographical design. The motifs surrounding these diagrams are charged with allegorical and symbolic meaning. At the top of the page, the XPS (Chi-Rho-Sigma) monogram for "Christus" in the azure medallion suggests the dominion of Christ over the world, represented by the maps of the continents on the sides. Echoing this idea, at the bottom of the page Hoefnagel included a verse from Psalm 56: Exaltare super caelos deus et in omnem terram gloria tua (Be exalted above the heavens, God, and your glory through all the earth). The two columns call to mind the so-called Pillars of Hercules, Habsburg imperial symbols since Emperor Charles V had used them in his emblem. The toucan probably does not have a specific symbolic meaning but interested Hoefnagel because of its rarity.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fa4112420-e180-453b-963b-f35a3eb00ef6_735x1025-jpeg.jpg) ### Guide for Constructing the Letters U and V ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f929fc01b-9c33-438e-bd4d-c88a42549ccc_747x1023-jpeg.jpg) ### Almond in Flower ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fbf9084d6-ff8b-464c-ac51-3277c9805bd3_723x1024-jpeg.jpg) ### Caterpillar, Dog-Tooth Violet, Pear, and Apricot ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f90b36625-e4f3-4b2f-a0fc-932901bb0299_698x1024-jpeg.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ### **Last Train To Clarksville Jeff Daniels Ben Daniels Band City Winery NYC 8/15/2018** I loved the Monkees when I was a kid, but I did not know until I found this video, that “Last Train to Clarkesville” was about a young man being shipped off to Vietnam. ### **Grace Potter & the Nocturnals with Heart - Paris & COY** Two rock and roll songs I really like. ### **4 Ballades, Op. 10: No. 1 in D Minor "Edward Ballade" - Andante** ### **Fourplay "Bali Run" Live at Java Jazz Festival 2011** --- # Four Things About Me The first personal computer I owned was an [IBM PCjr](https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah%5F905913?ref=richardjnewman.com) that my grandmother bought for me in 1985 when I went to graduate school. She insisted on buying an IBM machine, she said, because she owned stock in the company. In a precursor of things to come, though not until much, much later, the keyboard was wireless. I wrote my first graduate school papers on that machine, including the one on Morris West, which I mentioned above. I don’t have that paper anymore, but I do have scanned copies of some of the other papers that I wrote on the PCjr. Here, for example, is a paragraph from a paper I called “The Problem of Form,” which I wrote for a course on modern poetry taught by a Professor Shires: > *What is gained by thinking of prosody, the formal aspects of poetry, in the same way we think of the formal aspects of music? (It is important to remember that the comparison between music and poetry is not absolute; poetry cannot exploit the same kinds of vertical structures which music can. Rhyme comes close to being vertical, especially in a sonnet; but our experience of rhyme is still linear.) It is possible that we gain nothing; or that we lose more than we gain. Since music is another art form and carries with it its own vocabulary and its own set of conventions by which it must be experienced to be enjoyed by anybody, we may be making things more complicated for ourselves by trying to understand prosody in terms of music. However, certain confusions and problems do clear themselves up when we begin to think of prosody as music.* Reading this paragraph, which I wrote in the fall of 1984, I notice two things: first, the beginnings of how I have come to understand the role that form and craft play in my poetic and, second, a clear demonstration—though it took me a while to understand this explicitly—that my interest in studying literature had more to do with what it could teach me as a poet than with the pursuit of literary scholarship per se. The next excerpt I am going to share with you, from a paper called “The Poet as Deviant” that I wrote on an electric typewriter for an undergraduate sociology class also shows that the core of my thinking about what it means to be a poet has not changed much from when I was in my twenties: > *One of the things that is most important to a poet is recognition that his poetry is worth something. This recognition need not be from a large public; it could just as easily come from a few people who are very important in his or her life.* My MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) was, in practice and content, more of a degree in applied linguistics than in ESL pedagogy. This explains why one of the papers I wrote in pursuit of that degree was called “Political Language as Magical Speech.” In this paper, I compared what happens during a presidential State of the Union address to what happens when a shaman, or other community member understood to have magical powers, casts a spell. Ronald Reagan was president at the time. This, in part, is what I wrote: > *Instead of a presidential report on the state of the union, we have a presidential invitation to enter with him into an optimistic belief that his words either are already true, or will be coming true sometime in the future. The State of the Union Address becomes, instead of a statement of fact, an expression of hope. And an expression of hope as an illocutionary act contracts for a very different set of behaviors than does a simple reporting of the way things are.* And, finally, an excerpt from another paper I wrote with the PCjr, a book review essay of [*Extraterritorial*](https://www.amazon.com/Extraterritorial-Papers-Literature-Language-Revolution/dp/0689705344?ref=richardjnewman.com) and [*After Babel*](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/after-babel-9780192880932?cc=us&lang=en&&ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by George Steiner. Because I had studied linguistics as an undergraduate, I was very interested in Steiner’s critique of Chomskian linguistics, which is implicit in the first of the two following paragraphs. Now, though, I am drawn much more strongly to the idea embodied in the last sentence of the second paragraph: that translation, and literary translation in particular, and I would probably extend that to include literary creation in general, is an act of trust. Regardless of whether Steiner’s overall argument holds water—and, if I remember correctly, he came in for an awful lot of criticism (and ridicule)—given the state of our culture today, I think that idea is one we should hold to as strongly as we can: > *Language is both a private and a public property. Each member of a language community shares the conventions and materials of their language; they also, however, bring a body of individual associations, a personal context, to the language. Each person speaks their own version, an idiolect, of their language. It is this idiolect which allows us to maintain a sense of self; without some way of separating ourselves from the community, we would be nameless. This functional view of language leads Steiner to the conclusion that the original linguistic impulse was inward, was a way for people to see themselves as unique. Interpersonal and interlingual communication came later in response to other economic and social needs.* > > *People can lie, discuss the future and also what might have been. This quality of language, that it can be used to create “alternate worlds,” is, for Steiner, the main function of language. Through this “alternity” of language, this ability of language to transform the world, people need not face the actuality of death. Communication, translation, then, especially through literature, is a sharing of alternate world views, an act, for Steiner, of extreme trust.* --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Selections from Saadi's Bustan URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/selections-from-saadis-bustan/ Last updated: 2024-11-14T17:06:32.000Z **Selections from Saadi’s Bustan** (Global Scholarly Publications 2006) is the second book I completed as part the commission I received from the International Society for Iranian Culture. *Bustan--*the title means *Orchard*\--which Saadi completed in 1257, is part of a literary tradition called andarz, or wisdom literature, which dates back to pre-Islamic Persia. According to scholar John D. Yohannan, what distinguishes *Bustan* from its predecessors is the belletristic sensibility Saadi brought to his work, evident in the emphasis he places on what Yohannan calls, in *The Poet Sa'di: A Persian Humanist,* "entertainment and literary delectation." Regarding comparison in English literature, Yohannan suggests the metaphysical poets of the 17th century—he cites Donne in particular—for their love of wit and wordplay, as well as the didactic poets of 18th, like Alexander Pope. Saadi wrote *Bustan* entirely in the mutaqarrib rhythm, which most closely resembles anapestic tetrameter in English. In 1882, G. S. Davie published a complete translation of *Bustan* in that meter, but--and not only because Davie's English is old-fashioned to contemporary ears--his versions begin to sound a little bit like Dr. Seuss after a while, especially if you read them aloud, because his rhymes are all full rhymes, his lines are all end-stopped, and the beats in each line fall with the monotonous regularity of a metronome. I chose blank verse as the meter for my translations because I wanted, first, a music that would at least suggest Pope's heroic couplets and, second, a meter that would allow for greater flexibility should one of Saadi's couplets require more than two lines in English. Unfortunately, *Selections from Saadi's Bustan* is out of print, but you can download a free copy of the uncorrected proof here. In return, all I ask is that you consider [subscribing](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signup) to my newsletter, [*It All Connects*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/blog/)*.* [Bustan Uncorrected ProofDownload a copy of this file by clicking the icon at the right.Bustan Uncorrected Proof.pdf2 MBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2024/11/Bustan-Uncorrected-Proof.pdf "Download") ## Reviews #### "Having the **Bustan* in an English translation will finally allow Saadi to take his place beside Rumi and Hafiz and complete the Divine Trinity of Persian poetry...Richard Jeffrey Newman's...text reads clear, story-filled, delightful, striking just the right balance between contemporary and classic. What shines through is Newman’s depth of understanding: there is a wisdom in these pages that makes them sacred, yet there is also a system of ethics that makes them a How To for the Soul, and to tease out these meanings requires a master translator...Having a contemporary translation of the Bustan is an important step in Muslim-US relations, a milestone in literary history." ****Bob Holman, founder of The Bowery Poetry Club** ### Four By Four #20 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-20/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:23:04.000Z # Shameless Self Promotion! [Christina M. Rau](https://christinamrau.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) published a [review](https://www.whaleroadreview.com/richard-jeffrey-newman/?ref=richardjnewman.com) of [*T’shuvah*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2023/09/07/tshuvah/?ref=richardjnewman.com)on [*Whale Road Review*](https://www.whaleroadreview.com/richard-jeffrey-newman/?ref=richardjnewman.com). # Four Things To Read [Dad Brain Is Real, And It’s A Good Thing](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/16/opinion/dad-brain-fatherhood-parenting.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.1E0.tmKK.F6DwhMTQ%5Fw7K&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Darby Saxbe: “When men told us that they felt more bonded to their unborn children and hoped to take more time off from work after birth, they went on to lose more gray matter volume across the cortex — the part of the brain that does higher-order thinking. Similarly, men who spent more time tending to their infants in the three months after birth showed larger gray matter reductions. Men who lost more gray matter volume also said they enjoyed their infants more and reported lower parenting stress.” That loss of gray matter also occurs in women when they become mothers and in the teenage brain as it develops. Saxbe speculates that “these changes may fine-tune the brain to work more efficiently.” The research Saxbe refers to is fascinating—I have bookmarked but not yet read through it—because it suggests that the sexes may be more similarly “hardwired” for parenthood than previously thought. NPR’s Throughline did an [episode](https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1183467075?ref=richardjnewman.com) about this recently with Chelsea Conaboy, author of [*Mother Brain: How Neuroscience is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood*](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250762290/motherbrain?ref=richardjnewman.com), a book I am definitely interested in reading. [A closer look at the Gaza casualty data](https://goodauthority.org/news/gaza-casualty-data/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Marc Lynch and Sarah Parkinson: “Publishing combatant-civilian casualty numbers without fully explaining the caveats behind the data can have life-and-death consequences. Sharing casualty estimates that posit all men in Gaza as Hamas combatants, for instance, feeds into a normative narrative that actively denies their human rights and endangers them. Indeed, in 2014, anthropologist Maya Mikdashi critiqued dehumanizing and disenfranchising narratives where ‘boys and men are presumed guilty of what they might do if allowed to live their lives.’ Political scientist Charli Carpenter has clarified that in some settings, civilian men are at extreme risk of harm but lack the protection of presumed innocence afforded to women and children.” One point of contention since the start of Israel’s campaign in Gaza has been the number of Palestinian civilians casualties. This interview illuminates the politics behind the counting of casualties, how those numbers can be weaponized, and why the whole process of counting casualties is as complicated as it is under even the best of circumstances. [The 7 Grueling Months to Reclaim the Bookstore Dream a Fire Stole](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/01/business/yu-me-bookshop-fire.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.1E0.K4Yy.6f-z6ITLyfwA&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Jordyn Holman: “The bookstore was Ms. Yu’s first attempt at entrepreneurship, and she felt she had failed. She opened her store with about $45,000 in December 2021 as the neighborhood was rebounding from the pandemic shutdowns and reeling from a spate of anti-Asian attacks. It quickly became a literary hub that hosted first-time authors and held weekend bar nights, when bibliophiles sipped hard seltzers and wine. The store was profitable within four months.” The story Holman tells demonstrates the value of neighborhood bookstores and how a community came together to save Yu & Me Books after it was gutted by a fire. [Yiddish Anarchists’ Break Over Palestine](https://jewishcurrents.org/yiddish-anarchists-break-over-palestine-1929?ref=richardjnewman.com), Introduced and translated from the Yiddish by Eyshe Beirich: From Beirich’s introduction - “August 1929 was a time of widespread protest and violent riots which had broken out all over Palestine in response to the growing British colonial repression, Zionist anti-Palestinian agitation, and ideological splits within the Palestinian national movement. The events of August 1929—which left 116 Palestinians and 133 Jews dead by the end of the month—are referred to differently in different sources, depending on their perspective: ‘riots,’ ‘happenings,’ or, in much of the Palestinian press, ‘uprisings.’ Often, they are referred to metonymically as ‘the Hebron massacre’ or ‘the Hebron pogrom,’ particularly in Zionist historical memory. These events substantially changed the political allegiances of Jewish communities outside of Palestine. Up to this point, left-wing and Communist Yiddish newspapers in America had diverse positions on Zionism, ranging from passive support to agnosticism to explicit anti-Zionism. After 1929, many Yiddish papers slid rightward, openly embracing aspects of Zionism they once rejected in response to what they saw as antisemitic, Eastern European-style ‘pogroms’ at the hands of ‘the barbarous Arabs.’” The two pieces Beirich translates, “A Disgraceful Blot on Humanity,” which illustrates that rightward slide, and “The Other Side Of The Coin,” which was written in response by “An Anonymous Group of Polish Anarchists,” provide a useful reminder that Jews have never been monolithic in the stances we have taken when it comes to Israel and Zionism. They are both worth reading in the current moment. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See ### Amedeo Modigliani, Head of a Woman, 1910/1911 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f203426f7-34a9-44f9-838c-879848f46071_2988x4000-jpeg.jpg) ### Attributed to Charles Bierstadt, Frozen Falls, circa 1880 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fc725f336-dbad-4801-a787-3cca63857a1e_3213x4000-jpeg.jpg) ### Attributed to Francesco Righetti, Apollino of the Villa Medici, c. 1775/1820 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fba9204b6-f211-4dea-9f5f-c662cb3d0c65_2678x4000-jpeg.jpg) ### Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, Plate 626, 1887 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f12052d2c-e56e-4dbc-914f-c5a8abeedb3c_3000x2316-jpeg.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ### Tori Amos - Me and A Gun ### Todd Reynolds - And The Sky Was Still There ### Tony Bennett - The Shadow Of Your Smile ### Bach - Prelude from the Cello Suite No. 5 --- # Four Things About Me The campus where I got my BA was rife with Evangelical Christian proselytizers, including—though I don’t know if they would have accepted the Evangelical Christian label—what were then called Jews for Jesus. (Now I think they call themselves Messianic Jews.) A few lived in my dorm. One, whose name I think was Adrian, took every opportunity he could to make sure I knew that if I did not accept Jesus into my life I was going to hell. He was always polite about it, always emphasizing the joy I would find if only I could open my heart to the true savior, but the message was clear: if I didn’t change my beliefs and my ways, I’d suffer the torments of hell for all eternity. One Halloween, the guy who lived in the room next to mine—Mark, I think—went to our costume party in drag. Afterwards, a bunch of us were hanging out in the hallway, and a couple of the women from the floor above us started wondering what I would look like with a full head of hair. (I was already bald by then.) Jokingly, Mark put the wig he’d worn on my head, which made everybody laugh, since I also had a full beard. Then someone said something about turning me into a bearded lady and, before I knew it, I was wearing the costume in which Mark had gone to the party, complete with the three or four inch heels he’d had on his feet. (Sadly, this was long before cellphones, so there are no pictures.) At some point after I was fully dressed, Adrian walked onto the hall, and the look of absolute horror and disgust he had on his face when he saw me was too much to resist. I struck as seductive a pose as I could, beckoning to him with my hand. He ran past us and—the women were quite impressed that I could do this in heels—I chased him down the hall until he got to his room and locked the door. I don’t remember if he left me completely alone after that, but I know he could barely look me in the eye and that he stopped trying to convert me at least for a while. South Korea, where I lived during the 1988–89 academic year, is the only place I have ever been where Christian missionaries who approached me on the street to ask if they could tell me about Jesus left me alone once they found out I was Jewish. I’ve been working on an essay called “I Am A Creative Writing Program Dropout,” which I am, from Syracuse University’s MA in Creative Writing back in 1985 (before they had an MFA). While working on the essay, I remembered a moment in my own growth as a writer. I did not start writing the poems that became *The Silence Of Men* until I had first destroyed every draft, digital or otherwise, of every poem I had written, from the time I left Syracuse to that point, which was some time in the late 1990s. I couldn’t have explained it this way at the time, but they had become an anchor that kept me tethered to, mired in, an apprenticeship I needed to leave behind. I remember how much lighter, how liberated I felt, after I tossed the bag filled with all those pages in the garbage can in the basement and then came upstairs and emptied the trash on my Windows desktop. I sometimes feel an archeological or anthropological curiosity to see them again, but I’m also very glad not to be able to. I just finished writing that paragraph, when I remembered that a friend with whom I had shared some of those poems found them when he was clearing out his desk and sent them to me. After I read through them, one line stayed with me: *Poets enter their poems like cities.* --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Selections from Saadi's Gulistan URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/books/selections-from-saadis-gulistan/ Last updated: 2025-06-26T11:43:12.000Z [Saadi of Shiraz](https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/sadi-sirazi?ref=richardjnewman.com) is one of the most important poets in the Persian literary canon and *Gulistan* (also *Golestan),* or *Rose Garden,* is his best known and most popular book in the west. Translated into French in 1634 by [André du Ryer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9%5Fdu%5FRyer?ref=richardjnewman.com), *Golestan* was the first book from the Muslim world to "cross over" into the western imagination, and it has remained the most commonly translated of Saadi's work–and the most frequently translated into English–ever since, in large measure because so much of the book's sensibility is in keeping with what we would call a humanistic worldview, though that is ultimately a reductive way of understanding the text. *Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan* (Global Scholarly Publications 2004) was the first book I published under commission from the now-defunct International Society for Iranian Culture, but it is, unfortunately, out of print. You can download a free copy of the uncorrected proof here. In return, all I ask is that you consider [subscribing](https://www.richardjnewman.com/#/portal/signup) to my newsletter, [*It All Connects*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/blog/)*.* [Selections from Saadi's GulistanThis edition was published in Iran in honor of Saadi Day, April 21, 2025.Selections from Saadi's Gulistan.pdf3 MBdownload-circle](https://www.richardjnewman.com/content/files/2025/06/Selections-from-Saadi-s-Gulistan-1.pdf "Download") ### Four By Four #19 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-19/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:22:50.000Z # Shameless Self Promotion! An interview [Catherine Fletcher](http://cafletcher.blogspot.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) did with me about *T’shuvah* was justpublished on Green Linden Press’ [website](https://www.greenlindenpress.com/interviews-and-reviews?ref=richardjnewman.com#/richard-jeffrey-newman/). She asked really good questions that I thoroughly enjoyed answering. I do hope you’ll take a [look](https://www.greenlindenpress.com/interviews-and-reviews?ref=richardjnewman.com#/richard-jeffrey-newman/). While you’re there, you should also check out the books Green Linden publishes. They’re doing really fine work. # Four Things To Read [***A Flash of Darkness: Collected Stories of M. M. De Voe***](https://www.santabarbaraliteraryjournal.com/flash-of-darkness?ref=richardjnewman.com) **(Borda Books):** This book of short stories by M. M. De Voe, the latest one I’ve finished in my reading of books by people I know, is a joy to read. The tales are funny, quirky, scary, and wonderfully twisted. They take me back to when I was a kid and loved to read science fiction and other so-called genre magazines, but they play with that form in such interesting ways that, for me anyway, they erase the hierarchical distinction that the term “genre” is usually employed to establish. The first story, for example, “Shutter,” is an unconventional revenge story involving a serial killer and the ghost of one of his victims, but it is also an easy-to-miss, very subtle, biting and in some ways devastating critique of patriarchal manhood and masculinity. That kind of political/social justice critique wends its way through most, if not all of these stories. This is a book well-worth reading—and, I would dare say, worth teaching as well. [**Can Zionists Speak About The Nakba?**](https://www.hartman.org.il/can-zionists-speak-about-the-nakba-transcript/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**, a transcript of** [**Episode 74 of For Heaven’s Sake**](https://www.hartman.org.il/can-zionists-speak-about-the-nakba/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**, a podcast of the** [**Shalom Hartman Institute**](https://www.hartmen.org.il/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**:** Regardless of where you stand on the question of Israel and Palestine, I think this transcript is worth reading. (I have not yet had a chance to listen to the episode.) The people in this discussion are committed Zionists, by which I mean—as one of the participants, Donniel Hartman put it—people who are fully committed to “the right of the Jewish people to be a sovereign people” and to the existence of Israel as a sovereign Jewish state. They are, however, also people who are willing to ask the kinds of difficult questions that need to be asked on their side of the table if there is ever going to be peace. Here, for example, is a shortened version of the full quote from Donniel Hartman: “\[C\]an I as a lover of Israel…who embraces the right of the Jewish people to be a sovereign people…who experiences the victory of the Jewish people, can I look to my fellow citizens in Israel \[he’s talking about Palestinian citizens of Israel\] and…recognize that I’m walking in the midst of people \[for whom\] my coming home was not their independence day…for whom something has been broken?” The point he goes on to make is that, ultimately, no truly peaceful and productive resolution will be possible unless Jewish Israelis and their government—and by extension Jews worldwide and our governments—are willing to accept this fact. Neither he nor the other people on the podcast get into what that resolution might look like, which I think is wise since, especially given the Hamas attack on October 7th and Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, there is precious little trust on any side of the table. Indeed, the question of trust is the subtext of the question that is the title of this episode, and it is articulated by Elana Stein Hain: \[A\]re we having this conversation \[talking about the Nakba\] to build trust? Are we having \[this\] conversation in order to think about our own morals? Are we having \[this\] conversation to do public statements \[by which she means political posturing\]?” I think the purpose of the discussion on this episode of For Heaven’s Sake is the second one. I do not think it is a sufficient conversation, nor do I agree with the underlying assumptions of most of the positions the various participants lay out, even if I find value in some of the positions themselves, but I was glad to know the conversation is taking place because I think it is a necessary one to have. [**‌In Our Name: A Message from Jewish Students at Columbia University**](https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRQgyDhIjZupO2H-2rIDXLy%5Fzkf76RoM-%5FZIYsOfn9FkI7TETgRtOfXK9VobMvGh6iEZfDPgALXJTCR/pub?ref=richardjnewman.com): There is much that is problematic in this open letter, not least the way its authors elide the move that conflates what I will call religious/cultural Zionism—by which I mean the explicit connection to the land of Israel/Palestine that is woven throughout Jewish texts and traditions, including the belief in the value of Jewish return to that land—with the political Zionism that resulted in the founding of Israel as a Jewish nation state. It is also easy to critique the letter—and I think this is a *very* valid critique—because, unlike the discussion I referred to above, it makes no mention of the Palestinians and their experience. Nonetheless, I think the letter is worth reading and some of its points worth grappling with, not because I think they are correct, but because they assert a right that progressives generally grant to every other marginalized group—the right to define their own experience on their own terms—and much of the anti-Zionist discourse that separates Zionism from Judaism/Jewish culture either implicitly or explicitly denies that right. Complicating this issue, of course, is the fact that, while Jews might be marginal not just in the United States and in most other countries throughout the world; while Israel, as a self-proclaimed Jewish nation, might be marginal among the nations of the world; the Jews in Israel most certainly are not marginal. Also, whether you choose to read the letter or not, this [episode](https://jewishcurrents.org/on-zionism-and-anti-zionism?ref=richardjnewman.com) of the [Jewish Currents](https://www.jewishcurrents.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com) podcast On The Nose uses a leftist critique of it as a jumping off point for a discussion that is well-worth listening to. [**Dad Culture Has Nothing to Do With Parenting**](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2024/03/dad-stereotypes-caregiving/677639/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**, by Saul Austerlitz:** “Americans spend a fair amount of time describing things as “dad\[,\]” paint\[ing\] a picture of someone who is uncool, modestly embarrassing, and blissfully unconcerned with others’ judgments. But \[that picture\]…bear\[s\] little relationship to the actual work of raising children.” Austerlitz cites statistics showing that “Dads now spend more than triple the amount of time caring for children as they did in 1965” and the point of his essay is to ask why we continue culturally to hold on to “the old model of fatherhood” when it “bears less and less resemblance to \[current\] reality.” It’s a question worth pondering. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See ## Two by Ohara Koson (1877–1945) Ohara Koson (1877–1945), born in Kanazawa, northern Japan, was one of the foremost Japanese artists of the 20th century. He was renowned for designing beautiful illustration prints of birds and flowers (kacho-e) as part of the Shin-Hanga (new prints) movement. We have collected and curated Koson's best artworks for you to enjoy and download for free under the CC0 license. ### Two peacocks on tree branch (1900 - 1930) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f41f5d956-7d50-49be-b8fa-8a1ec0b5415d_1944x3499-jpeg.jpg) ### Blossoming Cherry on a Moonlit Night (ca. 1932) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f8f6a3dc9-0a80-465f-9842-1554d2b4284f_814x1200-jpeg.jpg) ## Two by Marie Cassat Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) was an American Impressionist painter, printmaker, and the embodiment of a “New Woman” of the 19th century. She spent much of her adult life in France alongside fellow contemporary Impressionists like Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, and Claude Monet. She was profoundly interested in depicting the woman’s perspective through art. She often drew pictures of ladies social lives, having tea in the garden during summertime. ### Peasant Mother and Child (1895) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f8b52fe36-52b6-48c9-8096-7b47468581dc_2142x2815-jpeg.jpg) ### Spanish Dancer Wearing a Lace Mantilla (1873) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f31583140-4d80-4e46-b365-765e65d9f9ca_915x1200-jpeg.