Mick Hume: Homage to Orwell

Hume revisits Orwell's Homage to Catalonia on its 75th anniversary @ Spike.

George Orwell could have been killed twice in the Spanish Civil War. Once when he was shot in the throat by General Franco’s fascist forces; then when he was hunted by official Communist agents who, with the backing of Stalin’s Soviet Union, stabbed the revolution in the back and imprisoned, tortured and killed leading leftists and anarchists who were ostensibly on the same Republican side. Orwell learned the hardest way that the war against fascism in Spain was also a civil war against Stalinism.

Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s famous account of his time in Spain from his arrival in Barcelona on Boxing Day 1936 to his escape in June 1937, has just reached its seventy-fifth anniversary. Like its author, the book almost didn’t make it either. The radical journalist and author’s usual publisher, Victor Gollancz, turned the book down without even seeing the manuscript, insisting that he would not publish anything ‘which could harm the fight against fascism’ by criticising the Communists.

Sarah Nicole Prickett: A Woman Under the Influence

Prickett considers the genius of B.A.D. women  @ The New Inquiry.

There comes a time when the way you are is not just the way you are, but also the way you might die.  There arrives at that time a word for what you said or hoped was indescribable, a diagnosis for your lure. Always there were moods you had that others did not, moods that were your organizing principle. Now they become your undoing. You weren’t wrong to think nobody else was like you. Not many people are. Almost nobody would want to be, and that’s where — in your wilding moments — you were wrong. I was.

The numbers could also be wrong. If not, and if you’re an adult in America, there is a two to five percent chance you have what is now called bipolar affective disorder (and I want B.A.D., an acronym that feels somehow bratty but also courteous, like a warning, to catch on). If you write for a living, multiply that chance by ten. Of course, you (or I) don’t write only for a living, but also to live; you (well, I) believe writing is both a reason to keep doing so and the effect of doing it singularly. Then comes a time when writing is just another symptom.

Records of the human condition are often kept by its least reliable narrators. Consider the case study conducted by the American psychologist Nancy Andreasen and compiled in her 2005 book, The Creating Brain, for which she chose 15 authors from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, class of ’74. As the connections between one’s creativity and one’s psychiatric history, or diagnosis, began to light up, Andreasen’s group grew to 30; so did the control group. Over the next fifteen years of follow-up studies, two of the Iowa writers committed suicide. Nobody in the control group died.

J. Malcolm Garcia: Revolution Downloaded

Garcia travels with the rebels in Syria @ Guernica.

Aleppo: January—February, 2013



Incoming

An explosion. Followed by another
.
Downloading, Nizar says in the dark.

He applies the language of the Internet to the live videogame outside. Incoming fire from the Syrian government he calls downloading. Return fire by the rebels, uploading.

It’s going to shit something, his cousin Radwan says. What do you think, uncle?

He calls me uncle because I am more than thirty years older than him. When we drove into Aleppo five days ago, my shoulders jerked in fright at every burst of gunfire, at every explosion. Now, I’ve stopped reacting unless it stays quiet. Then I feel uneasy.

It sounded close, I say.

Emily Urquhart: The Meaning of White

Urquhart searches for an understanding of her daughter's albinism, inside and outside of science @ The Walrus.

The visitors come from all wards of the hospital. There is an audiologist, a social worker, a lactation consultant, a rotating cast of doctors, and an endless stream of nurses. We have a private room, but our newly formed family of three is rarely alone. This is not unusual in the maternity wing. What is curious, however, are the nurses who visit with no service to offer. They arrive at my side, somewhat apologetically, to catch a glimpse of our newborn daughter. “Some white,” they whistle and coo into her plastic bassinet, using the vernacular emphasis that has become so familiar during my five years in Newfoundland. They say it to me, and they repeat it to one another: “That hair is some white.”

Sadie Jane is born in the usual excruciating manner on Boxing Day 2010. Overdue, she is unwrinkled and chubby, with perfectly formed features and a shock of white hair on her head. Her mouth a tiny O and her arms flailing, she reaches constantly for my arms, my milk, my warmth. Her eyes flutter open occasionally, but mostly they’re shut. In a fleeting moment of wakefulness, the ward pediatrician probes her pupils with a tiny flashlight. Afterwards, she looks past me and my husband, Andrew, past my parents, fixing her gaze on the spruce-clad hills behind the hospital. “You have a very fair, very healthy baby girl,” she says. We never see the doctor again.

Randon Billings Noble: I am a bird when I write

Noble reflects on being a writer in the writing classroom @ The Millions.

Sixty pairs of eyes follow me for four months. Then another 60, for another four. Then — at last — summer, when I am free from those staring eyes, the eyes half closed by sleep, even the eyes that are illuminated with sudden understanding — all those eyes that squint as they fill out student evaluation forms, the empty bubbles steadily becoming the dark cannonballs that determine my fate.

The system by which we are evaluated is Byzantine in its complexity and medieval in its outcome. The teachers in my program have to meet certain thresholds for certain questions, the number varying but always high. If we fail to meet these thresholds we fail to keep our jobs. So for eight months of the year, I have these numbers pressed into my brain like a brand. They steam and smoke and blacken there, waiting for me to make or miss them.

But then one summer I walked out of my last day of class and left almost immediately for a writing residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Shadab Zeest Hashmi: A Cafe Between Pakistan and Afghanistan

Hashmi remembers a place where psychology and geography merged @ 3Quarks Daily.

Torkham, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, felt like an utter release— as if we were random things, a fistful of summer insects set free in space.  This, of course, was before the Soviet war. I was in elementary school.

Dwarfed by the standoffish ice blue mountains on the road to Torkham, we loved the bridge one must drive under twice, once before and once after a loop. Where Peshawar of the ‘70s was a nest of  "jhoola parks" with stone slides, school routine, snack bars, badminton for girls, street cricket for boys, Torkham was a rush of freedom.

Steve Danzinger: Approaching Auschwitz

Danzinger reflects on his place in history @ Open Letters Monthly.

Approaching Auschwitz, the first thing you see is the hot dog stand. It’s a squat, yellowish beige rectangle with brown shingles and black capital letters spelling out ‘Hot Dog’ above one of the service windows