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ### Ali Farka Touré & Toumani Diabaté - Ai Ga Bani ### Mimi Fox : Live At The Palladium "Blues For Two" ### Reza Vali The Book of Calligraphy No. 1: Hazin ### Reza Vali The Book of Calligraphy No. 2: Zand --- # Four Things About Me For a brief time in my twenties, I thought I might make a career for myself in Jewish community work, and so I took a job as what was then known as a Jewish Campus Professional for B’nai Brith Hillel/JACY. (I don’t know if this is still the title.) Back then BBHJ was the organization that provided leaders for the Hillel groups on college campuses. I was assigned to two campuses, one in downtown Manhattan and one in Nassau County on Long Island, neither of which had enough members to justify a full-time leader. I only held the job for about a year, but one situation I ended up being involved was actually a matter of life or death for an Iraqi Jewish student and his family back home. He was the child of an interfaith marriage, with a Muslim father and a Jewish mother. In Iraq, he’d been raised Muslim, but for reasons I don’t now remember, he’d secretly converted to his mother’s faith. The problem was that he needed to keep his conversion hidden from the other Iraqi students, who were all Muslim, for fear that they would report his conversion back home and that his family would be punished for his apostasy, a crime that carried the death penalty. I remember meeting the student, hearing his story, and I think I remember that his biggest concern was either finding a way to pray and/or in some small way to observe Shabbat and the holidays without getting caught. I recall a meeting with the college president to discuss the situation, and I think we eventually did find a solution. I wish I could remember more details, but this was almost forty years ago. Maybe one day I’ll dig out the journal I kept back then and see if I wrote anything more about this situation. When I was a teenager, I played bass baritone bugle in the Knight of Columbus Drum & Bugle Corps. I originally wanted to be a drummer, but the corps’ director needed horn players, so that’s where he put me. I got to be pretty good, too, rising to the level of second seat, which meant I occasionally got to play solos. They didn’t have baritone horns in my high school marching band, though, so I tried unsuccessfully to learn trombone. I just could not get used to the difference between the valve-and-rotor system on the bugle–this was before they had two-valve bugles–and the slide on the trombone. The band director–I think his name was Mr. Fife (though I don’t know if I’ve spelled that correctly)–did get me a valve trombone, but for some reason I did not take to the instrument the way I did to the bugle. I left the drum corps once I started working summers as a camp counselor, and I have not tried since to learn any instrument other than the piano, on which I am mostly self-taught. (Sometimes I think I might like to take percussion lessons, though, or maybe voice lessons.) I received my MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) from Stony Brook University in 1987\. I taught English in South Korea–technically English as a Foreign Language (TEFL)–during the 1988–89 academic year. When I came back from Korea in September 1989, I was getting ready to apply for a job teaching English to South Korean immigrants for the New York State Department of Labor, when I received a call from Nassau Community College, asking me to come in for an emergency interview for a full-time teaching position. I had not actually applied for the job, but they knew me from my work in their Writing Center while I was getting my MA. In fact, they’d wanted to interview me when they were doing a formal search for new faculty that July, and had contacted my mother to get my number in Korea, but there had been no way I could get back to New York in time, and affirmative actions regulations prevented them from giving me a phone interview, while everyone else on their list interviewed face-to-face. The emergency interview came about because a member of the department had died suddenly and they needed to replace him. (I’m glad I did not know him.) I must have given a good interview, because they hired me. I have been teaching at Nassau Community College ever since. I have never tried to write fiction. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #18 - National Poetry Month URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-18-national-poetry-month/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:23:50.000Z # Four Things To Read [Shifting The Imbalance](https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/shifting-imbalance/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Evie Schockley: In 2011, Penguin published Rita Dove’s [*The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-penguin-anthology-of-twentieth-century-american-poetry-rita-dove/11732666?ean=9780143121480&ref=richardjnewman.com)*.* Helen Vendler and Marjorie Perloff, two of our most important literary critics, each panned the volume for different reasons. Schockley argues “that the commonalities and points of overlap between Perloff’s and Vendler’s takes on the anthology reveal the troubling role of race in U.S. literary culture at this moment.” The essay is well-worth reading for Schockley’s overall argument, but I also appreciated it when I first read it because of the way Schockley positions the anthology as being for “the writer seeking to hone her craft or locate her work within a tradition” and for whom the poets with the most to teach her “are not always the poets whose work most usefully exemplifies a literary-historical watershed or most elegantly illustrates important socio-cultural developments.” Schockley goes on to suggest that Dove’s anthology is especially useful for “MFA’s (or practicing poets, more broadly) \[because they\] have a less skeptical relationship to contemporary poetry; a dismissive time-will-tell approach is impractical for critics of poetry who seek (for themselves and their students) an understanding of the field in which their own creative work will presently circulate.” [Poetry After October 7th - Tablet Magazine](https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/poetry-after-october-7?ref=richardjnewman.com) & [The Silencing of The Jewish Poet](https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/silencing-jewish-poets?ref=richardjnewman.com), both by Maxim D. Shrayer: Something I have noticed in the reading and talking I’ve been doing about Israel and Palestine since October 7 is a tendency among Jews who support Israel’s war in Gaza to experience political disagreement as antisemitic, which is not necessarily the case. I find a lot of that kind of conflation in both these pieces. Nonetheless, as a Jewish poet, and precisely because I disagree with much of what Shrayer has to say, I think it’s important to wrestle with his central thesis, which is that there is “a nationwide literary campaign of vilification and ostracism in which Jewish artists and intellectuals \[in particular\] are intimidated into publicly choosing sides, for or against Israel, or harassed into dwelling in silence.” I have added “in particular” because, while that qualification remains implicit in Shrayer’s essay, it is at the heart of what makes the phenomenon he identifies—and I’ve read too many credible accounts to doubt that it exists—problematic at best, and antisemitic at worst. For me, what has been important in thinking about this issue had been figuring out how most meaningfully to tease this point of agreement away from my points of disagreement with arguments like Shrayer’s. [Tayi Tibble, Maori Poet and ‘It Girl’, Trusts the Wisdom of Her Ancestors](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/08/books/booksupdate/tayi-tibble-maori-poet.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.jE0.LHQg.2wLChgWUcJaE&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Natasha Frost: “On its surface, ‘Rangikura’ is a coming-of-age narrative by a young Māori woman from an urban New Zealand environment, wrestling with the personal, the postcolonial and the political. Tibble wrote most of it during lockdown, thinking about climate change and how ‘the desecration of the planet,’ she said, relates to the disenfranchisement and dislocation of Indigenous women worldwide.” This profile of Indigenous New Zealander poet Tayi Tibble is worth reading. It’s important to be aware of poetry written in other Englishes. [A Poem That’s Like a Perfect First Date](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/04/11/books/frank-ohara-having-a-coke-poem.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.kU0.boz8.bQZ0PwD6eIfw&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by A. O. Scott: This digital tour through Frank O’Hara’s “Having A Coke With You” is both educational and a lot of fun. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See ### The Cover of *America: A Prophecy,* by William Blake ([The New York Public Library](https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47db-b60b-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99?ref=richardjnewman.com)) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f385b6af6-4566-441b-b306-cdbd87bc7f69_501x760-jpeg.jpg) ### “Unwilling I Look Up to Heaven,” from *Europe: A Prophecy,* by William Blake ([The New York Public Library](https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47db-b61f-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99?ref=richardjnewman.com)) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f67ff35d5-3815-4be0-8bd1-8572e8a7f425_545x760-jpeg.jpg) ### The Goddess of Music And Poetry, the Song Dynasty 960–1279 ([The Metropolitan Museum of Art](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/61573?ref=richardjnewman.com)) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f8ab0c1ee-5aad-4ee8-acd1-a888f5722dc3_2000x1570-jpeg.jpg) ### Figure of Hitomaru, God of Poetry, 18th century Japan ([The Metropolitan Museum of Art](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/47229?ref=richardjnewman.com)) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f0059e680-fc62-42b1-8bb2-8150a088c7bf_900x558-jpeg.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ### The Arts Calling Podcast I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Jaime Alejandrio shortly after [*T’shuvah*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2023/09/07/tshuvah/?ref=richardjnewman.com)came out. It was a lovely interview. (If you have a hard time with the link to Apple Podcasts, you can listen [here](https://artscalling.com/2023/11/09/128-richard-jeffrey-newman-the-return-and-tshuvah-a-new-poetry-collection/?ref=richardjnewman.com)). ### Commonplace Episode 108 with Saeed Jones If you’re a poet or someone who loves poetry and cares about the work it does in the world and you don’t know Rachel Zucker’s podcast [Commonplace](https://commonplace.today/commonplace-podcast?ref=richardjnewman.com), you should. (Listen [here](https://commonplace.today/commonplace-podcast/episode-108-saeed-jones?ref=richardjnewman.com) if you don’t have Apple Podcasts.) ### Between The Covers: Major Jackson, Razzle Dazzle If you’re a poet or a writer of any kind, or just care about literature, David Naimon’s [Between the Covers](https://tinhouse.com/podcasts/?ref=richardjnewman.com) is another literary podcast you should know about. (Listen [here](https://tinhouse.com/podcast/major-jackson-razzle-dazzle/?ref=richardjnewman.com) if you don’t have Apple Podcasts.) ### Simon & Garfunkel - Richard Corey They were so young in 1966, weren’t they? I remember studying the poem by [Edward Arlington Robinson](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44982/richard-cory?ref=richardjnewman.com) in school and being fascinated by the way Paul Simon transformed it into a song. It’s been a long time since I heard the song, so I thought it would be fun to share it here. --- # Four Things About Me For National Poetry Month, I’m linking to four online publications: - [A Dream in Three Parts](https://nycbigcitylit.com/article/a-dream-in-three-parts/?ref=richardjnewman.com), which is in my new book [*T’shuvah*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2023/09/07/tshuvah/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* was published by Big City Lit. - [What Filled The Room](https://contrarymagazine.com/2022/what-filled-the-room/?ref=richardjnewman.com) was published in Contrary Magazine. (I offer this poem because April is also National Sexual Assault Awareness Month.) - [After Drought, This Sentence Is A Metaphor For Bridge #20 & Just Beyond Your Reach](https://www.iambapoet.com/wave-ten/richard-jeffrey-newman?ref=richardjnewman.com) were published in *iamb: poetry seen and heard.* (There’s also an audio file of me reading these poems at this site.) - [Five Poems by the Catalan poet Salvador Espriu](https://www.europenowjournal.org/2023/05/01/five-poems-by-salvador-espriu/?ref=richardjnewman.com), translated with Sonia Alland, were published in EuropeNow. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #17 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-17/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:25:10.000Z # Four Things To Read **First, a little self-promotion:** [Do Not Wish For Any Other Life: or How To Write Music For The Spoken Voice](https://www.owenbloomfield.com/blog/do-not-wish-for-any-other-life-or-how-to-write-music-for-the-spoken-voice?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Owen Bloomfield: “The text of the piece is by Richard Jeffrey Newman, a poet from New York City. It is made up of a series of short sequences that take us on a journey of healing, from a sense of urgency to positive self-reflection. They are quite remarkable, powerful in their conciseness and vivid imagery. The writing drew me into a personal world that was wrestling with the spiritual decision of moving on from one stage of life into another. How does one deal with past events that contain wounds and regrets? How can one rise above these while acknowledging them? Richard takes us on a fascinating journey with a wide variety of emotional responses to these questions.” Owen Bloomfield is a Canadian composer who has set to music the second sequence in my book *T’shuvah,* Do Not Wish For Any Other Life. The piece will be [premiered](https://numus.on.ca/event/the-%5F%5F%5F%5F%5F-experiment/?ref=richardjnewman.com) by [The \_\_\_\_\_ Experiment](https://www.theblankexperiment.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) in Kitchener, Ontario on April 19\. Owen’s blog post gets into some of the technical details involved when a composer decides to work with text, but I especially appreciate what he has to say about the sequence. I’ll be traveling to Canada for the premier, and I am sure I will write about it in a future issue. **Then, continuing my project-for-the-year of reading the books on my shelves by people I know, here are two more:** [*The Fear of Large and Small Nations*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-fear-of-large-and-small-nations-nancy-agabian/19813717?ean=9798985969238&ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Nancy Agabian: At the highest conceptual level, this novel tells the story of the writing of a novel. In sections labeled “Blog Post,” “Story,” “Meta-Writing,” and “Journal,” the protagonist, a bisexual Armenian-American woman named Natalee, who goes by Na, makes visible how the act of writing frames her coming to terms with the different strands of political, intergenerational, and personal trauma that have shaped her life and from the repetitive cycle of which the writing of the novel ultimately helps her to free herself. This is a very interesting book, in both form and content. It insists, without apology, on the many-layered nature of how trauma shapes identity—gender, sexual, political, national, familial—and how identity helps determine the way we respond to trauma. If you’re looking for a novel to read, I highly recommend this book. [*40 Weeks*](https://www.yesyesbooks.com/product-page/40-weeks?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: These poems track a woman’s experience as she carries a pregnancy to term, exploring what it means and what it feels like to be connected to the world through a body in which another body grows; and also what it means to have conceived that other body with someone whose own body is failing him. The books weaves a counterpoint of interiority and exteriority, playing one against the other to illuminate a conflict that is not explicitly articulated until the last poem in the book, titled “Why have children when the world is ending?” Dasbach’s answer is the familiar one, that children represent hope for the future, allowing us, through our commitment to care for them, to feel that hope in a way that might not otherwise be possible, but the path her poems take to arrive at that answer is where this book’s value and strength lie. **Finally, an article that makes a point worth paying attention to:** [Women’s liberation mustn’t stop at either side of the Gaza fence](https://www.972mag.com/palestinian-jewish-feminists-women-liberation-gaza-fence/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Samah Salaime: “Since the onset of the war, we have all been pushed to choose a side — to support or condemn, to be for or against. This language, which we know so well from the toolbox of patriarchy, has also permeated feminist strongholds. Still in shock, Jewish and Palestinian feminists have been forced to take a stance: to believe or deny that Jewish women were victims of sexual violence during the Hamas-led October 7 assault on southern Israel. This question has been subsumed into the war of narratives in the aftermath of those attacks and amid Israel’s ongoing bombardment of the Gaza Strip.” While Salaime wrote this piece back in December 2023, the point she makes remains relevant, especially in light of [findings](https://news.un.org/en/sites/news.un.org.en/files/atoms/files/Mission%5Freport%5Fof%5FSRSG%5FSVC%5Fto%5FIsrael-oWB%5F29Jan%5F14%5Ffeb%5F2024.pdf?ref=richardjnewman.com) by the UN’s Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks in multiple locations across Gaza periphery, including rape and gang rape, in at least three locations.” Salaime’s point is that such violence is no less an expression of patriarchy than the violence Israel is doing to Gaza as a whole and that women (and, by implication, men who are women’s allies) on both sides of the conflict need to recognize, assert, and fight against that. She doesn’t take on the question of whether the denial of the sexual violence committed by Hamas, much less the violence itself, is rooted in antisemitism. Others, though, have connected those dots—something I started to do in sections [2](https://www.richardjnewman.com/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are-916/) and [3](https://www.richardjnewman.com/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are-0b8/) of my essay “Israel and Palestine: Whose Side Are You On?” Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See ### Four Images Taken By the Hubble Telescope ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fdbe5b2be-483a-437b-8c00-e9cfa2cb8757_8000x5600-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2faad120b5-f328-4589-a51f-045e91b24922_4924x2784-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f23e4b292-dbd1-49b6-9428-1f9bcc91230c_3344x3055-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f39eebb1a-68b4-4538-a7ea-e310e2fbf027_4327x4846-jpeg.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ### Mavis Staples - I'll Take You There (Oxford, MS 4-23-22) ### New Orleans Jazz | Naseer Shamma - Wynton Marsalis ### Sull Lull, from Madar, 1992 - Jan Garbarek, Anouar Brahem, Istad Shaukat Hussain ### Thriller - Michael Jackson (1930s Jazz Cover) ft. Wayne Brady --- # Four Things About Me ***Because it’s National Poetry Month, four things about me as a poet:*** I called myself a poet for the first time forty years ago sitting in the Rainy Night House Cafe in the basement of Stony Brook University’s Student Union. I’d been writing in my journal at a table in back corner of the room and I can still feel the weight of the commitment that fell on me when I finally wrote out the words *I am a poet.* Not *I want to be a poet* or even *I want to write poetry,* but *I am a poet.* I sat there a little bit afraid of my own audacity—afraid, and also excited that I knew something about myself, had chosen something for myself, that no one else in my life had touched. More than choosing a major (English and Linguistics), more than figuring out that I probably wanted to be a teacher (which I have now been for thirty some odd years), the moment I wrote those words I was for the first time consciously, willfully, claiming for myself a central truth about the way I wanted to live in the world. It was a little bit afraid, yes, but I was also very, very happy. I don’t think I was older than fifteen when I took [Conrad Aiken’s](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/conrad-aiken?ref=richardjnewman.com) [Selected Poems](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/selected-poems-9780195165470?cc=us&lang=en&&ref=richardjnewman.com) off the shelf in the public library across the street from where I lived. I opened the book at random and read these lines: > *Well, as you say, we live for small horizons:* > *We move in crowds, we flow and talk together,* > *Seeing so many eyes and hands and faces,* > *So many mouths, and all with secret meanings,—* > *Yet know so little of them; only seeing.* > *The small bright circle of our consciousness,* > *Beyond which lies the dark. Some few we know—* > *Or think we know. Once, on a sun-bright morning,* > *I walked in a certain hallway, trying to find* > *A certain door: I found one, tried it, opened,* > *And there in a spacious chamber, brightly lighted,* > *A hundred men played music, loudly, swiftly,* > *While one tall woman sent her voice above them* > *In powerful incantation … Closing then the door* > *I heard it die behind me, fade to whisper,—* > *And walked in a quiet hallway as before.* > *Just such a glimpse, as through that opened door,* > *Is all we know of those we call our friends.* I don’t know how else to say this. The music in those lines swept me away, and I remember wanting, feeling like I needed, to learn how to make language sing the way Aiken did. The first poem I actually remember writing was a very long, self-indulgent diatribe addressed, when I was 17, to the girl whom I’d thought of as the only woman I would ever love. She’d broken up with me for reasons that, if I gave them now, without context, would seem petty and shallow, so I will tell you simply that she broke my heart the way only a teenager’s heart can be broken, into pieces I was sure could never be made whole again. Writing a poem about it was the next natural step. I remember sitting at my grandfather’s desk one Sunday when we were visiting and copying the poem neatly onto the pages of white loose leaf paper I put in the mail the next day. I don’t remember who called whom after she read the poem, but when she told me how much it hurt her, she also told me some deeper, very painful truths about herself that had to do with why she’d broken up with me. This was my first lesson in the ways that poetry can make a difference in how people relate to each other. I was no less heartbroken that she did not want to be my girlfriend anymore, but at least part of that heartbreak was for her, if that makes sense. My twelfth grade teacher was a devout Catholic named Mr. Giglio. When I asked him if he would read some of the poems I’d been writing, he said yes. I only remember one of the poems I gave him, though, In rhymed couplets, of which I was quite proud, it imagined a post-nuclear-holocaust dystopian future and ended by passing judgment on God for having let such a thing happen.Mr. Giglio’s response was to tell me, “I think you should stop writing poems and focus on writing critical essays like what we’re doing in class. That’s what you’re good at.” When I asked him to explain why, he wouldn’t tell me. “I’ve said what I have to say” was as much as I got out of him, and that’s when I realized two things. First, his response had nothing to do with the quality of my writing; what I had written about had offended his religious sensibilities; and, second, that if my poem had disturbed him deeply enough that he felt it necessary talk me out of writing more, then I must be doing something right. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #16A - Norouz Edition (Corrected) URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-16a-norouz-edition-corrected/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:24:59.000Z Dear Friends, I would not normally send you two newsletters in one day, but I was very disappointed to discover that the Spotify links I’d embedded in Four by Four #16 had been stripped out. So, I am sending a corrected version of Four Things To Listen To, so you can hear that music if you want to. I hope you enjoy it. Richard # Four Things To Listen To ### Barayeh I can’t not include the video of this song, which became the anthem of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement in Iran. If you would like to listen with English subtitles, click [here](https://youtu.be/0th9%5Fv-BbUI?si=U242ZbNgL62wGc0B&ref=richardjnewman.com). --- ## Two Pieces Inspired by Saadi’s Golestan I know that, technically, this means there are five things to listen to, but I like both these pieces a lot, so consider the extra one a bonus. ### Gulistan, by Kaikhosru Sorabji ### Gyulistan Bayati Shiraz, by Fikret Amirov --- ### Mystics And Fools, by Axiom of Choice ### Where Are You? Kayhan Kalhor, Ali Bahrami Fard --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #15 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-15/ Last updated: 2025-09-15T10:03:08.000Z # Four Things To Read [Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Anti-Semitic Lies](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/jewish-anti-semitism-harvard-claudine-gay-zionism/677454/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Dara Horn: “The problem was not that Jewish students on American university campuses didn’t want free speech, or that they didn’t want to hear criticism of Israel. Instead, they didn’t want people vandalizing Jewish student organizations’ buildings, or breaking or urinating on the buildings’ windows. They didn’t want people tearing their mezuzahs down from their dorm-room doors. They didn’t want their college instructors spouting anti-Semitic lies and humiliating them in class. They didn’t want their posters defaced with Hitler caricatures, or their dorm windows plastered with Fuck Jews. They didn’t want people punching them in the face, or beating them with a stick, or threatening them with death for being Jewish. At world-class American colleges and universities, all of this happened and more.” This is a really important essay! You can disagree, as I do, with some of Horn’s positions on Israel and Zionism—which, importantly, do *not* include giving Israel a pass on its actions in Gaza—but you should take *very* seriously the core of her argument, which is a meditation on this statement, “It remains unclear why anti-Semitism should matter only when it is lethal, or if so, how many unambiguously anti-Semitic murders would be necessary for anti-Semitism to be happening outside whiny Jews’ heads.” Horn’s writing is, in many places, angry, sarcastic, and satirical, but her analysis is largely spot on. [*Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition*](https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393347913?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by David Nirenberg: I’m pretty sure I’ve told you about this book before, but I am including it here because Horn uses it in her article. This is what she says: “Nirenberg’s argument…is that Western cultures…have often defined themselves through their opposition to what they consider ‘Judaism.’ This has little to do with actual Judaism \[or actual Jewish people\], and a lot to do with whatever evil these non-Jewish cultures aspire to overcome…If piety was a given society’s ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists. If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists. If nationalism was glorified, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans; if nationalism was vilified, Jews were chauvinistic nationalists. ‘Anti-Judaism’ thus becomes a righteous fight to promote justice.” Horn’s account of how this plays out in modern times—and, in particular, in how people respond to Jews in the context of Hamas’ October 7th attack and Israel’s response in Gaza—makes for chilling reading. [Black English Doesn’t Have to Be Just for Black People](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/opinion/black-english-white-people.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.ZU0.8W1a.dRryS3hE8tTl&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by John McWhorter: “There is simply no way that whiteness and Blackness will mingle as they have in music, cuisine, gesture, greeting styles, dating, matrimony and multiracial identity, and yet for some reason be halted at language. One might wish to enforce an artificial kind of blockade here, but it’s far too late. The horse has been out of the barn ever since white kids embraced Jay-Z and Tupac.” McWhorter is an African American linguist who teaches at Columbia University, and he has a point. Language change has very little to do with the arbitrary rules we construct around its usage, whether as grammatical prescriptions, like the one that says you can’t use *they/them* as second person pronouns, or prescriptions about who is “allowed” to use which variety of English, or which vocabulary. There is a difference between claiming that something is or is not allowed and insisting that people should be held accountable for the language they use and how they use it. That’s the part that I think McWhorter leaves out of this essay. By starting with a truth about language change and not really considering the full cultural and political context of that change, I think he ends up with a simplistic, if not reductive conclusion. [Do You Pay?](https://litmagnews.substack.com/p/do-you-pay?utm%5Fcampaign=email-half-post&r=1gwysa&utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email), by Allison K Williams: “Fundamentally, every \[literary\] journal has the right to choose the payment policy that’s best for their mission. Maybe they want to pay in the future; maybe it will always be about self-promotion or joining a literary community. But when a magazine elides their lack of cash compensation or makes it hard to find, they insinuate it should not be the writer’s concern, or a criterion for submission. It becomes another subtle signpost to writers: Your work shouldn’t be for money. At its worst, not actively sharing the information says, you shouldn’t care, writer. You shouldn’t ask. As if it’s money-grubbing or disgraceful or besmirching the purity of the art.” If you’re a writer who submits to literary journals, this essay is well worth reading. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See These are from the New York Public Library’s collection of sheet music of American popular songs. ### All Aboard For Podunk ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f82299ef4-eb0f-4aae-a42f-1bd2d14adccd_603x760-jpeg.jpg) ### Gesundheit (To Your Health) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f0f6b853c-7165-4e90-bef7-eed6c03df36d_595x760-jpeg.jpg) ### Bright Eyes ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f511ea31e-7bcd-45ee-97e9-39fd5d49aaaa_603x760-jpeg.jpg) ### Lovers Once But Strangers Now or Strangers Now But Lovers Once ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f4bc2a9bd-1b2d-49b5-9a7c-4c151259e776_596x760-jpeg.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ### Insurreal - Transgressive This is the latest release by my son’s death metal band. ### **Yiddish Socialists and the Garment Industry** A *very* interesting history of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, but also a look at what unions are and what they can accomplish when they are as concerned with union values as they are with fair compensation and safe workplaces. ### **Barcelona Gipsy Klezmer Orchestra - Hévenu Shalom Aléchem** ### **Igor Stravinsky - Symphony of Psalms: III. Psalm 150 (Entire)** --- # Four Things About Me I do not remember the name of the professor who taught the writing class that was, back in the 1980s, the first class I was required to take as an English major at Stony Brook University, but I believe he had come to Stony Brook from Yale, and I remember very clearly his first-day lecture about how college students no longer knew what it meant to write a persuasive essay, much less do literary analysis, and that none of us, therefore, should expect to get an A in his class. The only other thing I remember from that class is that he gave me the A he said would be impossible to achieve. (I don’t know if anyone else did, though I assume I wasn’t the only one.) From that class on, until my junior year, I never received anything less than an A- on any paper I wrote, regardless of the discipline. Then, in my junior year, I took a course in the modern novel with Professor Sallie Sears. The first book we read that year was André Gide’s [*The Immoralist*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-immoralist-andre-gide/6726231?ean=9780142180020&ref=richardjnewman.com). I do not remember the specific prompt to which I was responding when I handed in the first paper of that semester, but it was about five pages long, had to do with the letter that frames the novel, and I handed it in with the same confidence as when I handed any other paper in: that I had done a good job and that I would, of course, receive an A. You can imagine my shock, then, when I got my paper back, covered in Professor Sears’ tiny red handwriting, with a big C- on the cover. I was incredulous. Clearly, I thought—and I have seen this response over the years in not a few of my own students who have been similarly full of themselves—she had failed to understand the full sophistication of my argument. After discussing my paper with her during her office hours, however, *I* understood full well that the failure had been mine, that my writing was not as strong as I had believed—and, to be honest, as all of the professors I’d had to that point had led me to believe. Professor Sears gave me an opportunity to rewrite the paper, which I did. Five pages grew to fifteen pages and—I have a scan of the essay on my hard drive right now—my grade went from a C- to an A- of which I was extremely proud, because I knew that I had earned it in a way I had not earned any of the grades I’d previously received. I remain immensely grateful to Professor Sears. That was the semester I began truly to learn how to write. When I was younger, I looked a lot older than my age. I was the guy, when my friends and I were 16, who could walk into a deli and buy a six-pack of beer, no questions asked. (The drinking age was eighteen back then.) I never drank with the friends I bought the beers for—I didn’t start liking the taste of beer till I was well into my twenties—but I was happy to do it for them. Often enough when I was a teenager that we would anticipate it, because my mother always looked younger than her age, waitstaff in restaurants would assume we were out on a date, that I was old enough to drink, and would treat us accordingly, asking if I “and the lady” wanted to start off with cocktails or bringing me the check at the end of the meal. Once, when me, my mother, and my sisters went to get a family picture taken—probably to JC Penny or some such place—the photographer actually thought my mother and I were husband and wife, and my sisters were our children. One incident that was just about me, though, took place during my freshman year of college. My dorm threw a keg party. I was standing at the door to the room where the beers were being poured, when a women I recognized from freshman orientation got in line. We’d exchanged a few words during orientation, so, when she struck up a conversation, I thought it was because she remembered me. She was smart, and funny, and very cute. Then, out of nowhere, she asked me, “What subject do you teach here?” I was floored. She had mistaken me for a faculty member, not even a graduate student, but a full-fledged professor. When I reminded her that we’d met at orientation, by way of explaining her mistake, she said, “I’m so sorry! It must have been the low light and your glasses.” Then she made some excuse about needing to get back to her room and left the party. We never spoke again. I have a copy of Tennyson’s *‌In Memorium* that my friend Nuria gave me at the end of the summer of 1985\. We’d both been studying Scottish literature at Edinburgh University as part of the Scottish Universities International Summer School, and it was time for us to go home, her to Spain, me back here to the States. She’d found the book in a used bookstore. Its first owner, Jessie Black, had dated it April 14th 1885, just a few months short of exactly 100 years earlier. It’s now 39 years later, and I still page through the book once in a while and read one or two of the poems Tennyson wrote in memory of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, though the sequence ultimately moves far beyond Hallam’s death in the subjects it explores. The summer of 1985 was formative for me in ways that went far beyond what I learned about Scottish literature. There were many reasons, I suppose, but Nuria’s friendship was a very important one, which is why I treasure this book. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Photo of #4 by [Kin Shing Lai](https://unsplash.com/@photo%5Fblob?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/a-wooden-stick-laying-on-the-ground-next-to-a-wall-i-GRU0zChXw?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash). Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #14 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-14/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:24:31.000Z # Four Things To Read I usually list here for essays or articles that I have come across that I think will interest you. For the most part, that is what I will continue to do. I have, however, defined for myself a reading project for 2024, which is to read the books that are on my shelves by people I know that I have either not read at all or have not been able to finish. When I am so moved, I am going to tell you about them here. I’ve finished two so far. [My Mother’s Story](https://bookshop.org/p/books/my-mother-s-story-sonia-alland/16407121?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Sonia Alland: Sonia’s book is notable, for me, not only because it captures quite vividly aspects of the Jewish immigrant experience, and her family’s experience in particular; the book also captures quite poignantly the process of meaning-making through the construction and reconstruction of narrative. In other words, Sonia doesn’t just construct a narrative of her family’s, and particularly her mother’s, past; she makes herself-in-the-act-of -constructing-the-narrative part of the story. So it becomes clear that the she is creating the story not in pursuit of an objective truth, but rather a truth she can live with, and that will sustain her, and those who come after her, as they move forward through their lives. The book gives meaning to the past so that meaning can be given both to the present and future. (On another note, Sonia and I are working on translations of the Catalan poet, Salvador Espriu. If you’d like to check them out, you can do so on [Plume](https://plumepoetry.com/a-canticle-rehearsal-in-the-temple-and-the-waters-do-not-return-even-to-meriba/?ref=richardjnewman.com), on [EuropeNow](https://www.europenowjournal.org/2023/05/01/five-poems-by-salvador-espriu/?ref=richardjnewman.com), and on [Asymptote](https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/from-the-book-of-sinera-salvador-espriu/?ref=richardjnewman.com).) [September 12](https://wordworksbooks.org/product/september-12/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Andrea Carter Brown: This is a marvelous, meticulously crafted book of poetry. It’s divided into five sections that are loosely of organized around the idea of *before, during, and after,* but it is probably more accurate to call the book an exploration of the interior experience of *before, during, and after.* It’s a book that you have to—or at least I had to—read in stages, one section at a time, both because the emotional power of its content needs room to move in you and for the way the language itself, the way it is crafted, needs room to breathe before you’re ready to move on. The craft of this book bears real study—and I mean by craft here a deliberate attention to the music of the line, at the level of the syllable, of how a poet can play that music in counterpoint to the music and rhythm of syntax. I do not think there is a single traditionally formal poem in the book, and yet almost every poem in the book has the feel of that kind of poem. I don’t mean by this that the book is somehow perfect, no book is, no work of art can be, but *September 12* is a profound example of why the conscious, deliberate application of craft is so important in poetry that bears witness to trauma; and also of how craft opens up the possibilities of what poetry-as-witness can do in a way that nothing else can. [Children Anticipate What Others Want, But Great Apes Don’t](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/children-anticipate-what-others-want-but-great-apes-dont/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Joanna Thompson: “\[A\] team of scientists found that young children from diverse cultural backgrounds have the ability to anticipate other peoples’ food preferences—but nonhuman great apes do not…Some researchers are a bit skeptical about whether this truly disproves apes’ capacity to take on other perspectives, however…Just because a chimpanzee doesn’t want to share food with humans doesn’t mean it can’t empathize with members of its group…What’s more, \[a\]ll of the kids in the study were between five and 11 years old. By that point, they would have acquired linguistic and problem-solving skills far beyond that of any ape.” I find the critique of the study more interesting than the results of the study itself, but the whole question is truly an interesting one to ponder. [Co-Teaching a Class on Israel and Palestine](https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/co-teaching-a-class-on-israel-and-palestine]%28https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/co-teaching-a-class-on-israel-and-palestine?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Bernard Avishai: “For the past two years, at Dartmouth College, I have been co-teaching a course called The Politics of Israel and Palestine with Ezzedine Fishere, a former Egyptian diplomat who served under the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process. Our work in the class—a civil, exploratory dialogue sustained over eighteen sessions—anchored a series of public forums at the college in the aftermath of the horrors of October 7th. These drew several hundred students and faculty into the college halls, and were watched by two thousand more online; they proved sufficiently helpful in preëmpting the polarization that has afflicted other Ivy League campuses to gain the attention of various national media…I’ve been thinking more about our miniature peace process, about how a university might organize for difficult subjects—and about what, after all, universities are.” This short piece is well-worth reading, both for the way Avishai talks about the details of his and Fishere’s co-teaching and because of the conclusions he reaches about “what universities are.” Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See These images are all from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ### Bugaku This photograph of a woman in a bugaku-style costume was probably produced for the tourist trade. Bugaku, a traditional form of Japanese court theater that dates back to the first millenium, was performed only by men. The photographer's use of a female model suggests that he was concerned more with effect than with authenticity. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fe409722b-2307-40c9-aed5-fad63a7847a5_2514x3180-jpeg.jpg) ### The God of Good Fortune Daikoku, on Horseback, Being Led by an Ohara Maiden by Hokkyō Kōitsu, probably 1834, year of the horse ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f1d1d2112-73ed-4cc6-b35d-72e0e5839ed2_1594x1813-jpeg.jpg) ### Rakan In the Style of Keinin Sumiyoshi Japanese, 15th century ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f4434ba92-73ac-4f40-b114-59678939681b_2060x4000-jpeg.jpg) ### Handscroll of Ten Homoerotic (Nanshoku) Scenes, by Miyagawa Chōshun, early 18th century Although during the Edo period there was no taboo or stigma associated with male-male sexual liaisons, and many famous writers, artists and other celebrities were known to have same-sex lovers, there are very few surviving deluxe paintings capturing scenes like this one, which can be seen in context in this [handscroll](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/888663?ref=richardjnewman.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fc85779f8-5fb2-41df-a9ea-8f1eec40e74f_4000x2686-jpeg.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ### Di Arbuzn (The Watermelons): A Soviet Yiddish Folk Song ### **Two Yiddish Leibu Levin Songs Sung by His Daughter, Ruth Levin** Ruth Levin—singer and daughter of Yiddish orator, singer, and performer Leibu Levin—sings a children's song from the Bucharest Yiddish Theater before World War Two and the lullaby, "Leyg dayn kop af mayne kni," with words from H. Leivik and melody from her father. ### **A Couple Songs Remembered from a Yiddish Choir in Lodz** Menashe Rotberg—Holocaust survivor from Lodz, now living in Israel—sings two songs that he remembers from his years in a choir in Lodz. ### **The Daughters of Chuvashia Marching to Defeat Facism: A Yiddish Song from the Archives** Anna Shternshis, Associate Professor of Yiddish at the University of Toronto sings and explains the history of Chuvasher Tekhter (Daughters of Chuvashia), an anti-facist song she found in the Archive for Jewish Proletarian Culture. --- # Four Things About Me There were always animals in the house when I was growing up. In addition to the dogs and cats we had over the years—at one point there were two of each—we had tropical fish; a bird, which I think was my brother’s; a rainbow boa constrictor, which was mine; and I don’t remember whether it was before or after the snake, but I also had an iguana that would sit on my arm while I did my homework. The oddest pet we had, though, was a tame squirrel. I don’t remember how it came to us, but we only had it for a short time. One day, our dog—I’m pretty sure it was Valkyrie, the husky—got into the tank that was the squirrel’s home and killed it. When I was a kid, my grandparents owned a house in Dutchess County, on Hibernia Road, right off the Taconic Parkway at what was called back then Exit D15\. My memory is that they had about an acre of property, part of which was a forest—or at least it seemed like a forest to me—that ran along the one of the banks of Wappinger’s Creek. I used to love to wander among those trees, imagining all sorts of adventures, especially if I walked far enough that I came to the barbed wire that marked the end of the property. What I remember most, though, is the spot that, after it rained, me, my brother, and three local boys who became our friends used as a mud slide down into the creek. I drove by that house with my wife not too long ago and the property is almost unrecognizable, having been divided into three or four separate lots, each with its own house and driveway. We used to call it “up the country.” Now it looks like some of the more exclusive areas of Long Island. In the 1980s, I worked at a summer camp in Monterey, Massachusetts called Camp Shalom. It was my first job at a sleep away camp and, if I remember correctly, I was a counselor for a group of six- or seven-year-old boys, one of whom was a boy from Israel who spoke no English and who, if I remember correctly, arrived at camp on a helicopter—though about this I could be wrong. Out of curiosity, I just googled the director, Amnon Aronksind and learned that he died just some weeks ago. I remember Amnon as a kind, good-humored camp director who was fun to work for. He had played professional soccer in Israel and eventually made the Israeli national team. May his memory be a blessing. When I was a boy, one of the things I thought I might one day be was an astronomer. Not an astronaut like a lot of other kids I knew, but an astronomer, someone whose job was to study the stars, to know them scientifically. Now, one of the things I miss most is being able to see the stars. When I worked at Camp Shalom, there was a rock formation in the grass up the hill from the bunk where I slept that was, somehow, perfectly molded to the contours of my back. I would often lay there at night, staring up at the night sky, reveling in the endlessness of the stars above me. Sometimes, it felt like I could take that great expanse into me and that feeling gave me a profound sense of peace. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Photo of #4 by [Pasi Virtakari](https://unsplash.com/@pasivirtakari?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/a-building-with-a-clock-on-the-front-of-it-N828JYREeew?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash). Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #13 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-13/ Last updated: 2025-09-15T09:54:01.000Z # Four Things To Read [Ukraine, by Dovid Hofshteyn](https://danielkraft.substack.com/p/ukraine-by-dovid-hofshteyn), by Daniel Kraft: “Hofshteyn was born near Kyiv, Ukraine, and came from a family of artists. He was descended from [Pedotser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedotser?ref=richardjnewman.com), the stage name of Aron-Moyshe Kholodenko, a violinist and composer who was one of the 19th century’s great klezmer virtuosos; his younger sister, [Shifre Kholodenko](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifra%5FKholodenko?ref=richardjnewman.com), was also a renowned poet and translator; his cousin [Osher Shvartsman](https://yiddishkayt.org/view/osher-shvartsman/?ref=richardjnewman.com), was a highly influential modernist Yiddish poet, particularly known for his war poetry, and became a Soviet icon after dying as a hero in the Red Army, in 1919\. Hofshteyn himself had a complicated relationship to the communist regime. He supported it at first, moving to Moscow in 1920, writing for the communist Yiddish press and leading the realist Yiddish theater movement. But in 1924, Hofshteyn — who had been educated in Russian and Hebrew — publicly called for the teaching of Hebrew in Russia. Hebrew had no place in Soviet ideology, and after being what we might anachronistically call “cancelled,” Hofshteyn moved to Palestine for several years, struggling for work there, before returning to Kyiv.” The poem this text contextualizes is well-worth reading. Hofshteyn has apparently been undergoing a revival in Ukraine as part of [the cultural resistance](https://www.algemeiner.com/2022/04/05/i-see-your-face-you-are-alive-the-yiddish-poet-undergoing-a-revival-in-war-torn-ukraine/?ref=richardjnewman.com) to the Russian invasion. (And for the poets among my readers, I just love Daniel Kraft’s definition of rhyme as “a kind of implicit argument of kinship between two words or two ideas.”) [Man admits participating in ‘castration by clamping’ incidents](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/dec/14/man-admits-participating-in-castration-by-clamping-incidents?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Emine Sinmaz: “The defendants are said to have been part of a society in which people willingly undergo extreme body modification. The practice is linked to a subculture in which men become ‘nullos’ – short for genital nullification – by having their penis and testicles removed.” On the one hand the title and the quote would seem to speak for themselves, but—and I have no idea if the connection I am making here is real or an accident of discursive circumstance—the next piece offers a perspective I never would have imagined. [If One Part Suffers](https://harpers.org/archive/2024/01/if-one-part-suffers/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Michelle Orange: “BID, body integrity dysphoria, is rare. Though experts are reluctant to estimate its prevalence, it is believed that at least a thousand people globally have the disorder. Medical recognition of the condition is growing, and its addition to the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD) took effect last year. The ICD defines BID as ‘an intense and persistent desire to become physically disabled in a significant way’—to become, for example, a major-limb amputee, paraplegic, or blind—’with onset by early adolescence accompanied by persistent discomfort, or intense feelings of inappropriateness’ regarding one’s body.” This article, which at least potentially put the guys written about in the previous piece in a whole new context, traces the story of one man with BID, and it gets into some pretty interesting political territory as well: “Glancingly over the years, and recently, the political right wing has identified the disorder as a more specific beacon: a representation of the risks supposedly opened up by the freedom to express different gender identities and to modify one’s body accordingly, citing the affliction as evidence that trans rights and gender-affirming care are the first stops along a slippery slope.” [Behind the New Iron Curtain](https://harpers.org/archive/2024/01/behind-the-new-iron-curtain/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Marzio G. Mian, Translated by Elettra Pauletto: “It seems implausible, in the age of social media, that so little should be known about the country that has shattered the international order, but the shadows surrounding Russia have only grown since the days of the Soviet Union. Of course, it is one thing to observe the country from the outside; it is another to try to understand how Russians experience the war and react to sanctions from within, and what they hope the future holds. If Russia seems to have become another planet, it is largely because its regime has also waged war on foreign journalists, preventing them from straying beyond established perimeters.” A piece about Russia that would have been nearly impossible for an American to write, given the current politics between the two countries, that also demonstrates the importance of translation in giving us access to texts we would not otherwise be able to read. --- Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. --- # Four Things To See Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) is known as one of the first pioneers of modern abstract art. He employed geometry, abstract colors, and abstract forms in his artworks. He believed that art can be used to express the “inner life” of an artist. ### Untitled (1916) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fb9fc5292-3112-45ed-96dd-2e839a4770d6_2822x2123-jpeg.jpg) ### Painting with Green Center (1913) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f2b232499-3889-4b5e-8632-61d18b02d62d_1200x1117-jpeg.jpg) ### Free Curve to the Point: Accompanying Sound of Geometric Curves (1925) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f86286b00-a345-49e1-91a2-fd355de1b4fe_958x1200-jpeg.jpg) ### Landscape with Two Poplars (1912) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fd209d55a-e613-464a-a103-c35985727a9b_1200x938-jpeg.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ### Buena Vista Social Club - Chan Chan ### Climax - Precious and Few ### Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #3 - First Movement ### Amadou & Mariam - Senegal Fast Food --- # Four Things About Me Popcorn has been my comfort food going all the way back to my undergraduate days. I was a horrible procrastinator when it came to writing papers, often pulling one or two almost-all-nighters right before a paper was due. I’d make myself a huge bowl of popcorn and head down to the study room in our dorm to write. This, as you can imagine, was long before computers, but I did have an electric typewriter my mother gave me, with enough memory to auto-erase—using a ribbon that also had white out—an entire line of text. It was, at the time, top of the line technology, and I was very glad to have it. During my sophomore and junior years, my roommate’s name was also Richard. We played Dungeons & Dragons with some other guys in the dorm—I was the DM, the dungeon master—and, in keeping with that pursuit, we put a sign up on the outside of our door, though I don’t remember if it said *Riches Lie Beyond This door!* or *Riches Lie Within!* My first girlfriend’s name was Sandy. I was twelve; she was thirteen. We became known as a couple when she put her head on my shoulder at a Mets game to which a friend’s father had taken a group of us kids. (That was a big deal back then.) Sandy was skinny, with blond hair and a narrow, angular face. She’d been born with a heart defect that, she told me one day when we were hanging out in her family’s apartment, she knew was going to kill her. I don’t remember the nature of the defect or much about the conversation in which she told me, only that she told me and that, at twelve-years-old, I was not ready to handle that kind of knowledge. I also don’t remember anyone telling me when she went into the hospital for the last time, only that, after she died, her brother stopped speaking to me because I never went to visit her. Now, of course, I wish I had. Leaning against the wall in our foyer is the Fuji 10-speed racing bike that I bought more than forty years ago, when I was an undergraduate student and didn’t have a car. (I didn’t even have my driver’s license yet.) During the school year, weather permitting, I used the bike to go back and forth to my job as an adviser for the youth group at a nearby synagogue. I had the bike refurbished so my wife and I could go biking on one of the trails not far from where we live and, up until the pandemic shutdown, we went almost every weekend during the summer. I miss it. \*We\* miss it. Hopefully, we’ll be able to start up again this summer. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive* [*It All Connects*](https://itallconnects.substack.com/)*, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Photo of #4 by [Antonio Piña](https://unsplash.com/@elpainapol?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/2914-display-bk%5FwJPJ5Wis?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash) Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #12 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-12/ Last updated: 2025-09-15T09:47:11.000Z # Four Things To Read [What Did Top Israeli War Officials Really Say About Gaza?](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/01/israel-south-africa-genocide-case-fake-quotes?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Yair Rosenberg: “Unfortunately, this concatenation of errors is part of a pattern. As someone who has covered Israeli extremism for years and written about the hard right’s push to ethnically cleanse Gaza and resettle it, I have been carefully tracking the rise of such dangerous ideas for more than a decade. In this perilous wartime environment, it is essential to know who is saying what, and whether they have the authority to act on it. But while far too many right-wing members of Israel’s Parliament have expressed borderline or straightforwardly genocidal sentiments during the Gaza conflict, such statements attributed to the three people making Israel’s actual military decisions, the voting members of its war cabinet—Gallant, Netanyahu, and the former opposition lawmaker Benny Gantz—repeatedly turn out to be mistaken or misrepresented.” The kind of accuracy Rosenberg is talking about matters deeply. It’s important that this piece was written by someone who has not shied away from talking about “the hard right’s push to ethnically cleanse Gaza” and not an apologist for the Israeli government. [A Mass Assassination Factory: Inside Israel’s Calculated Bombing of Gaza](https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Ben Reiff: “In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. ‘The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths \[permitted\] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,’ said one source. ‘Nothing happens by accident,’ said another source. ‘When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit \[another\] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.’” If there were any doubts in your mind that Israel’s war on Gaza is about more than just retaliating against Hamas, this article should disabuse you of those notions. [The Epidemiological War on Gaza](https://jewishcurrents.org/epidemiological-war-on-gaza?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Maya Rosen: “On November 28th, Margaret Harris, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO), warned that the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza was likely to become even worse. ‘Everybody everywhere \[in Gaza\] has dire health needs now because they’re starving, because they lack clean water, and \[they’re\] crowded together,’ she said at a UN briefing in Geneva, before concluding with an ominous pronouncement: ‘Eventually, we will see more people dying from disease than we are even seeing from the bombardment.’” I think the quote speaks for itself. [‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.Kk0.6LYn.g62GsAWB8MOp&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella: “A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.” The truths of the previous two articles notwithstanding, we should not turn the overwhelming inhumanity of Israel’s campaign in Gaza (and [here](https://www.972mag.com/israel-torture-camp-gaza-detainees/?ref=richardjnewman.com) is another example) into a reason to elide the atrocities Hamas committed, not because the two attacks are equivalent—clearly, they are not—but because to do so is to give tacit approval to the hatreds by which those atrocities were informed. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See Julie de Graag (1877–1924) was a female Dutch graphic artist and painter. She mainly produced graphic works in an Art Nouveau style which have been described as being both “sober yet refined.” ### Chrysanthemums ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f0f9fd46d-5545-4625-97b8-aa6b375ed63a_748x1200-jpeg.jpg) ### Dog's head (1920) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f0887b938-b0ec-4711-ba8d-2e6efcae0841_3247x3500-jpeg.jpg) ### Flower (1920) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f7a633cfd-3147-4aaf-8468-796edfa8cfcc_3344x3247-jpeg.jpg) ### Chestnut Leaf ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fe57d921f-d566-4fc6-a615-5747e841f02a_3500x2240-jpeg.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ### Next of Kin — New Party Systems feat. Yvette Massoudi The music and lyrics of this song were written by award-winning composer [David First](https://davidfirst.bandcamp.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) to express, without taking a side, the desire for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Yvette Massoudi is the lead singer for [Mitra Sumara](https://mitrasumara.bandcamp.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com). You can find the song lyrics [here](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/r8f0gpalk2x2oc4khl6nv/lyrics-to-next-of-kin-by-david-first.rtf?rlkey=744c2khg373ncvzv0bxr5vjko&dl=0&ref=richardjnewman.com). ### Pour Some Sugar On Me - Postmodern Jukebox ### The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys - Traffic ### Velkhes Meydl S’nemt A Bokher (Any Girl Who Takes A Boyfriend) - The Klezmatics & Chava Alberstein # Four Things About Me When I was in seventh grade—my teacher’s name was Mr. Kaiser—I won second place in my junior high school’s science fair. Using, if i remember correctly, a piece of meat, I grew a culture in a petrie dish, documenting how long it took for me to be able to see microorganisms through the microscope we had in our classroom. Then I froze the culture and documented how long it took after I thawed it out for microorganisms to reappear. I must have articulated a hypothesis I was trying to prove, though I don’t remember what it was, and so I don’t remember what I thought the experiment showed, but I know that I called it an experiment in cryobiology. Back then, my primary academic interest was science, not English, though it was a toss up as to whether I would pursue biology or—I was also learning to write programs in Basic—computer science. I’ve started making a list of the books on my shelves that I’ve actually read, no matter how long ago I might have read them. I’ve just started the E’s—the books are arranged alphabetically—and these are the title I’ve recorded so far: *Brutal Imagination,* by Cornelius Eady (poetry), *Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers,* by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English (nonfiction), *The Hearts Of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment,* by Barbara Ehrenreich (nonfiction), *Re-making Love: The Feminization of Sex,* by Barbara Ehrenreich (nonfiction), *God’s Phallus and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism,* by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (nonfiction), *Stanley’s Girl,* by Susan Eisengber (poetry), *Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography & Censorship,* edited by Kate Ellis, Beth Jaker, Nan D. Hunter, Barbara O’Dair, and Abby Tallmer (nonfiction). The local library where I grew up had a children’s section, a young adult section, and an adult section. I don’t remember how young I was, but I read through all the science fiction books in the children’s section a year or two before I would be eligible for a young adult library card. One of the librarians made an exception, though, and gave me the YA card anyway, which allowed me access to the side of the building where the books for adults were housed. I read through the YA science fiction books very quickly as well—the category was nowhere nearly as expansive as it is today—but I don’t remember a single title. Nor do I remember why I stopped reading science fiction, though it may have had something to do with the library not having all that many sci-fi titles on the shelves to begin with. The first time I smoked pot, I was seventeen, which was late among the kids in my neighborhood. It was just me and my friend Joey, so I didn’t have to deal with the *we-can’t-wait-to-see-Newman-high* bullshit the rest of our crowd would surely not have shut up about. I remember he showed me how to toke on the joint and how I managed to hold the smoke in the way he told me I had to if I wanted actually to get high, but nothing happened. Even after we finished the whole thing, I felt nothing. Still, it was a moment of bonding between us. Not too many years later, Joey killed himself. I was away and couldn’t attend the funeral. I never learned where he was buried. One day, I’ll tell the rest of that story. --- *You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the* [*First Tuesdays*](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) *mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.* Photo of #4 by [Francesco Ungaro](https://unsplash.com/@francesco%5Fungaro?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/456-door-number-YJiB74zQLMs?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash). Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### The People of Gaza Keep Dying - A Poem URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-people-of-gaza-keep-dying-a-poem/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:29:11.000Z Dear Friends, As a follow up to my three-part series, “Israel and Palestine: Whose Side Are You On?”—which you can read as a single essay [here](https://richardjnewman.com/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are-you-on?ref=richardjnewman.com)—I wanted to share with you a poem of mine, “The People of Gaza Keep Dying,” that was recently published on [New Verse News](https://newversenews.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-people-in-gaza-keep-dying.html?ref=richardjnewman.com). I have revised this version only slightly. The poem’s backstory appears below. ### The People In Gaza Keep Dying *“You don’t need overt bloodshed to cause significant violence that ends people’s lives. Many people will die unnecessary deaths due to deprivation.”* —Yara Asi, quoted by Maya Rosen in Jewish Currents, “The Epidemiological War on Gaza” This morning on my daily walk I met a long-haired shepherd with ambiguous eyes. I slowed my pace, watched the dog’s walker rein the animal’s curiosity in, winding tightly around her hand the tether we tell ourselves protects people like me, who believe all others will of course welcome the friendship we assume they assume we intend, and in that moment, the rage I thought I’d put behind me at the words of the poet whose book I was asked to review sent its own tether out, and I heard myself again reading his lines aloud as I sat some months ago alone among my books, confirming I’d not misread his refusal of history, the willful pleasure he took in a loathing I disowned long ago, no differently, I have no doubt, than that neck-fettered dog, under the right circumstances, would disown its leash, and perhaps its master as well. I don’t remember much about my own opportunity, except that I was standing in my sophomore dorm hallway while a man from a country I knew nothing about, except that I knew nothing, looked at me with disbelief. “You really believe those mothers love their sons so little that they bring them into the world just to make them martyrs?” I had not said exactly that, but it had been my meaning, as its underlying hatred was, in poem after poem, the lie that poet embraced. I started to ask if the dog was friendly, but the woman spit out, “Come!” and pulled him hard into the gutter, so I let my question sink back into silence, which I’d thought at first was how I should respond to that poet’s betrayal of this art that saved my life, but then I wrote the review. It’s in the world. I want to know what difference it has made. *January 2, 2020 - January 10, 2024* Thank you for reading It All Connects.... This post is public so feel free to share it. ### The Backstory As you can see from the dates of composition, I began this poem almost exactly four years ago. I was at the time preparing to write the review I refer to, of Stephen Sher’s *Contestable Truths, Incontestable Lies,* which, if you want, you can read [here](https://www.dropbox.com/s/haw4xj95zud4r6l/review%20of%20contestable%20truths%20incontestable%20lies.pdf?dl=0&ref=richardjnewman.com). The early drafts of my poem were not successful, however, largely because they focused on my feelings about the book, not on the feelings themselves, or, as Yeats would put it, on the struggle within myself those feelings represented. When Israel began its military campaign in Gaza, I remembered the poem of Sher’s that my review focused on. Called “Bombing Gaza,” it appropriated in a really heinous way Abraham’s negotation with God over whether or not there were enough righteous people in Sodom and Gomorrah for God to spare those two cities—a rhetoric that is, in fact, echoed in statements made by Israeli officials to the effect that there are no innocent people in Gaza. Remembering how Sher’s poem foreshadowed what is happening there today moved me to go back to my own poem, the result of which you see above. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #11 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-11/ Last updated: 2025-09-15T09:41:53.000Z # Four Things To Read [Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign, in His Own Menacing Words](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/us/politics/trump-2024-president-campaign.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.Dk0.PvmP.DWtlV8D8iVAj&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Ian Prasad Philbrick and Lyna Bentahar: “‘If he says what he means and means what he says, and someday is able to implement it, it’s an existential crisis that the U.S. would face,’ said Barbara Perry, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.” When someone tells you who they are, you should believe them. This is a chilling read. [Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/us/politics/trump-2025-immigration-agenda.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.Dk0.7Or5.PyiW9tfBgDT%5F&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), By Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan: “In a public reference to his plans, Mr. Trump told a crowd in Iowa in September: ‘Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.’ The reference was to a 1954 campaign to round up and expel Mexican immigrants that was named for an ethnic slur — ‘[Operation Wetback](https://www.history.com/news/operation-wetback-eisenhower-1954-deportation?ref=richardjnewman.com).’” Again, he’s telling us who he is and we need to believe him. [Local Journalism Worth Reading From 2023](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/briefing/local-journalism-worth-reading-from-2023.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.H00.8FtK.jyL01vck7yBI&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com): As you may know, one of the (perhaps unintended) consequences of so much of our lives going online has been a decrease in publications that cover local stories. I don’t usually share so many pieces from a single publication, but this piece from the Times actually links to local journalism from around the country. It’s well worth taking a look. [He Was Falsely Accused of Using AI. Here’s What He Wishes His Professor Did Instead](https://www.techlearning.com/news/he-was-falsely-accused-of-using-ai-heres-what-he-wishes-his-professor-did-instead?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Erik Ofgang: “Quarterman says his professor ran his essay response through an AI detection tool because she felt that his response was too general. When the essay was marked positive, she proceeded to accuse him of cheating, never considering that the [**AI detection tool could have logged a false positive**](https://www.techlearning.com/news/ai-detectors-discriminate-against-non-native-speakers-says-stanford-research?ref=richardjnewman.com), which can be fairly common.” The question of how to deal with one student whom you suspect of using an AI is, in some ways, quite simple. You treat it the way we used to treat possible instances of plagiarism before there were tools like Turnitin. Unless you already had absolute proof of some sort, you asked the student to explain their paper to you. If they could to your satisfaction, you were just expressing interest; if they couldn’t, you could usually get them to admit they’d plagiarized. One of the challenges with AI is that there’s such easy access, which makes it impractical to meet with every student whom you might suspect. This past semester, most of the papers I suspected ended up not fulfilling the assignment I’d given, so I could fail them without even having to go there. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See: Images from the National Gallery --- #### **The University Singers of New Orleans, photographed in 1879 by Llewellyn A. Sawyer (1844 - 1923)** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f39bfbc16-de55-445b-add0-0e9823f335bc_4096x2695-jpeg.jpg) --- ## Portrait of a Family #### Photographed by Edith R. Wilson (1864 - 1924) in 1922 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fc73e923e-7c4b-462f-a423-9a61d7fc12ad_2594x3417-jpeg.jpg) --- ## Branche de Pommier #### Painted in 1922-23 by Eugène Atget (1857 - 1927) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f4e281f9d-3071-4f76-9640-92fbd50be24f_3318x4038-jpeg.jpg) --- ## Allegory on Copulation #### By an anonymous Italian artist in the fourth quarter of the 15th century ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f203832d1-25c1-4816-98e5-1f3c281b6bf4_4000x2681-jpeg.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ### **Bad Bunny - Where She Goes** --- ### Big Mama Thornton - Rooster Blues/Ball & Chain - Hound Dog --- ### Sarah Vaughan - Send In The Clowns --- ### The Cab - Angel with a Shotgun --- # Four Things About Me *I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the lessons I still carry with me from the yeshiva I attended from 8th through 11th grade, back when I thought I wanted to be a rabbi. I obviously changed my mind about that, and I know the rebbes who taught me would be very disappointed in how that change has shaped my life. Nonetheless, here are four lessons that I have carried with me for almost fifty years, and I am grateful for them.* When I was in eighth or ninth grade, some of my classmates circulated a petition asking the yeshiva’s administration for a change in policy that, if I recall correctly, would ease what they felt to be a conflict between schoolwork and certain aspects of their religious observance at home. I remember sitting in Rabbi Schubert’s Gemara class one morning when two of the girls who’d started the petition came in to ask if he would sign it. He told them no. He agreed with what they were asking for, he said, and would be happy to support them in discussions with the administration, but he would not sign the document itself because he did not want to lend his name to those students—and he knew there were some—who wanted the change to prioritize their own free time, not religious observance. Whether or not Rabbi Schubert was right about my classmates, I learned that morning that just because you nominally agree with someone, doesn’t mean you are in fact on the same side. Rabbi Wehl, my tenth grade Gemara teacher, was the first person to give me (and my classmates, of course) permission to annotate a text I was reading. In fact, he told us that if we didn’t annotate the Talmudic text we were studying, then we weren’t really learning. How would we remember what our questions were, he asked, if we didn’t write them down? How could we deepen them and allow them to deepen us? Obviously, he wasn’t talking about all the questions one might have about a given text, just the ones that, as he put it, “could end up being with you your whole life.” That, he insisted, was why we had to learn to love those questions—he saw writing them down as an act of love—because “if you don’t learn to love them, the ones that really matter, how are you ever going to learn to love yourself?” Tenth grade Gemara was also the class in which I got my first taste of a musar shmooze, a kind of (at least it appeared to me at the time, improvised) moral exhortation. Sometimes Rabbi Wehl would take up almost the whole class period passionately urging us to be better Jews. I tended to experience these talks more as exercises in shaming than the truth-telling tough love I think Rabbi Wehl intended them as. No matter what he was talking about, though, at some point he would pause, look around the room and say, “I am only speaking to one of you right now. I don’t know which one of you it is, and tomorrow it may be someone different, but whoever you are, you’re the one who needs to hear this. You’re the one I am meant to teach today.” That conviction echoes through my own pedagogy, not in the moral and ethical sense Rabbi Wehl was concerned with, but in the sense that I know I am at my best as a teacher when I don’t try to control which of my students is learning what. My teacher in eleventh grade Gemara was [Rabbi Wahrman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shlomo%5FWahrman?ref=richardjnewman.com). What I remember most about him, though, is something he said to me when I came back to visit the yeshiva during my first year of college. The school had structured its classes so that we were able to graduate in 11th grade. I could have gone the following year to a yeshiva in Israel before enrolling in college or I could have entered a program in which I would continue my religious studies in the morning and take college classes in the afternoon, getting a head start on all my friends who were in public school. I turned both those opportunities down, however, and instead went back to public school for 12th grade. Rabbi Wahrman was the only former teacher who did not try to guilt-trip me over that decision. Instead, he asked if I was involved with the Jewish community at the college I was attending, and when I told him that I was working as an advisor to a USY youth group, his face lit up. “So you’re still connected!” he said. “That’s the most important thing.” That moment was my first lesson in the fact that one could choose orthodoxy for oneself without being dogmatic about it when it came to others. --- Photo of #4 by [Jason Blackeye](https://unsplash.com/@jeisblack?ref=richardjnewman.com) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/a-sign-marked-with-the-number-four-over-a-lake-1?ref=richardjnewman.com). Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Israel and Palestine: Whose Side Are You On? URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are-0b8/ Last updated: 2025-06-03T15:19:50.000Z Photo by [Marco Bianchetti](https://unsplash.com/@marcobian?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/brown-rope-in-close-up-photography-cAuV981ygCg?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash) --- *(Read Parts* [*1*](https://open.substack.com/pub/itallconnects/p/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are?r=1gwysa&utm%5Fcampaign=post&utm%5Fmedium=web&showWelcome=true) *and* [*2*](https://open.substack.com/pub/itallconnects/p/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are-916?r=1gwysa&utm%5Fcampaign=post&utm%5Fmedium=web&showWelcome=true)*.)* The negotiations that will, in the end, bring any form of (admittedly imperfect) just resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict—whether that be the increasingly implausible two-state solution, a secular one-state solution, or some form of confederacy[1](#footnote-1)—will require each side to accept the fact that some aspects of the other’s narrative will be irreconcilable with their own. This doesn’t mean, of course, that the two sides have nothing in common. Palestinian and Israeli parents who have lost children, for example, started the [Parents Circle-Families Forum](https://www.theparentscircle.org/en/pcff-home-page-en/?ref=richardjnewman.com) out of their shared commitment that no one else should suffer the loss of a family member. As this essay by Susan Dominus in the *[The New York Times Magazine](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/14/magazine/israelis-palestinians-peace-forum.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.JU0.DjjM.1FAE%5FiiAlyio&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com)* shows, however, once you dig beneath the surface of that shared experience, horrific as it is, the ways in which it is impossible to “both sides” the conflict quickly come to the surface. Just as there can be no question that Israel is an occupying power and that any form of Palestinian resistance, including the October 7th attack by Hamas, needs to be understood in the context of that occupation; and just as there can be no question that Israel’s current campaign in Gaza is in keeping with, not an exception to, the policies and practices of that occupation; there can be no question that, whether you call Zionism a settler-colonial ideology or identify it, I would say more accurately, as a form of nationalism (because I do think [that difference is meaningful](https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2021-07-05/ty-article-opinion/is-israel-really-a-settler-colonial-state/0000017f-f46f-d497-a1ff-f6ef21fc0000?ref=richardjnewman.com)), the Jews who founded Israel *behaved* like colonizers. Nor can there be a question that the Jews who’ve governed the country since 1948 have, some more and some less explicitly, continued that behavior. If you say that you support Israel, but you are unwilling to come to honest terms with that history, if you are willing to use accusations of antisemitism to obscure that history, then we are not on the same side. Similarly, you and I are not on the same side if, implicitly or explicitly, you hold all Jews uniquely responsible for Israel’s behavior, or if the anti-Zionism you espouse when you declare your solidarity with the Palestinians does not distinguish between the political Zionism of the State of Israel and what Zionism means within the antisemitic world view where a core component of Hamas’ charter finds its roots. More to the point, if these are the positions you hold, then the side I *am* on will inevitably include anyone who is Jewish, even if they support the State of Israel without qualification. They need to be held accountable for that position, but they do not therefore deserve to be the targets of antisemitism. I am, in other words, talking here about two very different areas of concern, one that has to do with the oppressive and murderously unjust behavior of a nation state, and one that has to do with an ideology that targets Jews worldwide, regardless of what their position on Israel and Palestine might be. Unfortunately, however, because the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is among the few contexts in which it is possible, outside of Jewish circles, to insist that antisemitism *needs* to be part of the discussion, these areas of concern all too often become conflated. As a result, my self-interest as a Jew in calling out antisemitism gets pitted against the interests of the Palestinians on whose behalf opposition to the Israeli occupation is absolutely necessary. There is, in other words, a divide-and-conquer strategy at work here, and it’s worth asking whose interests it serves. For now, since answering that question would require an essay (and likely more) unto itself, all I will say is that I am not on their side either. Rather, I stand with those whose opposition to the Israeli occupation and solidarity with the Palestinians is accompanied by an explicit and proactive stand against both antisemitism and that kind of divide and conquer strategy. Otherwise, it does not matter what we may nominally agree on—whether that happens to be opposition to the occupation or Hamas’ antisemitism and all it represents—we simply are not on the same side. --- *Thanks for reading this series. I have turned comments on. If you would like to let me know what you think by responding directly to the post, rather than emailing me, I’d love to hear from you. Also, if you find my newsletter valuable, please consider forwarding it to others who might do so as well. I am trying to grow my mailing list. Thank You!* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. --- 1. Peter Beinart wrote about this question a couple of years ago in *[Jewish Currents](https://jewishcurrents.org/yavne-a-jewish-case-for-equality-in-israel-palestine?ref=richardjnewman.com)* [↩](#footnote-anchor-1 "Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.") ### Israel and Palestine: Whose Side Are You On? URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are-916/ Last updated: 2025-11-08T21:19:59.000Z Photo by [Marco Bianchetti](https://unsplash.com/@marcobian?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/brown-rope-in-close-up-photography-cAuV981ygCg?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash) --- *(You can read Part 1* [*here*](https://open.substack.com/pub/itallconnects/p/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are?r=1gwysa&utm%5Fcampaign=post&utm%5Fmedium=web&showWelcome=true)*.)* It is a fact that accusations of antisemitism are all too often used to silence voices critical of Israel. It is also a fact, however, that antisemitism sometimes does lie embedded within, and sometimes even animates, those voices, like, for example, the antisemitism enshrined in both the original version of Hamas’ charter from [1988](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th%5Fcentury/hamas.asp?ref=richardjnewman.com) and the revised version of [2017](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full?ref=richardjnewman.com). The 1988 version, for example, explicitly invokes [*The Protocols of The Elders of Zion*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FProtocols%5Fof%5Fthe%5FElders%5Fof%5FZion?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* as proof that the goal of Zionism is world domination. > *The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.* First published in Russia in the early 1900s, the *Protocols* purports to expose the Jewish plan to rule the world. As Hamas understood things in 1988, in other words, the State of Israel was not simply an occupying power that needed to be resisted. Rather, it was the political manifestation of something far more sinister and far-reaching, a Jewish plot to turn the world into one big Jewish state. The fight against Israel, therefore, was not just the fight for Palestinian freedom; it was a fight to ensure the freedom of the entire world. (If you’ve never heard of the *Protocols,* these articles, by [Michael Fox](https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2016-09-08/ty-article/.premium/the-elders-of-zion-113-years-of-a-lie-that-refuses-to-die/0000017f-e781-dea7-adff-f7fb67240000?ref=richardjnewman.com) and [Steven J. Zipperstein](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/08/conspiracy-theory-rule-them-all/615550/?ref=richardjnewman.com) are worth reading.) On the surface, the 2017 revision of the charter suggests that Hamas has had a substantive change of heart. It contains in Article 16 an explicit disavowal of antisemitism, “affirm\[ing\] that \[Hamas’\] conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion;” and, in Article 17, the document identifies “anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews” exclusively with “European history,” asserting that those phenomena have no place in “the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or their heritage.” Taken at face value, these words suggest that Hamas now considers antisemitism to be completely alien to its purpose and goals. Those statements, however, stand in direct contradiction to other language in the document that essentially reproduces the claims about the Jews that the 1988 charter took from the *Protocols.* This is from Articles 14 and 15: > *The Zionist project is a racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist project based on seizing the properties of others…The Zionist project does not target the Palestinian people alone; it is the enemy of the Arab and Islamic Ummah posing a grave threat to its security and interests \[and also\] to international security and peace and to mankind and its interests and stability.* The 2017 charter may not mention the *Protocols* at all; it may substitute the word *Zionists* for *Jews;* and it may contain language nominally disavowing antisemitism; but Hamas still clearly defines its anti-Zionism not in opposition to the State of Israel per se—a position which is not, in itself, antisemitic—but rather to the same campaign of world domination that the *Protocols* attributes to the Jews. The change in Hamas’ position, in other words, is more cosmetic than anything else. I thought about the transitive nature of this rhetoric a lot as I tried to figure out how to respond in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ October 7th attack. On the one hand, not to acknowledge what Hamas did as an expression of Palestinian resistance would be to deny both the reality of Israel’s occupation and the fact that the Palestinians have the right to resist that occupation on their own terms. On the other hand, not to call out at the same time the antisemitism in Hamas’ charter would be to allow it to remain an unexamined subtext in any discussion of the attack, one that neither I nor any other Jewish person should be expected to set aside, minimize, or ignore. I know it may sound like I’m trying to use antisemitism to “both sides” the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but I am not. There is no question that the current Israeli government is using Hamas’ attack as a pretext for furthering the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians that has been woven into Israel’s DNA since its [founding](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/may/18/a-jewish-case-for-palestinian-refugee-return?ref=richardjnewman.com); and there is also no question that [the unspeakable scale and brutality](https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/?ref=richardjnewman.com) of Israel’s response to that attack should disabuse anyone who still believes, as I once did, in Israel’s inherent moral superiority. What we are witnessing in Gaza is the logic of military occupation being carried out to its completely one-sided conclusion. Calling out Hamas’ antisemitism changes none of that. What it does do, however, is connect Hamas’ overall agenda (which is not necessarily the agenda of the Palestinian people), and, in particular, the [atrocities](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.Kk0.6LYn.g62GsAWB8MOp&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com) the Hamas fighters [committed, ](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/23/israel-shows-footage-of-hamas-killings-to-counter-denial-of-atrocities?ref=richardjnewman.com)to other instances of antisemitism worldwide: the [chants](https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5003402,00.html?ref=richardjnewman.com), for example, of “Jews will not replace us” at the 2017 Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, and the [Poway Synagogue shooting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poway%5Fsynagogue%5Fshooting?ref=richardjnewman.com) in Pittsburgh, and the [Halle Synagogue shooting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halle%5Fsynagogue%5Fshooting?ref=richardjnewman.com) in Germany; and the resurfacing of the [blood libel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood%5Flibel?ref=richardjnewman.com) in [Turkey](https://www.algemeiner.com/2023/08/14/turkish-newscaster-defends-airing-jewish-blood-libel/?%5Fga=2.185464545.957158488.1703073496-1742273328.1701691253&ref=richardjnewman.com); and the antisemitism that is causing many [Jews in France to feel they need to hide their Jewish identity](https://www.algemeiner.com/2023/11/29/antisemitic-discrimination-painful-daily-reality-jews-france-newspaper-investigation-reveals/?%5Fga=2.77910620.957158488.1703073496-1742273328.1701691253&ref=richardjnewman.com)—not to mention my personal experiences of antisemitism, those I told you about above and those I have not included in this essay, which, though their violence may only be implicit and implied, continue to this day. For me, in other words, and for all the Jews I know, antisemitism is personal—how could it not be?—and so I take it personally when, in discussions about Israel and Palestine, someone refuses to acknowledge the presence of antisemitism when I point it out to them; or tells me that, in light of Israel’s behavior, I should not make calling antisemitism out a priority; or that I am being too sensitive, or am too fragile, and that I am therefore seeing antisemitism where it isn’t; or assumes that the only reason I choose to call antisemitism out is my presumed Jewish loyalty to Israel. That person and I might very well agree both in our opposition to the Israeli occupation and in our understanding of the history that has culminated in Israel’s current campaign, as one Israeli official put it, to “flatten Gaza.” Unless there are compelling reasons to do otherwise, however—and I want to repeat that, because it’s important, *unless there are compelling reasons to do otherwise*—if I have to choose between affirming what we agree on and confronting antisemitism, I will always choose the latter. Not because I think calling out antisemitism is more important than the Palestinian men, women, and children whose lives are currently being torn apart by Israeli forces, but because when someone in conversation with me is willing to give antisemitism a free pass, I find it impossible not to ask whose side they’re really on. --- [*Part Three*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are-0b8/) *of this series, Whose Side Are You On?, will post tomorrow. I have turned comments on. If you would like to let me know what you think by responding directly to the post, rather than emailing me, I’d love to hear from you. Also, if you find my newsletter valuable, please consider forwarding it to others who might do so as well. I am trying to grow my mailing list. Thank You!* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Israel and Palestine: Whose Side Are You On? URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are/ Last updated: 2025-11-08T21:19:06.000Z My early Jewish education was saturated with the idea that the existence of the State of Israel was a categorical imperative of both Jewish identity and Jewish survival; and my early experience of antisemitism, starting in the third grade and lasting into my college years, made it all too easy to accept that idea as incontrovertibly true. The white, Christian kids in my neighborhood threw pennies, rocks, and bottles at me when I walked past, calling me *Cheap Jew!* and *Fucking Heeb!*. They harassed me in school, attacked me physically on multiple occasions, letting me know they had ovens waiting in their basements for me and my family; and they burglarized the apartment where my family lived, targeting my room in particular by trashing the books of Jewish learning I had on my bookshelf and carving the word *kike* into my closet door. Their message was clear. Because I was Jewish, I was not welcome among them. The white, Christian adults who stood passive-aggressively by while all this happened only reinforced that message. Perhaps the best example I can give of how unwelcome I was made to feel, however—or, more precisely, of how clear the message was that Jews in general were not welcome in that neighborhood—is what didn’t happen after one of those kids wrote antisemitic graffiti about me on the wall of my town’s public library. I was fifteen when he spray painted *Newman is a Jew* on the wall facing one of the avenues that ran through the center of town, illustrating his words, just in case a passerby didn’t get it, with the image of a penny. That was in 1977\. Fifteen years later, in 1992, when I brought the woman who would become my wife to meet my mother, the graffiti was still legible, and it continued to be legible at least until 2005 or so, when I took my then seven- or eight-year-old son to that neighborhood to show him where I grew up. Out of curiosity, I drove by the library not too long ago, and found that the words had finally faded to the point where, if you had not seen them in the first place, you would not know they had ever been there. I have no idea, however, whether that’s because someone in authority finally decided to sandblast them away or because the wind and the rain and the snow finally did what someone in authority should have done a long time ago. For nearly thirty years, though, anyone walking by the library could read on its wall just precisely how unwelcome Jews were in that town. Growing up, in other words, it was not hard to feel like I was living my own small version of the history of antisemitism, which, wherever it has been allowed to play out to its logical conclusion, has always contained within itself the desire to eliminate the Jews, whether by expulsion, forced conversion, or total annihilation. As a result, the need for a Jewish state, both a homeland and a safe haven, seemed to me like common sense, a feeling that was bolstered by the myth of the State of Israel’s moral superiority, expressed most powerfully, I thought at the time, by something [Golda Meir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golda%5FMeir?ref=richardjnewman.com) said at a [press conference](https://libquotes.com/golda-meir/quote/lbr6b1j?ref=richardjnewman.com) in London in 1969: > *When peace comes, we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.* At the time, I mistook the sentimental self-righteousness of Meir’s statement for an authentic moral stance. All the Jews wanted was a country where we could live as Jews, at peace with the rest of the world and free from antisemitic hatred, whether writ small, like my experience, or large, like the examples I learned about in school and in the books I read. It simply was not our fault if others forced us to kill in pursuit of that goal. That conviction started to unravel during my sophomore year of college. A friend who was not Jewish and I were talking about Israel and Palestine in the hallway of our dorm. I don’t remember specifically what we were talking about, but at some point I repeated one of the more heinous, anti-Palestinian canards I had internalized without even thinking about it: that when Palestinian women became pregnant, they prayed to give birth to sons so those boys could grow up to become suicide bombers and martyr themselves for the Palestinian cause. My friend’s jaw dropped, and he stared at me open-mouthed, silent and incredulous. I wish I could recall exactly what he said next, but the meaning of it is still with me: Did I really believe, he wanted to know, that Palestinian mothers loved their sons so little that they did not want for them the long and happy lives that all mothers desire for their children? It was my turn to be silent. No one had ever spoken aloud like that the implications of what I had been taught to believe, and the more I thought about it, the more ashamed I was for having believed it. One thing I do remember about my friend’s question—the reason I was able to hear it without getting immediately defensive—is that he did not make its subtext a test to see if my presumed Jewish loyalty to Israel outweighed my basic humanity. In all the years since then, and it’s been more than forty, I think I can count on two hands the number of people with whom I have been as sure of that as I was with him. It can make the question *Whose side are you on?* more complicated than you might think. --- [*Part Two*](https://www.richardjnewman.com/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are-916/) *of this series, Subtext, will post tomorrow. I have turned comments on, if you would like to let me know what you think by responding directly to the post, rather than emailing me. I’d love to hear from you. Also, if you find my newsletter valuable, please consider forwarding it to others who might do so as well. I am trying to grow my mailing list. Thank You!* Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #10 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-10/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:28:09.000Z # Four Things To Read [“Coney Island”, A Dadaist Sound Poem by Victor Packer](https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/language-literature-culture/yiddish-translation/coney-island-dadaist-sound-poem-victor-packer?ref=richardjnewman.com): The link will take you to the Yiddish Book Center’s website, where you can read a translation of this poem in English and listen to Victor Packer recite it in Yiddish. You can read more about Victor Packer in “[The One Man Radio Department](https://storycorps.org/stories/victor-packer/?ref=richardjnewman.com)” on StoryCorps’ website. He was a force to be reckoned with. [Ode to the Powerless: Bessie Head’s ‘A Question of Power’ through a Personal Lens](https://www.cambridge.org/core/blog/2023/03/09/ode-to-the-powerless-bessie-heads-a-question-of-power-through-a-personal-lens/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Nkateko Masinga: “I approach Head’s work with a reverence born from my failure to separate her characters from people I have met and closer to home, myself. I see myself in them and I want to understand the topography of their aches. I want them to heal because I want to heal. I grapple with powerlessness daily and it is only by writing that I can fight back, for myself and for them.” A brief introduction to a South African woman writer of whom I had never heard, but whose work certainly seems worth seeking out and reading. [A Persisting Inheritance: On the First-Ever Anthology of Sri Lankan and Diasporic Poetry in the UK](https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2023-07/a-persisting-inheritance-interview-sohini-basak-seni-seneviratne-shash-trevett-vidyan-ravinthiran/?ref=richardjnewman.com): “Out of Sri Lanka (Bloodaxe Books, 2023) shines light upon a long-neglected national literature by bringing together, for the first time, Sri Lankan and diasporic poetry written in and after Independence. Featuring over a hundred poets translated from Tamil and Sinhala, or writing in English, the anthology intends to exhibit poetry as a vehicle of anti-amnesia and of witness to the various political events that have shaped the country since 1948.” This conversation between [Sohini Basak](https://sohinibasak.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) and the three editors of the anthology is well worth reading. [Algorithms Hijacked My Generation. I Fear For Gen Alpha](https://www.freyaindia.co.uk/cp/138762303?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Freya India: “Instagram Face, I have come to believe, is just one symptom of something far larger and more pernicious. It is one manifestation of what I see as the driving force behind much of Gen Z’s growing and global mental health crisis. It is the end result—the inevitable end-point—of what I think of as the algorithmic conveyor belt.” This essay about the impact social media algorithms have on young people, especially women, is particularly powerful because it was written by precisely the kind of young woman the algorithms are designed to target. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See These are chromolithographic patterns from *L'animal dans la Décoration* (1897) by Maurice Pillard Verneuil (1869–1942), French artist and decorator in the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movement. Verneuil studied and developed his style from Eugène Grasset, a Franco-Swiss pioneer of Art Nouveau design. Inspired by Japanese art, nature and particularly the sea. He is known for his contributions to the Art Deco movement through the use of bold floral designs on ceramic tiles, wallpapers, textiles, and posters. (From [Raw Pixel](https://www.rawpixel.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com)) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fd2c0d939-a266-485e-9b9a-20335f1f9b7b_1429x1990-jpeg.jpg) --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f79894c97-1eb3-4fa8-886d-7fea1d4fac8b_1200x923-jpeg.jpg) --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f4b792e9b-fb4b-4486-8f89-312d8c342fdb_802x1200-jpeg.jpg) --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f9e80511a-b99b-40ce-a742-0e5a1c366b70_796x1199-jpeg.jpg) # Four Things To Listen To ### King’s X - Summerland ### Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer 1987 ### Renaissance - Can You Understand? ### Squirrel Nut Zippers - Hell # Four Things About Me I have a SoundCloud account, though the only thing I’ve done with it is upload some songs that I composed in the 1990s, when I bought myself a Yamaha SY77 MIDI keyboard, thinking I’d finally start writing music seriously. You can listen to the songs [here](https://soundcloud.com/user-512255240/sets/my-music-from-the-80s?ref=richardjnewman.com): I also have a [Micro.blog](https://richnewman.micro.blog/?ref=richardjnewman.com), which I call “Richard Jeffrey Newman’s Miscellany.” It’s mostly pictures, with some random thoughts scattered throughout. I haven’t been posting a lot there lately, but I did start two series that I had fun putting together. One is called “[Bookshelf Juxtapositions](https://richnewman.micro.blog/categories/bookshelf-juxtapositions/?ref=richardjnewman.com).” Since I organize my books in alphabetical order, I thought it would be interesting to see what kinds of books would end up next to each other. (The last nine images break the pattern in that they are of books I’d bought but not yet shelved.) I called the other series “[Lines Left On The Cutting Room Floor](https://richnewman.micro.blog/2019/01/20/lines-left-on.html?ref=richardjnewman.com).” I posted, without comment, lines I cut out of poems I was working on. I am thinking of making that a part of It All Connects, except I’d shorten the title to “Lines That Didn’t Make The Cut,” and I would write about the lines, the thinking behind them, why I decided to cut them, and so on. I have not posted anything to [my blog](http://www.richardjnewman.com/) since December 2022, which makes me sad, since I started it with high hopes of returning to the routine of regular blogging I maintained when I first started back in the early 2000s. I’m on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/richardjeffrey.newman.92), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/richardjnewman?ref=richardjnewman.com) (which I refuse to call by its new name), and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/rjnwrites/?ref=richardjnewman.com), but I have not been able to decide how I feel about having a social media presence. I used to have quite a robust Facebook presence, but I deleted it because it was becoming such a huge time suck. I got back on when I decided to start focusing again on my writing because many of the poets and writers I know are still there; I was just starting to build a presence on Twitter, when its new owner changed everything and I am thinking of leaving; I have profiles on both Mastodon and Bluesky that I’ve yet to use—though Bluesky does interest me; and I confess I have no idea what to do with my Instagram account. Substack shows some promise as an interesting place to hang out online, but I am just beginning to explore that. --- Photo of #4 by [Stockholm Paris Studio](https://unsplash.com/@stockholmparis?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/a-close-up-of-a-piece-of-wood-with-a-clock-on-it-3-zlUh5OIkw?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash). Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #9 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-9/ Last updated: 2025-09-15T09:32:36.000Z --- # Four Things To Read [Interviews & Reviews — Green Linden Press](https://www.greenlindenpress.com/interviews-and-reviews?mibextid=ncKXMA&ref=richardjnewman.com#/jared-harel/): “ I like poems that gravitate toward the unknowable, or unsayable, or those moments that remain unresolved. This notion of “writing toward discovery” is something I try to enact in my work. I come from a tight-knit and loving family, but even so, there are things that are easier to say in a poem than at the dinner table. Elizabeth Bishop once wrote in a letter to Robert Lowell that “it’s almost impossible not to tell the truth in poetry.” Perhaps the distances that poetry and poetic craft provide enable us to speak and see more clearly.” Catherine Fletcher interviews Jared Hárel—both friends of mine—about his new book, “Let Our Bodies Change The Subject.” It’s a pleasure to read Jared being so clear-sighted about his own work, even when he’s talking about “the unknowable.” It’s an interview that might very well persuade to buy the book. [Supreme Court Decision on Reckless Speech Will Cost Victims of Stalking and Harassment](https://msmagazine.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-online-stalking-harassment-women-free-speech-counterman-v-colorado/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Michelle Onello: “The Supreme Court issued a ruling on June 27 in Counterman v. Colorado, holding that a speaker’s subjective intention must be considered when determining whether speech is a ‘true threat’ and thus punishable notwithstanding the First Amendment. The decision requires that a speaker must have been aware of the ‘threatening character’ of the speech but delivered it anyway, and was thus reckless in their actions. The holding will limit protections for victims of stalking, verbal abuse and online harassment and increase the burden on prosecutors who must now provide evidence of the speaker’s state of mind.” If someone insists—and let’s be honest; this someone is most likely going to be a man—that he didn’t intend as threatening the emails/text/posts/images he sent over and over and over and over again to someone, most likely a woman, he is pursuing, how is a prosecutor going to prove otherwise? [Vagina Museum - Kunyaza](https://twitter.com/vagina%5Fmuseum/status/1662088263790735363?s=43&t=-BQRye5yI7snI3xdbfokeg&ref=richardjnewman.com): “The word of the day is "kunyaza". Kunyaza is a Rwanda-Rundi language word for a traditional sexual practice in Rwanda and regions around the Great Lakes which focuses on pleasure, and is said to result in squirting 90% of the time.” Need I say more? A Twitter thread well-worth reading. [The Seamstress Who Solved the Ancient Mystery of the Argonaut, Pioneered the Aquarium, and Laid the Groundwork for the Study of Octopus Intelligence](https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/12/26/jeanne-villepreux-power-argonaut/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Maria Popover: “Walking the shoreline and wading into the sea in her long skirts, \[Jeanne Villepreux-Power\] fell in love with one of Earth’s most alien life-forms: the small sepia-like octopus Argonauta argo, known as paper nautilus for the thin, intricately corrugated shell of its females and the sail-like membranes protruding from it like a pair of bunny ears.” Another woman whose contributions to science deserve to be better recognized. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See ## *Dragons from The Library of Congress* ### Cloud Dragon, by Morizumi, Tsurana, 1809-1892 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f777305c5-5fac-4207-a032-df419c659814_806x1024-jpeg.jpg) ### Military Dragon, by Valturio, Roberto, 1405-1475 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f37df00cd-25ca-4798-99f5-ef34aa5acfda_483x591-jpeg.jpg) ### Friendly Dragon An only mildly fierce dragon, hanging from the Providence Children's Museum in Providence, the capital of, and largest city in, Rhode Island. Originally created by Symmetry Products for a Chinese painting exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, it was moved to the roof of the Providence Children's Museum in 1997\. The museum held a naming contest, and the dragon is called Nori. (Source: Providence Children's Museum article dated 2013, viewed 2023) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fef80dfba-9715-4dd5-b203-f4bbd699fea3_876x1024-jpeg.jpg) ### Ryu Shoten (Dragon Rising To the Heavens), Ogata, Gekkō, 1859-1920 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f68abdb4c-d0f5-4364-b151-df82b54446ac_709x1024-jpeg.jpg) --- # Four Things To Listen To ### **Bam, Crack, Dot: Mah Jongg and Its Jewish-American Roots** ### Lynyrd Skynyrd - Freebird ### Renaissance - Can You Understand ### Habib Koité - Batoumambé - "Not all love ends in marriage" --- # Four Things About Me I’ve been thinking lately about books that have changed me. I read the four I’ve taken down from my shelves and listed here when I was in my early to mid-twenties. [*The Unborn: The Life and Teaching of Zen Master Bankei*](https://search.worldcat.org/title/43050268?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* first published by North Point Press in 1984, which is the edition I have. I could not articulate for you now just how this changed my life—it’s been that long since I read it—but I just took it down from my bookshelf. There are notes written all over the margins in my twenty-something-year-old handwriting, which is much more legible that how I write now, I think. It’s got me thinking that I should make a list of books I want to reread [*On Call: Political Essays*](https://archive.org/details/oncallpoliticale00jord%5F0)*,* by June Jordan, published in 1985 by South End Press, in particular the essay “The Blood Shall Be a Sign Unto You: Israel and South Africa.” For the first time in my life, I was confronted with a critique of Israel written by someone who wasn’t Jewish that also affirmed, without qualification, the importance of Israel to Jews and Jewish identity. The essay not only shifted the lens through which I understood the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; it was my first experience of a social justice argument that held two seemingly unresolvable, oppositional truths in balance. It set an example I have tried to live up to in my own writing ever since. [*Five Bodies: The Human Shape of Modern Society*](https://www.amazon.com/Five-Bodies-Human-Modern-Society/dp/0801417279?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by John O’Neill, first published by Cornell University Press in 1985, which is the edition I have. This is another book filled with my own marginalia. O’Neill argues for the centrality of anthropomorphism to the making of human society and culture. It gave me my first taste of what a just politics rooted in human embodiment might be like. (It occurs to me now that it would be interesting to read this book next to Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.) [*Original Light: New & Selected Poems 1973-1983*](https://open-books-a-poem-emporium.myshopify.com/collections/used-books/products/goldbarth-albert-original-light-new-selected-poems-1973-1983-used-paperback?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Albert Golbarth, published in 1983 by Ontario Review Press. I was entranced by the capaciousness of the intelligence at work in Goldbarth’s poetry, and by the way he gave often explicit voice—in an imagined if implicit dialogue with the reader—to the poem’s function as an exploration of truth. Goldbarth’s work allowed me to imagine directions for my own poetry that I would not realize for many years, but that I absolutely trace back to this book. --- Photo by [Erfan Pashangpour](https://unsplash.com/@erfanpsh?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/number-cutout-wall-decor-PjkDxY5qmKc?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash). Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four by Four #8 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-8/ Last updated: 2025-07-10T13:48:19.000Z # Four Things To Read [A review of Steven Sher’s ](https://www.dropbox.com/s/haw4xj95zud4r6l/review%20of%20contestable%20truths%20incontestable%20lies.pdf?dl=0&ref=richardjnewman.com)[*Contestable Truths, Incontestable Lies*](https://www.dropbox.com/s/haw4xj95zud4r6l/review%20of%20contestable%20truths%20incontestable%20lies.pdf?dl=0&ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Richard Jeffrey Newman (me): In the days after Hamas’ brutal October 7th attack against Israel, I started to write something in response to those who [celebrated](https://x.com/BGOnTheScene/status/1711145162657673347?s=20&ref=richardjnewman.com) the attack, including [the atrocities the Hamas soldiers committed](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/why-israeli-officials-screened-footage-hamas-attack/675735/?ref=richardjnewman.com) “[what decolonization meant](https://twitter.com/najmamsharif/status/1710689657757769783?s=20%29&ref=richardjnewman.com).” Whatever else might have been true about the attack as an expression of Palestinian resistance—and there is no denying that it was an expression of that resistance—I wanted to point out that the attack itself, especially the atrocities, was also an expression of the [antisemitism](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/10/hamas-covenant-israel-attack-war-genocide/675602/?ref=richardjnewman.com) that is explicit in Hamas’ original charter from [1988](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th%5Fcentury/hamas.asp?ref=richardjnewman.com) and is at least implicit in the revised version that the organization put forth in [2017](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full?ref=richardjnewman.com). Not to acknowledge both those truths in responding to the attack, I planned to aruge was to compromise whatever solidarity you might express for the Palestinians by allowing it to serve as a cover for a hatred of the Jews that extends far beyond the borders of Israel and Palestine. I still think that is an important to make, which is why I have noted it briefly here. Far more important at this moment, though, is to acknowledge that a very similar hatred informs the war Israel is now prosecuting in order to make good on its goal of “flattening Gaza,” and so I want to draw your attention to [my review](https://www.dropbox.com/s/haw4xj95zud4r6l/review%20of%20contestable%20truths%20incontestable%20lies.pdf?dl=0&ref=richardjnewman.com), published in 2022, of a book of poetry the goal of which is to establish for that hatred the kind of legitimacy that only art can give, in particular in a poem called “Bombing Gaza” that has turned out in hindsight to be horrifyingly prophetic. [Dionne Brand: On narrative, reckoning and the calculus of living and dying](https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/dionne-brand-on-narrative-reckoning-and-the-calculus-of-living-and-dying/article%5F47884274-07ad-561a-973b-027ef2cbc8fb.amp.html?ref=richardjnewman.com): “Where they advocated, over the last 30 or 40 years, shrinking the state they have now swiftly expanded it. Though they have not admitted to the failure of their ideas and austerity policies, they have virtually, though temporarily, overturned 40 years of shrinking the state’s responsibilities to people. You wonder what additional things might have been done that they previously said could not be done. For we have seen how quickly these hitherto impossible changes were ramped up.” Brand is talking here about how Canada dealt with the pandemic shutdown, but the point is well-taken in the States as well. This brief essay is worth reading for its meditation on what the idea of “returning to normal” means, and to whom. [Tales from Crane Nation](https://www.tarb.co.il/tales-from-the-crane-nation/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Alex Stein: A review of [*The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Lan*](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/673280/the-man-who-sold-air-in-the-holy-land-by-omer-friedlander/?ref=richardjnewman.com)d, by Omer Friedlander, this essay is also an interesting meditation on some of the challenges of writing fiction set in Israel about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. [“Coney Island”, A Dadaist Sound Poem by Victor Packer](https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/language-literature-culture/yiddish-translation/coney-island-dadaist-sound-poem-victor-packer?ref=richardjnewman.com): The link will take you to the Yiddish Book Center’s website, where you can read a translation of this poem in English and listen to Victor Packer recite it in Yiddish. You can read more about Victor Packer in “[The One Man Radio Department](https://storycorps.org/stories/victor-packer/?ref=richardjnewman.com)” on StoryCorps’ website. He was a force to be reckoned with. “[Irene, Goodnight](https://poems.com/poem/irene-goodnight/?ref=richardjnewman.com),” by Jessica Cuello: This very powerful poem was up on Poetry Daily’s website in February of this year. It’s from Cuello’s book [LIAR](https://barrowstreet.org/press/product/liar-by-jessica-cuello/?ref=richardjnewman.com). # Four Things To See These photographs are by Carol Highsmith, who takes pictures of all aspects of American life in all fifty states, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. She has donated her life’s work, a collection of around 100,000 images to the Library of Congress. ## An elaborate spiral staircase, at the Nathaniel Russell House in South Carolina. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f3360eb02-8e56-476f-b0d4-1db1266bd1b5_1200x836-jpeg.jpg) ## An infrared-camera view of the New River Gorge Bridge in Fayette County, West Virginia. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fc05280a7-991c-4fac-9fc3-7c128df2cec3_1200x882-jpeg.jpg) ## Prince William Sound on the south coast of Alaska ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fe359dd19-5913-4cf3-8001-abfc0ef16214_1098x1200-jpeg.jpg) ## Slot Canyon in Arizona ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f35d2bc47-c365-4d5b-9720-81c88f912d78_1200x800-jpeg.jpg) # Four Things to Listen To ### Chuck Mangione - The Children of Sanchez ### No Doubt - Don't Speak ### The Charlie Daniels Band - The Devil Went Down To Georgia ### Squirrel Nut Zippers - Ghost of Stephen Foster # Four Things About Me I had a very serious girlfriend in my twenties. We were together for close to seven years and had started talking seriously about moving in together. We first got to know each other through what would have been considered a perfectly conventional Victorian courtship: we wrote letters. When I tell my students about this they are incredulous. They can’t understand why we would’ve been interested in news about each other that was already old when we got it. I am a self-taught piano player. When I was a teenager, I played bass baritone bugle in the Floral Park Knights of Columbus Drum Corp. I was good enough that I briefly flirted with the idea of trying to get into one of the corps that, at the time, competed in the [Drum Corp International](http://www.dci.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com), tournaments. I think the one nearest me would have been the [Bayonne Bridgemen](https://www.facebook.com/TheBridgemenOrganization/), which no longer exists. When I was in my early twenties, I was, briefly, accused of corporate espionage. I was working for a strategic intelligence startup that produced industry-specific databases for high level decision-makers. My job was to read all the computer magazines that were then available, or at least the ones that the company subscribed to, and write overviews of trends in the industry that corporate executives could use in making technology-purchasing decisions. This was in the mid-1980s and the only PC I’d ever owned was an [IBM PCjr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM%5FPCjr?ref=richardjnewman.com), so I was pretty much brand new to desktop computers myself. One day, I needed to format a floppy disk so I could save the work I would do that day, but I mistyped the command and ended up reformatting the entire hard drive of the computer I was working on. Thankfully, the person in whose office I was working—I think it was the CEO’s lawyer—was religious about doing backing ups, so nothing was actually lost, but he and the CEO did question me about whether I was in fact working for one of her competitors. I was not. Interestingly enough, I received an email newsletter from that company not too long ago. It’s now a very successful international company with the same CEO. --- [Image](https://www.rawpixel.com/image/2668567?ref=richardjnewman.com) by [rawpixel.com](https://www.rawpixel.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #7 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-7/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:27:31.000Z # Four Things To Read [**The first observations of octopus brain waves revealed how alien their minds truly are**](https://www.salon.com/2023/02/28/the-first-observations-of-octopus-brain-waves-revealed-how-alien-their-minds-truly-are/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**, by Troy Farah:** “For this experiment, the researchers chose three big blue octopuses (octopus cyanea), which often appear a mottled brown, but have exceptional camouflage with the potential to quickly alter their color and skin texture. These tropical cephalopods are sometimes called ‘day octopuses’ because they hunt while the sun is out. Remarkably, octopuses are color blind. So how do they know to morph into a bluish magenta hue or transform into a chunk of coral shrapnel? They can sense the different directions light waves vibrate, a property known as polarization. Even their basic perception is radically different from ours.” A fascinating article about scientists’ attempt to connect octopus behavior to cephalopod brain wave activity they were able to measure. [**A Jewish Case for Palestinian Refugee Return**](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/may/18/a-jewish-case-for-palestinian-refugee-return?ref=richardjnewman.com)**, by Peter Beinart:** “The argument against refugee return begins with a series of myths about what happened in 1948, the year in which Britain relinquished its control over Mandatory Palestine, Israel was created, and the Nakba occurred. These myths allow Israeli and diaspora Jewish leaders to claim that Palestinians effectively expelled themselves.” I grew up with those myths; it was hard to unlearn them. Steeped in historical fact, this is a powerful essay that asks, without creating a false equivalence, “Why is dreaming of return laudable for Jews but pathological for Palestinians?” [**Abortion Snitching Is Already Sending People to Jail**](https://msmagazine.com/2023/08/19/celeste-burgess-abortion-snitching-privacy-police-illegal/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**, by Morgan Carmen:** “Celeste’s friend and fellow high-schooler, Sumer (last name withheld for privacy), independently reached out to Madison County prosecutors to report that she was present when Celeste took the first of the two abortion pills. Sumer also told prosecutors that the Burgess family owned several computers the police eventually seized (one of which Jessica used to order the pills). Celeste’s purportedly private, self-managed abortion—conducted outside of the healthcare system—was suddenly public because a close friend betrayed her trust.” And it’s not just friends. Police in this case also relied on access they had to Facebook messages between Celeste and her mother. A very sobering article. [**A New English Dialect Is Emerging in South Florida, Linguists Say**](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/linguists-have-identified-a-new-english-dialect-thats-emerging-in-south-florida/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**, by Phillip M. Carter:** “For example, we found people to use expressions such as ‘get down from the car’ instead of ‘get out of the car.’ This is based on the Spanish phrase ‘bajar del carro,’ which translates, for speakers outside of Miami, as ‘get out of the car.’ But ‘bajar’ means ‘to get down,’ so it makes sense that many Miamians think of ‘exiting’ a car in terms of ‘getting down’ and not ‘getting out.’” A fascinating look at how language is ever-evolving (whether we like it or not). Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. # Four Things To See These are from the [Smithsonian’s Open Access Collection](https://www.si.edu/openaccess?ref=richardjnewman.com). ### [A Woman Has Registered To Vote](http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ng49ca746ad-9ac5-704b-e053-15f76fa0b4fa?ref=richardjnewman.com) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fa3b44d5a-5a9b-41aa-85fd-340c32215277_654x1200-jpeg.jpg) ### [Collection Box of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society](http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/fd51812d554-b14d-4d08-8d4e-c91e66e14bd2?ref=richardjnewman.com) Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of the Garrison Family in memory of George Thompson Garrison ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f9131b35b-ffd9-4f0f-a6db-932c6e5cd691_1045x1200-jpeg.jpg) ### [Carte-de-Visite Portrait of Harriet Tubman](http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/fd5c1fe9caa-2405-4c5f-ae98-e33ce83b5f30?ref=richardjnewman.com) Collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture shared with the Library of Congress ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f93a932ec-e7c8-4886-944a-90104f70adfd_756x1200-jpeg.jpg) ### Black-and-white Ruffed Lemur ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f7def12de-ffb8-4015-891e-fd97c35ef82d_1200x800-jpeg.jpg) # Four Things To Listen To ### Khatia Buniatishvili - Rhapsody in Blue ### Ruthie Foster - War Pigs ### Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun ### Tool - Eulogy # Four Things About Me When I was a little boy, a woman who lived in our building was getting her Masters Degree in foreign language instruction. As part of her thesis project, she taught me Spanish and French. I neither speak nor read either language, but I sometimes surprise myself by understanding more Spanish than I would otherwise expect—and not because of cognates—and I can do a French accent well enough that even people who speak French have thought that perhaps I do speak the language. I have often wondered if that early experience is why I have found it relatively easy to learn new languages. In addition to English, I have Hebrew, Korean, and Persian, though I am nowhere near fluent in any of them. When I was in college, I was awarded the B’nai Zion medal for proficiency in Hebrew largely because of translations I did of the Song of Songs and some medieval Hebrew poetry. When I lived in Korea, I learned enough Korean to have basic conversations and, as I said in a previous issue, I taught myself to read Hangeul. My reading knowledge did not go far beyond restaurant menus, however. Still, I did start to work with a woman who’d studied Korean and English literature on translations of poems by [Hwang Jini](https://www.medievalists.net/2021/04/hwang-jini/?ref=richardjnewman.com). Unfortunately, we never finished any of them. I learned Persian from my wife and from spending time with my in-laws. I have not studied the language formally. Still, when our son was little, we spoke almost only Persian with him, until he was about four, when his command of the language began to far outstrip my own and I had no choice but to speak with him in English. Now, I have fun surprising my wife and her relatives with how much I can understand of what they say in their native language. They sometimes joke that they have to be careful, since they are no longer able to speak about me in front of me anymore. It’s ironic, therefore, that the books of translations that I have published have been from classical Persian poetry. The story of how that came about is an essay in itself. Here, though, I will simply say that I am in fact a co-translator, commissioned by the now-defunct International Society for Iranian Culture to create literary translations—ones that would stand on their own as contemporary American verse—from outdated and/or scholarly translations that, frankly, only scholars would probably want to read. My favorite color is purple. --- Photo of #4 by [Erica Nilsson](https://unsplash.com/@enphotos?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/white-and-red-number-4-signage-in-shallow-focus-photography-BJvTauqtAxc?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash). Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four by Four #6 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-6/ Last updated: 2025-09-15T09:23:35.000Z # Four Things To Read [**We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other**](https://jewishcurrents.org/we-cannot-cross-until-we-carry-each-other?ref=richardjnewman.com)**, by Arielle Angel:** “Most of our internal disagreements center on the correct container for our grief. Our staff is not unlike the rest of the Jewish world in that many of us are only a matter of degrees from someone who died or was taken hostage. How can we publicly grieve the death and suffering of Israelis without these feelings being politically metabolized against Palestinians?” One of the best pieces I’ve read from a Jewish perspective on the war between Israel and Hamas. [**The Lust Libel: Sexual Antisemitism in History and Contemporary Culture**](https://fathomjournal.org/the-lust-libel-sexual-antisemitism-in-history-and-contemporary-culture/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**, by Jonah Cohen:** “Going back to the Middle Ages, European art and literature have depicted the Jews as perverse, predatory, pornographic, horny vampires of the Orient. That ghoulish portrait — which, for short, can be called the ‘lust libel’ — is one of the more enduring of the classical antisemitic stereotypes. Today, it is all over the internet, influencing not just disaffected white men but even some prominent members of American popular culture.” This is a very sobering look into an often overlooked corner of antisemitism. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. [**On the Gleefully Indecent Poems of a Medieval Welsh Feminist Poet**](https://lithub.com/on-the-gleefully-indecent-poems-of-a-medieval-welsh-feminist-poet/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**, by Lauren Cocking:** “I labored under the illusion that I was well-versed in literary works about the cunt, especially after writing my university dissertation on that topic. (I titled an academic paper ‘See You Next Tuesday.’ No, I’m not kidding.) But Gwerful Mechain, the title of whose most infamous poem is sometimes translated to ‘Cunt,’ was a name I’d never come across. Perhaps it was because she was a woman; perhaps because she wrote in Welsh; perhaps because she was alive in the 15th century. Medieval literature is so dreary, right?” How can you not want to read more? [**So, Gutenberg Didn’t Actually Invent Printing As We Know It**](https://lithub.com/so-gutenberg-didnt-actually-invent-the-printing-press/?ref=richardjnewman.com)**, by M. Sophia Newman:** “The printing press is often said to have been created by Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany, around 1440 AD, and it began taking root in Europe in the 1450s with the printing of the aforementioned Bible. Books themselves had been present in Europe long before then, of course, but only in hand-copied volumes that were accessible mainly to members of the clergy. Access to mass-produced books revolutionized Europe in the late 1400s, with advancing literacy altering religion, politics, and lifestyles worldwide.” Newman (no relation) goes on to show how this is only part of the story, and a much later part than most realize, since the story begins in Asia. The earliest movable-type-printed book that we know of was produced in Korea in 1377\. It’s called Baegun Hwasang Chorok Buljo Jikji Simche Yojeol (The Anthology of Great Buddhist Priests’ Zen Teachings). # Four Things To See These are paintings by Paul Klee (1879–1940), who is known as the father of Abstract Art and was a central figure of the Bauhaus movement. Influenced by Cubism and Surrealism, he is best known for minimal stick figures, abstract forms, vivid colors and his usage of symbols drawn from imagination, poetry, music, literature, and the world around him. ## Hardy Plants (1934) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f20c6a73d-8de9-46da-9332-a576aaaab929_1200x892-jpeg.jpg) ## Persische Nachtigallen (Persian Nightingales) (1917) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f1b3ef6cb-15b4-4aef-a6ab-30a05f97b1f9_955x1200-jpeg.jpg) ## The Harbinger of Autumn ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f53cf8643-d1d8-4097-9cf6-f883213e6a7c_1200x922-jpeg.jpg) ## Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to Be of Higher Rank (1903) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fb91455ec-ab2e-450a-90c1-0b53965e39fc_2000x1148-jpeg.jpg) ## Four Things to Listen To ### Beverly “Guitar” Watkins - Rock Me Baby ### Yes, with Geddy Lee - Roundabout ### Steve Reich - Tehilim ### True Blues - The Modern Jazz Quartet # Four Things About Me I started losing my hair at fifteen years old. I remember when the woman who cut my family’s hair—I want to say her name was Debbie—showed me how to hide my very premature receding hairline by parting my hair in the center rather than on the side. She also encouraged me not to use a blow dryer because, she said, it would dry my hair out and increase the speed at which I was losing it. I listened to her and rarely used a blow dryer after that. I don’t remember the occasion, but when I was seventeen, my girlfriend wanted to blow dry my hair before we went out. When I sat down in a chair low enough for her see the top of my head—she was quite a bit shorter than I was—she blurted out, “Oh my god! You really are losing your hair.” I’m not sure if she was surprised because she hadn’t believed me when I told her or if it was just the shock of seeing my bald spot, but I know it bothered her. She told me it made her feel very awkward because she associated baldness with old men. I have a memory that this was part of why she broke up with me, but I don’t know if that’s true or if it’s something my insecurity cooked up for me back then that I just haven’t let go of. I really like cooking. Tonight I made pesto from [*The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-new-mediterranean-diet-cookbook-a-delicious-alternative-for-lifelong-health-nancy-harmon-jenkins/11431888?ean=9780553385090&ref=richardjnewman.com). When I was in 11th grade, Mrs. Lynch—I think her first name was Judy—predicted that I would one day play blues piano in Greenwich Village. I never did, but for one night in my twenties, I came pretty close. My friend Bill and I performed at the Bitter End as part of a showcase a singer-songwriter friend of his had arranged. My friendship with Bill broke not too long after that, however; we parted ways; and I kind of lost whatever desire I’d had to perform on stage. Still, I’ve always been a little sorry I never had the chance to tell Mrs. Lynch how close her prediction came to being true. --- Photo by [Lucas van Oort](https://unsplash.com/@switch%5Fdtp%5Ffotografie?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/black-and-yellow-arrow-sign-2ZmlkT3ACkU?utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=unsplash). Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #5 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-5/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:27:07.000Z # Four Things To Read [Can Judaism Survive A Messianic Dictatorship In Israel?](https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-07-13/ty-article-magazine/can-judaism-survive-a-messianic-dictatorship-in-israel/00000189-5049-de0f-afbb-7c6d75a40000?ref=richardjnewman.com) by Yuval Noah Hariri: “What if this time the Zealots succeeded in creating a messianic state that would destroy Israeli democracy and would persecute Arabs, secular people, women and LGBTQ people? What if that state were to embrace a racist ideology of [Jewish supremacy](https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-04-08/ty-article-magazine/israels-rule-over-the-palestinians-has-created-a-new-judaism/00000187-5d43-dde0-afb7-7f53f63f0000?ref=richardjnewman.com) – but thanks to its nuclear weapons and cyber industries, it managed to avoid for some time economic and political destruction? If this were to happen, then Judaism would have to deal with an unprecedented kind of destruction – a spiritual destruction.” A thoughtful, thought-provoking piece about the implications for Jews and Judaism of the autocratic, fascistic direction of the current Israeli government. [When We Are Afraid: On teaching in a red state, the silences in our history lessons, and all I never learned about my hometown](https://longreads.com/2023/06/01/when-we-are-afraid-silence-history-teaching-red-state-greensboro-massacre/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Anne P. Beatty: “What is taught has always been policed. Though it’s also true the level of scrutiny depends on your state, your school, and your courses — in other words, it depends on which side of the street you stand on. In my experience, people rarely question what’s being taught in the low-performing school, or in the standard classes at the high-performing school. And sometimes teachers police themselves.” A well-wrought, thought-provoking account of one teacher’s experience resisting (and failing to resist) book banning and the ideology behind it while teaching a very, very red state. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. [I Finally Found A Name For My Father’s Abuse](https://www.damemagazine.com/2019/02/25/i-finally-found-a-name-for-my-fathers-abuse/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Mia Brett: “My father never once hit me, my brother, or my mother. It wasn’t until my late 20s that I called him abusive and it wasn’t until this year that I found the language to actually describe the abuse my father inflicted on our family: coercive control.” [Coercive control](https://www.coercivecontrol.us/what-is-coercive-control/?ref=richardjnewman.com) is a kind of domestic violence the features of which are generally not considered criminal when perpetrated within a family, but which may be crimes when committed against strangers. The piece was written in support of the [Coercive Control and Rape Family Court Act Bill](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/S6695?ref=richardjnewman.com) and is well worth reading. [An Interview With the School Board Chair Who Forced Out a Principal After Michelangelo’s David Was Shown in Class](https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/03/florida-principal-fired-michelangelo-david-statue.html?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Dan Kris: I am going to let the interview speak for itself, but here is one example of an answer the school board chair gave: “We’re not going to show the full statue of David to kindergartners. We’re not going to show him to second graders. Showing the entire statue of David is appropriate at some age. We’re going to figure out when that is. And you don’t have to show the whole statue! Maybe to kindergartners we only show the head. You can appreciate that. You can show the hands, the arms, the muscles, the beautiful work Michelangelo did in marble, without showing the whole thing.” # Four Things To See These are photographs by [Wilhelm Weimar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm%5FWeimar?ref=richardjnewman.com), from the photographic herbarium he produced for the Hamburg Museum of Art and Design. ### [Chrysanthemum](https://www.europeana.eu/item/2048429/item%5FJEFFBPYZL7I2JJPYKGRPHGGSDHTMNHBB?ref=richardjnewman.com) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f16a0b6ab-7f26-4cc4-ae8d-bdd71da85fe7_883x1200-jpeg.jpg) ### [Lilie](https://www.europeana.eu/item/2048429/item%5FUVNCZZ5ZT5RQ2VPZ3J2TBG5T45LUYQRL?ref=richardjnewman.com) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f127f2ff2-f40e-4a68-a299-5b5ebb09a248_1200x875-jpeg.jpg) ### [Sommerhyazinthe](https://www.europeana.eu/item/2048429/item%5FGN55CC4WWSBKYRPKJA5JM5J6PGBQ3AWD?ref=richardjnewman.com) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fa6b70642-3ddb-431b-a669-270529539c72_764x1200-jpeg.jpg) ### [Thistle](https://www.europeana.eu/item/2048429/item%5F66H2PPUK4I3KKNCASHSJ3ZYI5FWBCQYP?ref=richardjnewman.com) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f2b6b6296-a035-4822-9f91-653e901f99d4_858x1200-jpeg.jpg) # Four Things To Listen To ### The Trammps - Disco Inferno ### Larkin Poe - Black Betty ### Sweet Shop Boy - Aaja ### Crosby Stills and Nash - Suite: Judy Blue Eyes # Four Things About Me My favorite non-American cuisine is Korean and my favorite Korean food is [agujjim](https://www.koreanbapsang.com/agujjim-spicy-braised-monkfish-with/?ref=richardjnewman.com). When I taught English in Korea in 1988-89, I taught myself to read [Hangeul](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul?ref=richardjnewman.com) and practiced by reading the menus in the Korean restaurants I went to. I would start at one end of the menu, which was usually posted up on the way, and try each food in succession. There were very few I didn’t like. My students told me I must have been Korean in a previous life, since most westerners they encountered wouldn’t even try most of the foods I did and liked. When I started teaching at Nassau Community College in September of 1989, just a few months after I returned from Seoul, I was the youngest and least senior member of my department. Now, 34 years later, I may not be the oldest member, but I am the most senior. It’s an interesting perspective to have. In 1994, in a now-defunct journal called The American Voice (#33), I published an essay on pornography called “Inside The Men Inside ‘Inside Christy Canyon.’” In what is still one of the most fulfilling moments in my life as a writer, a colleague told me she’d been at a dinner party and introduced herself as a Nassau Community College professor. Another guest asked her if she knew me. When she said yes, he told her that he’d come across my essay when someone in a group he was part of read it (or maybe just parts of it, I don’t remember exactly) aloud one evening when they were hanging out. He said he thought the essay important enough that he bought a copy of the journal and gave it to his teenage son to read as prelude to a discussion about the politics surrounding porn. --- Photo of #4 by [Sri Jalasutram](https://unsplash.com/photos/WzOhb-A0ckU?utm%5Fsource=unsplash&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/WzOhb-A0ckU?utm%5Fsource=unsplash&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText). Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four By Four #4 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-4/ Last updated: 2025-09-15T09:13:00.000Z # Four Things To Read [The Parents Trying to Pass Down a Language They Hardly Speak](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2023/09/children-learning-immigrant-family-languages/675423/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Kat Chow: “Language facilitates many things: at its most basic, a transfer of information, and at its most complex, an exchange of emotion. But perhaps what I value above all else is that it grants intimacy.” A very interesting article about the value inherent in learning to speak a “heritage language,” the language, say, of your immigrant grandparents, which you never learned, or which you may have had when you were very young, but which you lost as you got older. [6 Iranians, 1 Year After the Iran Protests Began](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/09/iran-protests-one-year-later-2023.html?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Alex Shams: “I live in a city where protests haven’t stopped since the beginning of the movement, not even for a week. Even after the Bloody Friday massacre where the government killed many people. They typically happen after Friday prayers when people gather outside the mosque to march. And they will keep going. Still, the government acted with so much brutality that it is unlikely we will hold a protest quite like last year to mark the movement’s anniversary, since they’re likely to crackdown.” Six Iranian perspectives on how the Women, Life, Freedom protests following the murder of Mahsa Jina Amini impacted and continue to impact both them in their personal lives and the nation as a whole. A follow up to [this piece](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/iranian-protesters-in-their-own-words.html?ref=richardjnewman.com) about what kept people in the streets during the protests. [What If Competition Isn’t As “Natural” As We Think](https://slate.com/technology/2020/01/darwin-competition-collaboration-evolutionary-biology-climate-change.html?ref=richardjnewman.com), by John Favini: “The bobtail squid, for instance, is famous for its shimmering bioluminescent bottom, a trait that it is not born with but only develops thanks to a glowing bacteria called Vibrio fischeri that it invites into this productive collaboration. This critical trait, in other words, emerges not through genetic mutation selected by competition but skillful collaboration across difference. “ A fascinating article about findings that call the scientific and cultural edifice known as “survival of the fittest” into question. [A Professor’s Remarks on Sexual Consent Stir Controversy](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/nyregion/suny-fredonia-professor-lawsuit.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=EhNpmB3nfIOKj28%5FqiMxpbZ0ffAew49ILvJnwUholO--r-7FhLJ2MLedeBJRf7hhlw14Q0SQBBA8aCa3RiRPPWRVVURtueDbatBX2-7ri2r8Ioa5SLF9FjRqoDKnOtlvcFn8x%5FOdVAN4WXS9OEXoC-miFdXSA4Ik1X79JU1KzXgfBzI3oWyM-YrV6FfKxJxUgb1sZVMlOFPYkLErIiziBGpmpL2jdjEw3YaCFo2-oTSPWpmsev7v6FMq%5FPS8SCcxelwrhR2qQVYPc-RzJyV3SmkkYe29-IN8uiSLfiZdReQw0dHvK9OumlHa7PXSQtWFSOtzIZfaMWp1k7Ru3LlWvESV8SwhGCSOk%5FrK&smid=url-share&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Vimal Patel: “\[Stephen Kershnar\] is still employed by the State University of New York at Fredonia, but he has not taught or even been allowed on campus for more than a year — fallout from remarks he made in a 2022 podcast about whether it is ever moral for an adult male to have sex with a ‘willing’ 12-year-old girl. ‘It’s not obvious to me that this is, in fact, wrong,’ he said on the philosophy podcast, as part of a wide-ranging thought experiment about ethics and consent. (As a matter of law, he has said that it should be criminalized.)” I think the quote is self-explanatory in terms of the controversy, but what I find most interesting about cases like this is the implication that, like certain kinds of research performed on living beings, there are also thought experiments that should be beyond the pale. It reminds me of the [controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia%5Ftransracialism%5Fcontroversy?ref=richardjnewman.com) surrounding this article on [transracial identity](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/hypa.12327?ref=richardjnewman.com). # Four Things To See All by Vincent Van Gogh ### Landscape from Saint-Rémy (1889) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f55faf474-1fae-44bb-b6be-09c4cd2da959_3500x2744-jpeg.jpg) ### Shoes (1888) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f8685aa17-271d-4d0e-9b3e-819d0c1da5df_3500x2952-jpeg.jpg) ### Stairway at Auvers (1890) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f2dabdc46-5201-4e1f-b7fd-b822c360fb0a_3508x2479-jpeg.jpg) ### Head of a skeleton with a burning cigarette ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f05668f2f-a649-4bef-96d7-e9f3fe003d03_2481x3289-jpeg.jpg) # Four Things To Listen To #### Squirrel Nut Zippers - The Ghost of Stephen Foster #### Miriam Makeba - Pata Pata (Live 1972) #### Sir Tom Jones at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Concert #### The Beach Boys - Good Vibrations # Four Things About Me I hum “happy tunes” in my sleep: My wife was sitting in the next room as I was working on this issue, and I told her I needed four things about me. “This is something I know that no one else knows about you,” she said. “You hum happy tunes in your sleep and you’ve been doing it throughout the thirty years of our marriage.” I didn’t know this about my self until now, and now you know it, too. When I was in high school, my basketball teammates gave me the nickname Lurch, after the character on the Addams Family, because I was taller than everyone else on the team. One of the rebbes thought that was my real name and, until someone—I don’t know whom--corrected him, he would greet me every morning with a very cheerful, “Good morning, Lurch!” I always got the feeling he thought everyone else was making fun of (what he thought of as) my name and he wanted me not to be ashamed of it. I don’t remember his name, but I have always appreciated him for that. I just learned that the editors of [Big City Lit](https://nycbigcitylit.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) have nominated my poem, “[A Dream in Three Parts](https://nycbigcitylit.com/summer-2022/a-dream-in-three-parts/?ref=richardjnewman.com)” for Best of The Net. The poem appears in my new book, *T’shuvah,* which you can pre-order [here](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2023/09/07/tshuvah/?ref=richardjnewman.com). I’d be lying if I said it wouldn’t be nice to win, but what’s really important to me is that editors—this is the second year in a row I’ve been nominated—think highly enough of my work to put it forward for these kinds of awards. During 2020, I wrote just about every day in a yearly, page-per-day planner from Leuchtturm1917\. I started the project before the pandemic shutdown and continued through January 1, 2021\. I set myself a few rules: - I could write as little as I wanted, but I would write no more than would fit on a single page—or double page on Sundays; - Once I started typing up what I’d written, I wouldn’t go back and start revising until I finished the year; - Then, once I started revising, I would do so only in chronological order, making a first pass through the material to see what would survive as a first draft and, again, waiting to make a second pass until I’d finished the entire year; - I could travel as far back into the past as I wanted in these revisions, but I decided would not include anything that happened after the original date of composition. Well, we’re about to enter the final quarter of 2023, and I am finally ready to start my second pass through this material, which means deciding which ones are worth moving towards publication and, possibly, my next book. I’ve been working on these poems, in other words, for three years, and I am eager to see what will happen with them next. --- [Image](https://www.rawpixel.com/image/2510172?ref=richardjnewman.com) of Number 4 by [rawpixel.com](https://www.rawpixel.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) ### Four by Four #3 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-3/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:26:31.000Z # Four Things To Read [The Art of Fiction No. 78](https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2994/the-art-of-fiction-no-78-james-baldwin?ref=richardjnewman.com) \- A Paris Review interview with James Baldwin: “I had to go through a time of isolation in order to come to terms with who and what I was, as distinguished from all the things I’d been told I was. Right around 1950 I remember feeling that I’d come through something, shed a dying skin and was naked again. I wasn’t, perhaps, but I certainly felt more at ease with myself. And then I was able to write. Throughout 1948 and 1949 I just tore up paper.” [The rise of voluntary celibacy: ‘Most of the sex I’ve had, I wish I hadn’t bothered](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/apr/26/the-rise-of-voluntary-celibacy-most-of-the-sex-ive-had-i-wish-i-hadnt-bothered?CMP=Share%5FiOSApp%5FOther&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Ermine Saner - “\[Celibacy\] has had unintentional benefits. ‘It’s taught me more about what I enjoy in sex, which I wasn’t expecting. I thought it was going to put me at a disadvantage, but I feel a lot more confident in my own sexuality.’” [Harold & the Purple Crayon](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/118554/harold-the-purple-crayon?ref=richardjnewman.com), by D. Gilson - [*Harold and The Purple Crayon*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold%5Fand%5Fthe%5FPurple%5FCrayon?ref=richardjnewman.com) was one of my favorite books when I was a little boy. This poem in Poetry made me smile. [No, I Will Not Debate You](https://longreads.com/2018/09/18/no-i-will-not-debate-you/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Laurie Penny - “If you won’t debate, the argument goes, you’re an enemy of free speech. You’re basically no better than a Nazi, and certainly far worse than any of the actual Nazis muttering about not being allowed to preach racism from prestigious pulpits.” There is real wisdom in this essay. # Four Things To See I don’t remember where I found these drawings, but I know that they are in the public domain and that they are gorgeous: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fee6efe52-8507-43e2-8117-fc2d0db7198f_887x1199-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fbada34a5-5b37-460f-a28e-17bff9f812d4_1200x972-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fcfeea1b3-6df2-4d35-b04b-28c8684d67fc_2592x3500-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fd897a110-9f52-4441-9cb3-8f60a678c2bb_1200x974-jpeg.jpg) # Four Things To Listen To Philip Glass’ [The Photographer](https://youtu.be/oPCkt9VvkY0?si=JY7N83UeNEbx1SY1&ref=richardjnewman.com): Listening to this as an undergraduate, I had my first truly transcendent experience of art. Pat Metheny’s album [As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls](https://music.apple.com/us/album/as-falls-wichita-so-falls-wichita-falls/1523943902?ref=richardjnewman.com): Another album that was really important to me during my undergraduate years. McCoy Tyner’s [The Real McCoy](https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-real-mccoy/721273864?ref=richardjnewman.com): The whole album is worth listening to over and over again. Two versions of Kol Ha’Olam Kulo ([here](https://music.apple.com/us/album/kol-haolam-kulo-take-me-to-the-bridge/1433450675?i=1433453511&ref=richardjnewman.com) and [here](https://music.apple.com/us/album/kol-haolam-kulo/551193041?i=551193045&ref=richardjnewman.com)): the words to this song provide the epigraph to [*T’shuvah*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2023/09/07/tshuvah/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* my third book of poems, which is available for pre-order now. If you [pre-order](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2023/09/07/tshuvah/?ref=richardjnewman.com), you’ll get access to two of my own piano improvisations on this melody. # Four Things About Me As I wrote above, if you pre-order [*T’shuvah*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2023/09/07/tshuvah/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* you’ll get access to two of my piano improvisations. I’ve been playing piano more and more lately, which has been a source of real joy. I fell out of the habit for a long time. I usually play only for myself, but the experience of recording these improvisations—and of playing the piano at [Azerbiajan Grill](https://www.azerbaijangrill.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), because Saeed, the owner asks me to—has inspired me to start learning some songs, something I never really focused on before since I preferred to play only for myself. Currently, I am learning “[All of Me,](https://youtu.be/5J18k5Sx3Dw?si=ENPRm6kp7LxTdMOg&ref=richardjnewman.com)” by Gerard Marks and Seymour Simon. The book launch for [*T’shuvah*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2023/09/07/tshuvah/?ref=richardjnewman.com) will be on October 12th at [Espresso 77](http://www.espresso77.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) in Jackson Heights. This is also the venue where [First Tuesdays](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com), the reading series I curate and host meets on the first Tuesday of the month, September through June. The second section of [*T’shuvah*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2023/09/07/tshuvah/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* “Do Not Wish For Any Other Life,” has been set by the Canadian composer, [Owen Bloomfield](https://www.owenbloomfield.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com). The piece will have its world premiere on April 24, 2024, performed by [The Blank Experiment](https://www.theblankexperiment.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com). More details to follow. On Friday, September 15th, I officiated at my wife’s nephew’s wedding, something I’ve never done before and that, to be honest, I never imagined myself doing. --- Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### T'shuvah Is Available For Pre-Order URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/tshuvah-is-available-for-pre-order/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:26:45.000Z I am delighted to share with you the cover of [*T’shuvah*](https://www.fernwoodpress.com/2023/09/07/tshuvah/?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* my third book of poems*.* The official publication date is October 17th, but if you order before then, you’ll also receive a free gift: two of my own piano improvisations on the melody that ran like the thread running through the heart on the cover through the process of my putting the book together. I used the words to that melody as the book’s epigraph: “All the world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be overwhelmed by fear.” A paraphrase of a saying by Reb Nachman of Breslov, those words—though in the Hebrew original—were set to music by Rabbi [Baruch Chait](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch%5FChait?ref=richardjnewman.com). That song, Kol Ha’Olam Kulo, has been important to me since I first learned it in high school, and I often sang it to myself or played it on the piano when I got stuck as I worked on *T’shuvah—*in particular when I was working on the book’s final section, “This Sentence Is A Metaphor For Bridge.” In a very real sense, in other words, Kol Ha’Olam Kulo was a bridge that helped me cross the difficulties I encountered putting this book together, which is why, as a thank you for [pre-ordering](http://www.barclaypressbookstore.com/T-shuvah.html?ref=richardjnewman.com), I’d like you to have two of my improvisations: The Path To The Bridge and The Bridge Is A Blues. (There’s more information at the pre-order link.) [You can pre-order T'shuvah here.](http://www.barclaypressbookstore.com/T-shuvah.html?ref=richardjnewman.com) ## The Launch Party - Save the Date! **Where:** [Espresso 77](http://www.espresso77.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) in Jackson Heights **When:** Thursday, October 12, 2023 **Time:** 7:00 - 9:00 --- [Espresso 77](http://www.espresso77.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) is the cafe where the reading series I curate and host, [First Tuesdays](http://www.firsttuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com), meets on the first Tuesday of the month, September through June. David Siller, a First Tuesdays regular, and the series’ faithful [cento](https://firsttuesdays.net/the-cento-for-march-7-2023?ref=richardjnewman.com) scribe, will be hosting. I understand that he has planned a delightful and interesting evening. I will, of course, be reading from *T’shuvah,* but it will also be a chance to celebrate literature and the reading of literature at a time when the value of those pursuits are under serious and sustained attack. I look forward to seeing you there! ## Finally T'shuvah completes a trilogy of books exploring the impact surviving sexual violence has had on the personal and political shape of my life. If, like me, you are a survivor of sexual violence, please know that you are not alone. (And if you know someone who is a survivor, please let them know they are not alone.) There are resources available to help survivors heal and recover. Here are some places you can reach out to if you need help: • The National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-HOPE • RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network): rainn.org • The National Center for Victims of Crime: victimsofcrime.org • MaleSurvivor (Specifically for male survivors and their loved ones) • 1in6 (Also for male survivors) I’ll say it again: You are not alone. There is hope. Please reach out for help if you need it. [Subscribe now](#/portal/signup) ### Four by Four #2 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-2/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:26:18.000Z # Four Things To Read 1. [*Kindred*](http://www.beacon.org/Kindred-P489.aspx?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Octavia Butler - Originally published in 1979, this book tells the story of a 20th century Black woman who, along with her white husband, is brought to face to face—through a time travel neither of them can control with the complex realities of slavery. It is scarily relevant today, given the historical revisionism in which the right is engaged, which is why I’ll be teaching it in the fall. 2. [*The Anti-Racist Creative Writing Workshop*](https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1552-the-anti-racist-writing-workshop?ref=richardjnewman.com)*,* by Felicia Rose Chavez - While this book focuses on the creative writing classroom, both graduate and undergraduate, the principles Chavez outlines for the anti-racist potential in making the classroom a place students can own—many of which will be familiar to you if active or experiential learning have ever been part of your practice—are well worth engaging no matter what grade or subject you teach. 3. [Poet, Artist, Erotic Muse of Mexico’s Avant Garde: Rediscovering Nahui Olin](https://lithub.com/poet-artist-sex-symbol-of-mexicos-avant-garde-rediscovering-nahui-olin/?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Claire Mullen - An essay about an important, forgotten, but now rediscovered Mexican woman artist and poet “who reveled in her own beauty, who painted portraits of herself with her many lovers, and who was eventually shunned by society and died, decades later, in the house that she grew up in, alone.” 4. [A catatonic woman awakened after 20 years. Her story may change psychiatry](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/06/01/schizophrenia-autoimmune-lupus-psychiatry/?wpisrc=nl%5Fmost&carta-url=https://s2.washingtonpost.com/car-ln-tr/3a2cc41/6478c2ae49fef7411d00143d/64009d3c4faed61888b0f656/9/70/6478c2ae49fef7411d00143d&ref=richardjnewman.com), by Richard Sima - New research, along with the stories of April Burrell and Devine Cruz, suggests that a subset of patients with psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia may actually have autoimmune disease that attacks the brain. # Four Things To See These are royalty free images I found while poking around on the web. The first one, by Franz Marc, reminds me a little bit of the paintings by Terry Netter I included in [Four by Four #1](https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-1/). I also love the idea of hanging poems from the branches of a tree. It’d be an interesting thing to do, say, for a botanical garden event. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f0526e263-ef40-41a7-8e04-adc2e2d6e201_1000x1481-webp.jpg) The Little Mountain Goats (1913–1914) painting in high resolution by Franz Marc. Original from the Saint Louis Art Museum. (Digitally enhanced by [rawpixel](https://images.rawpixel.com/image%5F1000/czNmcy1wcml2YXRlL3Jhd3BpeGVsX2ltYWdlcy93ZWJzaXRlX2NvbnRlbnQvbHIvcGQyMjUtcGRmcmFuem1hcmMwMDAwNi1pbWFnZS5qcGc.jpg?ref=richardjnewman.com).) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f835b8925-a844-41d1-bdbf-dec9708a0a6f_1024x709-jpeg.jpg) Teahouse at Koishikawa the morning after a snowfall, Katsushika, Hokusai, 1760-1849, artist. (From the [Library of Congress](https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/pnp/jpd/02400/02457v.jpg?ref=richardjnewman.com)) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f9f0a2ed9-31b7-48be-a90c-e64b2bb0c48d_457x1024-jpeg.jpg) Hanging poems on a cherry tree, by Ishikawa, Toyonobu (1711-1785), from the [Library of Congress](https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/pnp/jpd/02100/02148v.jpg?ref=richardjnewman.com) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f33b2bcb4-8be5-409d-a90a-40964e4bf7ec_1200x1057-jpeg.jpg) Narcisse by Weimar, Wilhelm - [Museum of Arts and Crafts](https://www.europeana.eu/item/2048429/item%5FJ62KIO7MS4ECI3OMKSGVNLC4B3IJVL36?ref=richardjnewman.com), Hamburg, Germany - CC0. # Four Things To Listen To 1. [The Many Genders of Judaism](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/adventures-in-jewish-studies-podcast/id1445592926?i=1000585353598&ref=richardjnewman.com) \- This episode of Adventures in Jewish Studies, the Association for Jewish Studies’ podcast, is a marvelous example of how reading ancient texts in light of contemporary sensibilities can, in fact, help rather than hinder understanding. 2. [Born in the USA](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/broads-and-books/id1453721956?i=1000568965717&ref=richardjnewman.com) \- If you don’t know the [Broads and Books](https://www.broadsandbooks.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) podcast, it’s well worth a listen. The hosts, Amy and Erin, pick a theme and have a lot of fun exploring it by asking each other questions about their lives and then by sharing brief reviews of books they’ve read and pop culture they’ve consumed in keeping with the theme. This episode on hypocrisy was really good. 3. [Study of the Invisible](https://music.apple.com/us/album/study-of-the-invisible/1597789716?ref=richardjnewman.com), by Vanessa Wagner - I discovered Vanessa Wagner’s music entirely by accident and I fell in love with it. If you like thought-provoking solo piano, I think you’ll like it too. (Here’s a link to [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/album/2fflhZ9Fur0MxShCUkIuSu?si=b-WLpCKKRk6tgYdhtoLOTg&ref=richardjnewman.com) in case you’re not on Apple Music.) 4. [Jethro Tull, The String Quartets](https://music.apple.com/us/album/jethro-tull-the-string-quartets/1183135506?ref=richardjnewman.com) \- If you like Jethro Tull and you want to hear—I know I’m repeating this phrase—really thought-provoking versions of their music, this album is worth listening to. ([Spotify](https://music.apple.com/us/album/study-of-the-invisible/1597789716?ref=richardjnewman.com)) # Four Things About Me 1. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be an orthodox rabbi. I was less interested in leading a congregation, though, than in the intellectual pursuit of Jewish learning. It gave me a purpose that I later found in writing. 2. In my early twenties, I worked at a summer camp in the Hudson Valley, where my campers gave me the nickname High Lama of the Bald Pate and where my supervisor told me, without irony, that it was a good thing I didn’t have aspirations to be a cult leader. 3. I spent the 1988-89 academic year teaching English in South Korea. I taught myself to read Hangeul and learned to love Korean food by reading a different item off the menu on the wall each time I ate at one of the restaurants near where I lived. My students told me—because I ate and liked things the Americans they’d known had refused even to taste—that I must have been Korean in a former life. 4. My colleagues and I watched the opening ceremony of the 1988 Olympics from the roof of the building in which one of us lived, but I don’t remember going to a single Olympic event. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### Four by Four #1 URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/four-by-four-1/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T16:26:04.000Z Dear Friends, As you can see, I’ve given my newsletter a new name and moved it to Substack. I originally wanted to call it *Because It All Connects,* going back to the name I gave my very first blog more than fifteen years ago, but that name was taken. So I made it a statement instead. I’ve also decided to take a slightly different approach to my newsletter, one that will allow me to keep in touch more frequently and more consistently. I still plan to publish the longer pieces I’ve been writing, but it’s been hard to do that consistently with all the other demands on my time. Since I know that one of the things people have appreciated about this newsletter is the list of links to articles, videos, songs, and websites that I include, I’ve decided to turn that into its own thing. Every two weeks, you’ll receive from a “Four by Four” that will include four short and sweet items under the headings below. Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Please let me know what you think by clicking on the comment button at the bottom of the page. Thanks, Richard # Four Things to Read - [When Hamlet Speaks Persian: A History of Shakespeare Translation in Iran - Ajam Media Collective](https://ajammc.com/2019/12/02/persian-translation-shakespeare/?ref=richardjnewman.com): “Over the last 129 years in Iran, Shakespeare and his characters have undergone a startling transformation in the process of translation and adaptation, one affected at each step by the movements of Iranian politics and the identities of the translators.” - [What Bradley Cooper’s Makeup in ‘Maestro’ Can’t Conceal](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/08/bradley-cooper-maestro-movie-leonard-bernstein-jewish/675106/?ref=richardjnewman.com): “The real question is not whether non-Jews can play Jews, but whether they can do the Jewishness justice. To take one example, the problem with the 2018 Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic, *On the Basis of Sex*, is not that the trailblazing Jewish judge is portrayed by the non-Jewish Felicity Jones. It’s that the feminist jurist’s [deep and abiding Jewish identity](https://yair.substack.com/p/ruth-bader-ginsburgs-jewishness-in) was almost entirely effaced from the story.” - [The Problem With ‘Centering Blackness’ in Everyday Conversations](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/08/anti-racist-color-blindness-dei-programs/674996/?ref=richardjnewman.com): “That she made the remark without thinking twice—a remark, it should be noted, that assumes being a Black tenure-track professor is *worse* than being a marginally employed white one—shows how profoundly interracial social etiquette has changed since 2020’s ‘[summer of racial reckoning](https://www.npr.org/2020/08/16/902179773/summer-of-racial-reckoning-the-match-lit?ref=richardjnewman.com).’” The exchange that statement sums up is well worth thinking about, as is this thought-provoking essay. I don’t agree with everything the author says, but his position is an important one to account for. - [ChatGPT and GPT-4 skew the most liberal — and Meta's LLaMA is the most conservative AI model, a new study says](https://www.businessinsider.com/research-study-openai-chatgpt-liberal-bias-meta-llama-conservative-2023-8?ref=richardjnewman.com): “Steven Piantadosi of UC Berkeley's computation and language lab [tweeted](https://twitter.com/spiantado/status/1599462375887114240?ref=richardjnewman.com) a thread of screenshots where he asked the chatbot to ‘write a python program for whether a person should be tortured, based on their country of origin.’ ChatGPT's response showed a system that was programmed to respond that people from North Korea, Syria, Iran, and Sudan ‘should be tortured.’” Strange that this should be the position articulated by one of the most liberal AIs, but there you have it. The article is chilling in its implications. # Four Things to See These are four paintings by the artist [Terrance Netter](https://www.terencenetter.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com), who was my teacher and my friend when I was an undergraduate at Stony Brook University. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/bbde54a8-9257-4d86-a9b5-652d307fe455_350x350-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/5edb155b-b9f1-4286-9881-b33c9d8728fe_350x472-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/152d5a1a-4ce6-411c-a8c3-d1db55125a13_350x478-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/fa485c09-8563-4f0c-8912-ff83a9d49b30_350x459-jpeg.jpg) From the top left: 79, Time+Run+Out, Moonscape, and Ruins. # Four Things to Listen To ### Words - The Verso Podcast: [Bodies Under Seige](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-verso-podcast/id1116816501?i=1000618705286&ref=richardjnewman.com) \- A truly important discussion about why it’s so important to protect and preserve reproductive autonomy. ### Music - Bokanté: [Bliss](https://music.apple.com/us/album/bliss/1685042651?i=1685043039&ref=richardjnewman.com), from their album [History](https://music.apple.com/us/album/history/1685042651?ref=richardjnewman.com) - Philip Glass: [Symphony No. 8, Duos Nos. 1-5, Harpsichord Concerto](https://music.apple.com/us/album/philip-glass-symphony-no-8-duos-nos-1-5-harpsichord-concerto/593078616?ref=richardjnewman.com) - Vanessa Wagner: [Study of the Invisible](https://music.apple.com/us/album/study-of-the-invisible/1597789716?ref=richardjnewman.com) # Four Things About Me - My third book of poems, *T’shuvah,* will be published by [Fernwood Press](http://www.fernwoodpress.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) in October. The cover reveal, pre-order information (with a special premium for those who pre-order), and the date and time of the launch party are all forthcoming. Stay tuned! - The second section of the book, “Do Not Wish For Any Other Life,” is being set by the composer [Owen Bloomfield](https://www.owenbloomfield.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com). The world premiere will be performed by [The Blank Experiment](https://www.theblankexperiment.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) new music ensemble in Kitchener, Ontario on April 19, 2024\. A second performance will take place on the 20th in Toronto. - You can [watch me read](https://youtu.be/40UxGBnOxH0?ref=richardjnewman.com) “Do Not Wish For Any Other Life” as part of the [First Tuesdays](http://www.firstuesdays.net/?ref=richardjnewman.com) reading at this years [New York Poetry Festival](https://www.newyorkcitypoetryfestival.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com). - CavanKerry Press invited me to be [part of a reading](https://youtu.be/SXfe2%5FQQZf0?si=Ae793d59hsVNMofg&ref=richardjnewman.com) they held on August 19th at [The HUB](https://www.thehubnyc.org/?ref=richardjnewman.com). I read from *The Silence Of Men,* which CavanKerry published almost twenty years ago, in 2006, and had the pleasure of meeting two other fine poets, [Jerome Ellison Murphy](http://www.jemwords.com/?ref=richardjnewman.com) and [Lydia Cortes](https://www.poetryproject.org/people/lydia-cortes?ref=richardjnewman.com). Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ### A Gratitude In Me That I Did Not Fully Appreciate At The Time URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate/ Last updated: 2025-07-04T20:57:10.000Z *(Some of the images below are NSFW.)* ***I was scrolling through my photos the other day,*** looking for I-don’t-remember-what, when this image of my grandmother’s friend Herbert caught my eye. I cropped out the married couple who were sitting to his left because they’re only peripherally a part of the story I want to tell and I don’t want what I think I recall about them to be associated with their faces—just in case I’m wrong and someone reading this newsletter knew them. I put *knew* in the past tense because I assume that, like Herbert, they’re dead. What I think I know about them is that theirs was a long and happy marriage of convenience, a lavender marriage, that they entered into when they both were very young to camouflage the husband’s homosexuality. I have a vague memory of my grandmother telling me this at the same time she told me Herbert was a gay man who’d either converted or recommitted himself—I don’t remember which—to Roman Catholicism, adding that he’d been celibate ever since, having chosen to accept the doctrine that being gay was not a sin, but that gay sex was. Herbert was European, though I either don’t remember or never learned what country he was from. He had an old-style European’s disdain for what he always referred to as “American crassness” in everything from food to clothes to literature and music. My grandmother adored how opinionated he was, how easy it was to needle him into the kind of debate, filled with wit and banter, that she liked to have, but that she loved watching others have even more—the kind of debate she always tried to provoke between Herbert and me. I did not like debating Herbert. I was much younger than he was and found his inflexibility tedious. I saw no point in arguing with someone so condescending to my own tastes and interests. He was never openly insulting, but he made no secret of the fact that he thought that someone of my “obvious intelligence” ought to have “aimed higher” my musical, literary, and other tastes. Herbert was, however, a very good storyteller. He was well-traveled and had a writerly flair for conjuring the places he’d been to with just a few details. He’d served in either World War II or the Korean War—I don’t remember which—and he told some marvelous tales of the time he spent in Japan, though all I remember of them is that they were marvelous. He started sharing them with me after I came back in 1989 from the year I spent teaching in South Korea, and it never occurred to me back then that he might have been trying to use those stories as a way to connect. I wish now that I had been more curious and less arrogant in my own inflexibility when it came to him–or that I’d written down some of what he told me. Instead, all I have are some Japanese prints he gave my grandmother to give me—with one exception, he never gave me anything directly—and a stack of photographs someone (maybe him, maybe not, I never knew) took when they were in Korea ten or maybe even twenty years before I was. \*\*\* ![_korea9.jpg](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f6af8c754-254b-4f13-b7c9-14a675ccf072_1396x1984-jpeg.jpg) ***I do not know exactly when or where the pictures from Korea were taken,*** but some of them, like the one above, evoke for me even now the places in Seoul where I lived, worked, and played. I tried as I was writing this to look for those places on the map, and it took me longer than I thought it would. The city has changed a lot in the past three-decades-plus, including both the names of those places and the conventions of transliterating Korean into English. I lived in what were called at the time the Jugong Apartments right across the street from the Shincheon subway station. That station, though, is now called [Jamsilsaenae Station](https://www.google.com/maps/search/jamshil+station/@37.5138877,127.0828116,17z?hl=en&utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), and while I can find on the map Building 112, where I lived in apartment 513, the apartment complex in which that building is located has been renamed and is now called, based on what I can figure out from the map, the Jamsil Els Apartments. Just a few dozen steps south and to the right of what was then the entrance to Shincheon station on the south side of Olympic-ro (Avenue) was the [Saemaeul Shijang](https://www.timeout.com/seoul/attractions/jamsil-saemauel-market?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), now known (in English anyway) as the [Saemaeul Traditional Market](https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction%5FReview-g294197-d18995353-Reviews-Saemaul%5FTraditional%5FMarket-Seoul.html?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate). These two pictures, which bear little resemblance to what you’ll see at the links above, might as well have been taken there—at least according to what I remember the market being like in the late 1980s. ![_korea1.jpeg](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f0ed16359-3d20-4534-8127-c947abc8f108_1992x1404-jpeg.jpg) ![_korea7.jpeg](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f8a39068d-299b-4e9a-88d6-4b4b0deb536c_2000x1368-jpeg.jpg) And whether this next picture was taken at [Naksansa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naksansa?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate) or not, it reminds me of what it felt like to walk alone on the grounds of the first Buddhist temple I visited during my stay. ![_korea4.jpeg](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fabe7eaf0-421c-4bdb-a490-0588a06e5304_2004x1388-jpeg.jpg) I wish I had pictures of this quality from my stay in Korea. My photos are in an album that I have not yet had a chance to scan, but none of them are as visually evocative as the set that Herbert gave me. \*\*\* ***The Japanese prints Herbert gave me are gorgeous!*** Thanks to my friends Andy Meyer and Eleanor Goodman, who translated the Chinese characters for me, I was able to find some information about this one: ![_print2.jpeg](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f7df00656-c7c4-4e3c-8873-dbdcee5ecfda_3023x4031.jpg) It’s by [Kitagawa Utumaro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utamaro?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), “The most celebrated artist of women of the whole ‘Ukiyo-e’ school,” according to the [British Museum’s website](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A%5FOA-0-55?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate). This is from [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utamaro?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate): > Little is known of Utamaro’s life. His work began to appear in the 1770s, and he rose to prominence in the early 1790s with his portraits of beauties with exaggerated, elongated features. He produced over 2000 known prints and was one of the few ukiyo-e artists to achieve fame throughout Japan in his lifetime. In 1804 he was arrested and manacled for fifty days for making illegal prints depicting the 16th-century military ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and died two years later. The above print is called Yogoto ni Au Koi (“love that meets each night”), suggesting that the letter the woman is pulling in delight from the breast pocket of her kimono is from a lover who wants to meet her that night. It’s from a series called [Kasen Koi no Bu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasen%5FKoi%5Fno%5FBu?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), or “Anthology of Poems: The Love Section,” which Wikipedia describes as > a series of five ukiyo-e prints…published c. 1793–94 \[the title of which\] parodies the section headings in waka and kyōka poetry anthologies, and takes the theme of love. The women depicted are not courtesans or others employed in the pleasure districts, who were the typical subjects of ukiyo-e portraits of beauties. The other two prints are also by Utumaro, though I have not been able to find out anything else about them, except that the first one is now used to advertise [skin care products](https://mitomos.com/products/mitomo-aloe-cherry-blossom-facial-essence-mask?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate). ![_print3.jpeg](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f47c8f3ed-6b42-4535-821a-abd61e2e64a0_3023x4031.jpg) ![_print4.JPG](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2fad25aa53-7087-413b-bfd0-e1c0e030187d_4032x3024.jpg) Utumaro, I also discovered, was known for his erotic prints. This one, among others, can be found at the [Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/56719?sortBy=Relevance&%3Bft=Kitagawa+Utamaro&%3Boffset=0&%3Brpp=40&%3Bpos=1&utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate): ![_utumaroerotic.jpg](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f41fa3340-c2d5-4d5f-a084-7a7df90cc94f_3836x2574-jpeg.jpg) \*\*\* ***Which leads me to Herbert’s mischievous streak.*** When my grandmother was moving out of the apartment she’d lived in for more than fifty years, long after Herbert was gone, she gave me these hand-painted plates that he’d given her to give me at some point before he died. (I don’t remember when he died or what he died of.) ![_satyrs.JPG](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f146e1aa5-2442-4b15-9a22-7063d10da5d8_4030x3022.jpg) She’d found the plates, she told me, while going through the drawers in her desk. She figured she must have put them there when Herbert gave them to her and then forgot about them, but she was happy now that they’d finally found their way to where he’d wanted them to be. I was disappointed not to have gotten them when he was alive. Not only was there no way Herbert could have known how much in line with my own developing interests in gender and sexuality the images on the plates would be; I would have loved to hear him tell the story of where and when he bought them and of the artist whose signature is on the back of one of the plates. ![_satyrback.JPG](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f8bc83bbe-664c-4e79-8b02-2ee6b512d85a_4032x3024.jpg) \*\*\* ***The last thing I have that is connected to Herbert,*** which is actually what started me thinking about writing this post in the first place, is the one thing I received directly from his hand, though it did not originally belong to him. ![_bakingdish.JPG](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/c1/acc1ea6d-50e1-4de3-aaca-df8ca23ef15d/content/images/2025/01/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2f7d5261f7-9b73-4763-bc8d-6f8661d716cc_4028x2063.jpg) This oval, cast iron fish baking dish had belonged, as did the frying pan with the screw-in wooden handle that came with it, to a man named Michael, whom I met only once, when I accompanied Herbert and my grandmother on a visit. (The frying pan went the way of the world a long time ago.) Michael, whose family had disowned him, was dying of AIDS. I don’t remember if Michael was a friend or former lover of Herbert’s, or if Herbert had met and befriended him after he’d gotten sick, but by the time of our visit Herbert was one of the people helping to make sure that Michael was not alone and was as comfortable as possible as death approached. I remember a pale, gaunt man with short-cropped red hair and a neatly trimmed beard and mustache propped up on pillows so he could watch TV and how his face lit up when we entered the room. We, though it was mostly Herbert, made small talk. About what, I don’t remember. It was the first time I’d ever been in the presence of someone who was dying, who knew he was dying, and I did not know what to say or how to process it after we left. Some months later, I was visiting my grandmother and she told me that Michael had died. We were sitting at her dining room table, waiting for Herbert, who was coming to have lunch with us. She’d been helping Herbert go through Michael’s belongings, she said, trying to figure out what to do with the things Michael had not designated for specific people, like the sexual paraphernalia they’d found—dildos, cuffs, ball gags, and so on—that they were having a hard time figuring out how to get rid of without embarrassing either themselves or, posthumously, Michael. I laughed out loud as my grandmother listed those items as if they had been, for example, mismatched forks, knives, and spoons. When Herbert arrived, he was carrying both the baking dish and the frying pan that I mentioned above. “Michael remembered you vividly from your visit,” Herbert told me, “and when I saw him next, he said about you, ‘He is a good, kind, *decent* man.’ I told him you liked to cook and so, as we were making his final arrangements, he said he wanted you to have these.” I don’t know what Michael saw in me during the short time we were together nor did I have the slightest idea how to acknowledge what I understood to be Herbert’s implicit agreement with Michael’s assessment. I said thank you and I don’t think I said anything else about it after that. Some time ago, as I put the baking dish into the oven for our dinner (freshly caught cod covered in a tomato-cilantro-cumin sauce), it hit me that I think about Herbert and Michael every time I use it and that I’ve been carrying for the last thirty-something years a gratitude that I myself did not fully appreciate at the time, one I never had the chance to express to Michael and that I wish I’d understood well enough to express to Herbert. That’s when I decided to write this post, which I found I could not write without talking about the other material ways that Herbert, as a result of his friendship with my grandmother, wove himself into the fabric of my life. He is gone and will not know, but I’m glad I have finally acknowledged it. As always, I’d love [to know what you think](mailto:richardjeffreynewman@icloud.com). Richard \*\*\* ## News **Publications** *BigCityLit* recently published [A Dream In Three Parts](https://nycbigcitylit.com/article/a-dream-in-three-parts/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), a poem that really haunted me when I wrote it and that continues to haunt me even now, mostly because I don’t know what the ending means. If you check it out and have some ideas to share, [I’d love to hear them](mailto:richardjeffreynewman@icloud.com). **Books I’m Reading** [*The Truffle Eye*](https://www.zephyrpress.org/product-page/the-truffle-eye?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), by Vaan Nguyen, translated from Hebrew by Adriana X. Jacobs. Nguyen is the child Vietnamese immigrants to Israel. She writes in Hebrew, which makes for lots of interesting tensions between what people usually think of as Israeli/Hebrew literature and what it actually is. I’m about to start my second read-through. It’s a book well worth wrestling with. **Online Reading I’d Recommend** - [The Case Against the Trauma Plot | The New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/the-case-against-the-trauma-plot?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), by Parul Sehgal - a deeply thought-provoking take on what the centering of trauma in narrative has done to narrative - [What Google Search Isn’t Showing You | The New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/what-google-search-isnt-showing-you?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), by Kyle Chayka - the title is pretty self-explanatory - [Will literature survive? - UnHerd](https://unherd.com/2022/06/the-death-of-literature/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), by Mary Gaitskill - I didn’t agree with everything in this piece, but I found it thought-provoking - [Synagogue Sues Florida, Saying Abortion Restrictions Violate Religious Freedoms - The New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/us/florida-abortion-law-judaism.html?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), Eliza Fawcett - this made me smile when I read it, but it also made me nervous, because I knew it would give rise to discussions like the one below: - [Tentative Thoughts On The Jewish Claim To A “Religious Abortion”](https://reason.com/volokh/2022/06/20/tentative-thoughts-on-the-jewish-claim-to-a-religious-abortion/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), by Josh Blackman - a chilling example of someone deciding Judaism is not a “real” religion based on a half-baked notion of how Judaism works. - [Saving Historic Songs, and a Jewish Culture in Morocco](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/world/europe/morocco-jews-sephardic-music-songs.html?referringSource=articleShare&utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), by Aida Alami - the title is self-explanatory. - [Ya Lalla: Jewish Saharans Singing to Birth](https://yalalla.org.uk/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate): A Project of Dr. Vanessa Paloma Elbaz based on oral history interviews of Mme. Sultana Azeroual in Casablanca 2015 - 2016\. Full interviews are held in KHOYA: Jewish Morocco Sound Archive. - [Black Boys Play the Classics](https://voxpopulisphere.com/2022/06/19/toi-derricotte-black-boys-play-the-classics/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), by Toi Derricotte - a poem well worth your time. - [Who Killed Mae West’s No. 1 Fan? – The Hollywood Reporter](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/mae-west-fan-mysterious-death-1235164946/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), by Seth Abromovitch - “The mysterious death of one of \[West’s\] acolytes offers a window into the Hollywood legend’s strange world. - [The Gizzard Tree](https://arablit.org/2022/06/20/mansour-el-souwaims-the-gizzard-tree/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), by Mansour El-Souwaim, Translated by Nassir al-Sayied al-Nour. - [No Apology: A Poemifesto](https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/699758718/0/the%5Fbest%5Famerican%5Fpoetry~Carmen-Gim%c3%a9nez-Smith-Pick-of-the-Week-ed-Terence-Winch.html?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), by Carmen Giménez Smith - another poem you should pay attention to. - [The Problem with Jewish Museums » Mosaic](https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/history-ideas/2016/02/the-problem-with-jewish-museums/?utm%5Fsource=Klaviyo&utm%5Fmedium=flow&%5Fkx=aZdRwq2IQZl-zj1ubUESO7UVDSYvhPxjnJljYttvUU8-Syuxn3DSCQk2AFV89sl3.L87CGh&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), by Edward Rothstein - an interesting debate, if you follow the links to people’s responses. - [Inside the Push to Diversify the Book Business - The New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/22/magazine/inside-the-push-to-diversify-the-book-business.html?referringSource=articleShare&utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), by Marcela Valdes - [Marilyn the Poet - The Paris Review](https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2022/06/28/marilyn-monroes-poetry/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), by Elisa Gonzalez - a side of Marilyn Monroe you probably didn’t know existed. - [This couldn’t happen anywhere: How coverage of the shooting failed Highland Park – The Forward](https://forward.com/opinion/509570/how-coverage-of-shooting-failed-highland-park/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), by Elhad Nehorai - an important take on the damage done by the silence regarding the antisemitic elements of the shooting in Highland Park. - [The new right-wing attack on education is part of a long tradition of white conservative panic over schools - Alternet.org](https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/right-wing-panci-education/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), by Mia Brett - [“Gender is sickeningly important in our culture” - Tel Aviv Review of Books](https://www.tarb.co.il/gender-is-sickeningly-important-in-our-culture/?utm%5Fsource=rss&utm%5Fmedium=rss&utm%5Fcampaign=gender-is-sickeningly-important-in-our-culture), by Alex Stein - a fascinating interview with Dr. Daphna Shochat, who runs the Keshet Clinic, a clinic for gender reassignment, in Tel Aviv. - [Post-Translation: Between the Bi-National and Dialogic - Tel Aviv Review of Books](https://www.tarb.co.il/post-translation-between-the-bi-national-and-dialogic/?utm%5Fsource=rss&utm%5Fmedium=rss&utm%5Fcampaign=post-translation-between-the-bi-national-and-dialogic), by Ohad Zeltzer Zubida - an important discussion of a new approach to literary translation - [Straight Outta Zion - Tel Aviv Review of Books](https://www.tarb.co.il/straight-outta-zion/?utm%5Fsource=rss&utm%5Fmedium=rss&utm%5Fcampaign=straight-outta-zion), by Tomer Gershenman - a history of Israeli hip-hop. - [An Excerpt from ](https://arablit.org/2022/07/11/an-excerpt-of-fadi-zaghmouts-speculative-novel-a-needle-and-a-thimble/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate)[*A Needle and a Thimble*](https://arablit.org/2022/07/11/an-excerpt-of-fadi-zaghmouts-speculative-novel-a-needle-and-a-thimble/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), By Fadi Zaghmout, Translated by Wasan Abdelhaq. - [We Were Wrong About the Great Resignation: Workers Have No Power](https://www.businessinsider.com/wrong-great-resignation-recession-means-workers-powerless-despite-labor-shortage-2022-7?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), Juliana Kaplan and Madison Hoff - [Why Community College Students Are ‘Stopping Out’](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/18/nyregion/community-college-students-cuny.html?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate), by James Barron - which may, or may not, help explain the enrollment woes at the campus where I teach. - [Christians hold largest percentage of global wealth: Report - The Economic Times](https://m.economictimes.com/news/company/corporate-trends/christians-hold-largest-percentage-of-global-wealth-report/articleshow/45886471.cms?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate) \- This is hardly surprising, but it was interesting to see it laid out in black and white. **What I’m Listening To:** - [Sutphin Boulevard](https://open.spotify.com/track/2NtqI3Ylig7bB36esIwYuE?utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate) - [Fleet Foxes - Mykonos](https://youtu.be/DT-dxG4WWf4?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate) - [Leon Bridges - River](https://youtu.be/0Hegd4xNfRo?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate) - [Joni Mitchell - Both Sides Now, Newport 2022](https://youtu.be/4aqGjaFDTxQ?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate) - [Beverly “Guitar” Watkins - Rock Me Baby](https://youtu.be/RPv92ABFNP4?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=a-gratitude-in-me-that-i-did-not-fully-appreciate) ### Publication News and Some Thoughts on Patience and Process URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience/ Last updated: 2026-05-13T02:56:22.000Z Dear Friends, I am very excited to share with you that an essay it took me nearly thirty years to write, “[The First Time I Told Someone](https://solsticelitmag.org/content/the-first-time-i-told-someone/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience),”was published earlier this month by [Solstice](https://solsticelitmag.org/content/the-first-time-i-told-someone/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience). The essay unpacks the progression from the first time I tried to tell someone I’d been sexually violated as a boy to the moment when I finally did tell someone, bringing in along the way the feminist origins of my healing, the poetry of e. e. cummings, my experience with hardcore heterosexual pornography, and more. I’ve been thinking a lot about why it took me so long to write this essay, and it was not the subject matter, difficult though that still sometimes is for me to grapple with. I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on this matter here. I first started work on what eventually became “[The First Time I Told Someone](https://solsticelitmag.org/content/the-first-time-i-told-someone/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience)” in the 1990s, though I do not remember the title it had back then. I was encouraged by two men who have long since disappeared from my life: Rory MacDonald, who was my therapist at the time, and Peter Nevraumont, an editor with whom Rory put me in touch. Peter in particular was very excited by the idea that I would write a collection of personal essays about manhood and masculinity rooted in the feminist perspective I brought to my experience. I even found an agent who was very enthusiastic about the project. Unfortunately, while almost all the editors to whom she sent my proposal found the writing and the subject matter compelling, none were willing to take it on because—and this was the refrain we heard over and over again—“men’s books just don’t sell.” When the agent eventually dropped me—she had to make a living, after all—I set the book project aside and turned my full attention as a writer to being a poet, channeling my energies into the poems that eventually became [*The Silence Of Men*](https://cavankerrypress.org/product/the-silence-of-men/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience) and, ten or so years later, [*Words For What Those Men Have Done*](https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771832090?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience). I also started blogging during that time and, at least among those who read and commented on the well-established blog where I cross-posted my work, earned a small, if sometimes controversial name for myself as a male feminist blogger. I sometimes repurposed material from the book manuscript for my blog posts and would occasionally pull the old essays out to see if that project would rekindle itself in my imagination, but it never did. The 1990s were the era of Robert Bly’s [*Iron John*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron%5FJohn:%5FA%5FBook%5FAbout%5FMen?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience) and what was called at the time the [mythopoetic men’s movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythopoetic%5Fmen%27s%5Fmovement?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience). A lot of what I wrote had been framed as a critical response to that movement’s agenda, which had gone stale by the 2000s, at least in terms of the mainstream attention it had been getting, and so men’s mythopoesis no longer had the relevance that initially gave my essays some of their bite. More importantly, though, *I* had changed. I was in my 30s when I wrote those essays, and by 2006, when *The Silence Of Men* was published, my perspective had changed significantly, as it has changed several times in the nearly two decades since. The person I am now simply cannot stand behind much of what I wrote back then. I decided to return to the pages that became “[The First Time I Told Someone](https://solsticelitmag.org/content/the-first-time-i-told-someone/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience)”—almost the entire first section of which dates, with very few changes, from the original 1990s draft—because I read, though I cannot now remember where, that most men of mine and previous generations who were sexually violated as children (I’m 60) usually wait three or four, and sometimes more decades before disclosing that fact even to their closest loved ones. The first time I told someone was just four years or so after the second sexual assault I experienced and less than ten years after the first. I attribute this difference from the generalization I read about to the anger the women’s movement gifted me when I started in the 1980s and 1990s to read writers like Adrienne Rich and June Jordan. No matter how much shame I might have felt over what the men who violated me did to me, the fierce and uncompromising feminist position that a perpetrator of sexual violence is the *only* person responsible and accountable for that act gave me a kind of strength I could not have found anywhere else at a time when no one, and I mean no one, was talking publicly about the sexual abuse of boys. The formal problem I had to solve before I could finish writing “The First Time I Told Someone” was a knotty one I had been struggling with since I started the essay in the 1990s: how to tell about each experience of abuse that I suffered without being redundant or stringing them together in a way that risked devolving into a kind of trauma porn. I solved that problem once I realized I’d been approaching the question of how to tell my story ass backwards. When I first began writing, given the culture wars around gender that were roiling at the time, it was very important to me to establish the material’s “feminist bona fides,” not to insulate myself from criticism, but to make clear from the start that I was writing from a profeminist position. Inevitably, this resulted in my privileging argument over narrative in a way that made it hard to tell both stories on their own terms. Instead of showing how feminism accounted for my experience, I realized, I needed to show how feminism helped me come to terms with that experience, even if that process didn’t always fit neatly into a feminist mold. The result is an essay I would not have been able to write fifteen, much less thirty years ago. More to the point, though, telling my story in this way has opened up the space for me to write, as a companion piece, the argument that has been implicit in this material from the start. I’m just about finished with “The First Time I Said It In Public,” which takes as its starting point a story I told in a blog post I wrote in 2017 called “[My Students First Taught Me to Claim the Politics of My Survival](https://richardjnewman.com/my-students-first-taught-me-to-claim-the-politics-of-my-survival?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience).” Hopefully that essay will find a publisher soon after it’s done. I will let you know when it does. As always, if you are so moved, [please let me know what you think](mailto:richardjeffreynewman@icloud.com). Richard \*\*\* ## Other News **Upcoming Events:** - On Sunday April 17th at 7 PM Eastern Standard Time, I’ll be reading in Ruben Quesada’s [Mercy Street Reading Series](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mercy-street-reading-series-tickets-136060565815?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience). The other readers are [Alexis Sears](https://www.alexissears.com/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience), [Derrick Austin](https://derricklynnaustin.wixsite.com/authorpage/about-me?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience), [Lynn Melnick](https://www.lynnmelnick.com/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience), [Michael Dumanis](https://poets.org/poet/michael-dumanis?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience), and [Serge Neptune](https://www.sergeneptune.co.uk/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience). This will be a virtual event. You can register [here](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mercy-street-reading-series-tickets-136060565815?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience). Please consider donating to support the series. - On May 15th at 9 AM Eastern Standard Time, I will be a guest on Jaime Alejandro’s podcast [Arts Calling](https://cruzfolio.com/arts-calling-podcast/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience). **What I’m Reading:** Lately, I’ve been reading poetry pretty much exclusively. I’m looking forward to picking up a novel or a book of nonfiction, maybe getting back to James Woods’ *The Broken Estate.* - I’m still working on [A Slow Green Sleep](https://www.ipgbook.com/a-slow-green-sleep-products-9781947817265.php?page%5Fid=21&utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience). I haven’t set it aside entirely mostly because I can’t decide if I’ve lost interest or if I am reasonably paying attention to other things that need to take precedent. - For example, because my students will be going to hear her read later this month, I have been re-reading Safia Jama’s chapbook, *Notes on Resilience,* which is part of the [New Generations African Poets Box Set: Saba](http://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog/new-generation-african-poets-a-chapbook-box-set-saba/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience). - I’m also reading [*Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora*](https://www.greenlindenpress.com/books/poetry-of-iran-and-its-diaspora?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience). **Online Articles, Essays, Poems, Stories, Talks I’d Recommend:** - “[This Be The Curse: Philip Larkin’s Big Problem](https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/this-be-the-curse-philip-larkins-big-problem?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience),” by Nicola Shulman, which brings to the reading of Larkin a reading of his body of the sort that is usually reserved for women writers. - “[The Poetry of Labor: On Rodrigo Toscano and the Art of Work](https://lithub.com/the-poetry-of-labor-on-rodrigo-toscano-and-the-art-of-work/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience),” by Alissa Quart, which introduced me to a poet I did not know before, but whom I am glad to know about now. - “[The Key to Catastrophe Management](https://thewritelaunch.com/2022/04/the-key-to-catastrophe-management/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience),” by Mary Lannon, an interesting short story by one of my colleagues at Nassau Community College. **What I’m Listening To:** - [Good Hope](https://youtu.be/P2LxUsqRNW8?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience), by Dave Holland, Zakir Hussain, and Chris Potter - [The Hallelujah Chorus](https://youtu.be/Q04-8WDKtzo?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience), by the Roches - You Can Leave Your Hat On, three versions, [Joe Crocker](https://youtu.be/xzjcM-SITZ0?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience), [Tom Jones](https://youtu.be/4QfyMQEqK%5Fw?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience), and [Etta James](https://youtu.be/XvtjaTiIrxM?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=publication-news-and-some-thoughts-on-patience) ### Standing With Ukraine Also Means Paying Attention To Its Larger Context URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/standing-with-ukraine-also-means-paying-attention/ Last updated: 2025-05-25T12:57:02.000Z Dear Friends, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine casts its long shadow over everything I do these days, even the small, mundane moments, like washing the dishes or playing backgammon with my wife. How could it not? I stand with the Ukrainian people, of course, and I have cheered each sign that their resistance is working, but I have also chosen to remain largely silent, preferring instead to learn from people far more knowledgeable and eloquent than I am on this subject. Then I read [this article](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/25/vladimir-putin-ukraine-attack-antisemitism-denazify?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=standing-with-ukraine-also-means-paying-attention) in *The Guardian,* by Jason Stanley, “The Antisemitism Animating Putin’s Claim to ‘Denazify’ Ukraine,” and I decided there are some thoughts I’d like to share. Nothing I’m about to say, of course, is immediately more important than what’s actually happening on the ground in Ukraine, but what’s happening on the ground there is taking place within a larger context of which we in the United States are also a part. To the degree that antisemitism plays a role in framing that context, I think we need to be paying attention to that too. There is always the danger when Jews decide to highlight antisemitism as Stanley did, as I have just done, especially in the midst of an international crisis, that people will think some version of–and hear this in Ronald Reagan’s voice, if your memory goes back that far–“There they go again, making everything about Jewish suffering.” What Stanley highlights in his piece, however, and what most discussions of antisemitism overlook, is the danger this form of hatred poses not just to Jews, but to anyone who stands for progressive values. “Central to European fascism,” Stanley writes, > is the idea that it is the Jews who are the agents of moral decay. According to European fascism, it is the Jews who bring a country under the domination of \[the\] (Jewish) global elite, by using the tools of liberal democracy, secular humanism, feminism and gay rights…to introduce decadence, weakness and impurity. Fascist antisemitism is racial rather than religious in origin, targeting Jews as a corrupt stateless race who seek global domination. There is a great deal to be said about the fact that, while Christianity may not be white, whiteness is almost always understood in Christian terms–think [Manifest Destiny](https://www.history.com/topics/westward-expansion/manifest-destiny?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=standing-with-ukraine-also-means-paying-attention), the [The White Man’s Burden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FWhite%5FMan%27s%5FBurden?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=standing-with-ukraine-also-means-paying-attention), and the legacy they have left–but what I want to focus on here is the conspiracy theory that Stanley rightly points out is at the core of the antisemite’s world view. In “[Why So Many People Still Don’t Understand Anti-Semitism](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/texas-synagogue-anti-semitism-conspiracy-theory/621286/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=standing-with-ukraine-also-means-paying-attention),” Yair Rosenberg delves more deeply into the nature of this conspiracy theory–and if you read one article about antisemitism, I’d recommend you make it this one–but he also says something really important about the impact of conspiracy theories on the people who believe them. Those who “embrace conspiracy theories to explain their problems,” he says, “lose the ability to rationally solve them.” Rosenberg then quotes Walter Russell Mead (from Mead’s piece “[The BBC and ‘The Jews’](https://www.the-american-interest.com/2012/05/13/the-bbc-and-the-jews/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=standing-with-ukraine-also-means-paying-attention)”): > People who think “the Jews” run the banks lose the ability to understand, much less to operate financial systems. People who think “the Jews” dominate business through hidden structures can’t build or long maintain a successful modern economy. People who think “the Jews” dominate politics lose their ability to interpret political events, to diagnose social evils and to organize effectively for positive change. In the same vein, Rosenberg also quotes civil-rights activist Eric Ward: > Anti-Semitism isn’t just bigotry toward the Jewish community. It is actually utilizing bigotry toward the Jewish community in order to deconstruct democratic practices, and it does so by framing democracy as a conspiracy rather than a tool of empowerment or a functional tool of governance. Both Mead and Ward, in other words, neither of whom are Jewish, see in antisemitism not just hatred of the Jews, but also, though they do not call it this, one of the central ideological building blocks of what Stanley calls a “global fascist movement,” which he points out is becoming almost indistinguishable from (white) Christian nationalism. One reason it’s hard to talk about antisemitism from this perspective is that it requires us to see antisemitism as its own thing, on its own terms, rather than as another “flavor” of racism, which raises the specter of special pleading for the Jews that I talked about above. Difference, however–I am paraphrasing Robin Morgan from her book [*The Demon Lover*](https://www.amazon.com/Demon-Lover-Roots-Terrorism/dp/0743452933?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=standing-with-ukraine-also-means-paying-attention)–does not have to mean hierarchy, and it is possible we will learn far more from understanding the differences between antisemitism and other forms of hatred than we ever will from glossing those differences over, which is what usually happens. I am reminded as I write this of watching one portion of the Women’s March after the election of Donald Trump and listening to speaker after speaker make sure to include in her comments a list of the various oppressions “we” had to stand against. Not one, not even the rabbi who spoke, included antisemitism as one of those hatreds. Especially after the explicitly antisemitic rhetoric that had been coming out of Trump’s campaign, I found myself wondering who precisely “we” were supposed to be. Then Angela Davis spoke and, if I remember correctly, antisemitism was one of the first forms of hated she mentioned. The order, however, is less important than the fact that she mentioned it at all. After Davis spoke, I had to stop watching, so I don’t know whether subsequent speakers included antisemitism in their remarks or not. If Jason Stanley is right, however, and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, whatever else it may be, is also his way of asserting himself as the “acknowledged leader of \[what has become\] a global fascist movement”–and we know who the leader of that movement is here in the States–then we fail to follow Angela Davis’ example at our peril. All of our peril, Jews and non-Jews alike. Because if we don’t respond to the conspiratorial aspect of antisemitism forcefully and unambiguously, we will continue to allow one of the central ideological building blocks of the fascist movement to remain intact. Thanks for reading. What do you think about all this? I’d like very much to know. Next issue, it’s back to John Wisniewski’s interview. I hope you are all well and safe and beginning to look forward to spring. Richard \*\*\* ## In Other News I have other news to tell you about, but now is not the time. It can wait till the next issue. I do, however, want to urge you again, in case you did not click through after reading what I wrote, to read both Rosenberg’s and Mead’s pieces: - **Rosenberg:** [Why So Many People Still Don’t Understand Antisemitism](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/texas-synagogue-anti-semitism-conspiracy-theory/621286/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=standing-with-ukraine-also-means-paying-attention) - **Mead:** [The BBC and The Jews](https://www.the-american-interest.com/2012/05/13/the-bbc-and-the-jews/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=standing-with-ukraine-also-means-paying-attention) ### I have been (once again) thinking about antisemitism... URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/i-have-been-once-again-thinking-about-antisemitism/ Last updated: 2025-05-25T17:29:17.000Z Dear Friends, I want to share with you something I wrote recently about antisemitism–and not only because Election Day is just around the corner and the question of whether Donald Trump will be re-elected is weighing heavily on my mind, as I assume it also is on yours. What I'd like to share is a letter I wrote to the editor of *Poets & Writers* in response to an article they published by [Namrata Poddar](http://www.namratapoddar.com/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=i-have-been-once-again-thinking-about-antisemitism) called “[Return to the MFA: A Call for Systemic Change in the Literary Arts](https://www.pw.org/content/return%5Fto%5Fthe%5Fmfa%5Fa%5Fcall%5Ffor%5Fsystemic%5Fchange%5Fin%5Fthe%5Fliterary%5Farts?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=i-have-been-once-again-thinking-about-antisemitism).” In the article’s introduction, Poddar writes that she’s not interested in producing “yet another story about how rough I had it in my MFA program as a brown immigrant woman. \[This\] is, instead, a story about a greater reality of MFA programs that begs for a reevaluation.” That greater reality–and she is, of course, correct that it calls out loudly for reevaluation–is the way in which (here she is paraphrasing Claudia Rankine) “creative writing programs, with their white majority faculty and students, *work* to maintain whiteness as the workshop’s unspoken norm.” The rest of the article connects this work to other systemic oppressions worldwide and argues that dismantling the “white nationalist, Judeo-Christian, hetero-patriarchal space” of the MFA program, particularly “in its aesthetic ideology,” needs to take place in the context of efforts to dismantle those other oppressions. However, as is all too often the case in this kind of critique, Poddar’s argument erases antisemitism as one of those forms of oppression. This is the letter I sent to Poets & Writers: > I read Namrata Poddar’s “Return to the MFA: A Call for Systemic Change in the Literary Arts” with interest and with care. I was disappointed to note, however, that her critique of whiteness, like so many I have read recently, elides entirely the fact that, at least as it is constructed in the United States and Europe, whiteness is Christian. As a result, Poddar fails to include antisemitism among the “forms of systemic oppression” that she argues need to be reckoned with. > > In characterizing the traditional MFA as “a white nationalist, *Judeo-Christian*…space” (my italics), for example, Poddar overlooks the fact that there is nothing Jewish about the term Judeo-Christian. At its core, for Christians, it signifies the appropriation of the Hebrew Bible into and its supersession by the New Testament. It is, to put it plainly, a colonizing term, and so the relationship of Judeo-Christian anything to a specific, historically situated Jewish identity is not fundamentally different from the relationship between whiteness and BIPOC identities Poddar foregrounds in her piece. She implicitly acknowledges this when she characterizes her presence in the “white nationalist Judeo-Christian space” of the MFA program as that of “a non-Christian, non-passing brown woman.” What matters in that space, in other words, along with the fact that Poddar is a woman and is not white, is that she is not Christian, not that she is not Jewish. > > Indeed, Jews, Jewishness, and antisemitism are almost entirely invisible throughout the essay. Poddar does not, for example, count Jews among those whose oppression intersects with racism. This despite, just to name three examples, the [chants of “Jews will not replace us” at Charlottesville](https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5003402,00.html?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=i-have-been-once-again-thinking-about-antisemitism); the shootings at [the Tree of Life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh%5Fsynagogue%5Fshooting?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=i-have-been-once-again-thinking-about-antisemitism) and [Poway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poway%5Fsynagogue%5Fshooting?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=i-have-been-once-again-thinking-about-antisemitism) synagogues; and how [white supremacists are actively promoting conspiracy theories blaming the COVID-19 pandemic—which, Poddar is careful to note, has disproportionately impacted communities of color—on the Jews](https://chicago.suntimes.com/2020/5/5/21248296/anti-semitism-anti-immigrant-racism-bigotry-pandemic-holocaust-museum-edna-friedberg?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=i-have-been-once-again-thinking-about-antisemitism). > > This near-invisibility is framed by the presence of the white Jewish man Poddar critiques in her introduction. Her critique, of course, is valid. His inability to empathize with the Indian protagonist of her story does bespeak a deeply rooted white privilege. However, because Poddar does not acknowledge the Christian nature of whiteness, the complexity of his, of any white Jew’s relationship to whiteness is left out of her larger analysis. If we take seriously the fact that the (Christian) white supremacist ideology that underpins so much of United States culture very explicitly labels Jews as not white, the double bind in which whiteness catches those Jews whose skin color marks us as white becomes clear. The only way to be white is to assimilate, giving up the specifically Jewish identity the term Judeo-Christian serves to erase. > > Figuring out how to live and, since we are talking about MFA programs, to write within that double bind in an anti-racist way is white Jews’ responsibility, and we need both Jewish and non-Jewish communities of color to hold us accountable for that. Turning a blind eye to this double bind, however, as Poddar does, only serves to perpetuate it further, further enabling the antisemitic hatred in which it is rooted. Figuring out how not to do that is the responsibility of those, like Poddar, who take on the necessary task of undoing what Christian whiteness has wrought. The invisibility of antisemitism in critiques like Poddar's, I would argue, is due in no small measure to the intellectual history David Nirenberg traces in [*Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition*](https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393347913?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=i-have-been-once-again-thinking-about-antisemitism). Going back to the roots of Christianity (and even earlier to the ancient Egyptians!), Nirenberg shows how "Anti-Judaism should not be understood as some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifices of Western thought. It was rather one of the basic tools with which that edifice was constructed." I've just started Nirenberg's book, but the connection he makes between anti-Judaism and antisemitism--in both its most subtle and its most explicitly deadly forms--is chilling, not least because it helps to illustrate just how deeply rooted the blind spot in critiques like Poddar's actually is. ## News & Events **Publications:** - Poem #24 from a sequence called "This Sentence Is A Metaphor for Bridge" appeared recently in [Open: Journal of Arts & Letters](https://ojalart.com/featured-series-works-by-membersof-the-two-year-college-caucus-at-awppoetry-all-forms-styles2yc-member-richard-jeffrey-newmanfrom-tshuvah-repentance-24/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=i-have-been-once-again-thinking-about-antisemitism). - Two poems, "What Will Not Let Itself Be Washed Away" and "Four Variations & A Theme," are up on [Unlikely Stories](https://www.unlikelystories.org/content/what-will-not-let-itself-be-washed-away-and-four-variations-and-a-theme?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=i-have-been-once-again-thinking-about-antisemitism) **Events** - On Monday, November 2, I will be a guest on Vijay R. Nathan's [The Truth to Power Show](https://radiofreebrooklyn.com/show/the-truth-to-power-show/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=i-have-been-once-again-thinking-about-antisemitism). The show is live at 8 AM on [Radio Free Brooklyn](https://radiofreebrooklyn.com/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=i-have-been-once-again-thinking-about-antisemitism). You can listen [here](http://www.radiorethink.com/listen/rfb?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=i-have-been-once-again-thinking-about-antisemitism) or you can check the episode out as a [podcast on iTunes](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-truth-to-power-show/id1331225871?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=i-have-been-once-again-thinking-about-antisemitism) a day or so after it airs. - [Hala Alyan](https://firsttuesdays.net/first-tuesdays-presents-hala-alyan-2?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=i-have-been-once-again-thinking-about-antisemitism) will be the featured reader at [First Tuesdays](https://firsttuesdays.net/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=i-have-been-once-again-thinking-about-antisemitism) next week. If you'd like to attend, [this is the registration link](https://ncc-zoom.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAlcuuprDkjHNG3J95mUyPTfYeoYl-qN2iL?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=i-have-been-once-again-thinking-about-antisemitism)\--you'll get the login link once you've registered--and if you'd like to read during the open mic, [send me an email](mailto:firsttuesdays@icloud.com). I hope this finds you and your loved ones healthy and safe, and that you are all finding ways to get through these difficult times with meaning and good humor. As usual, I'd love to hear what you think. Just respond to this email. Richard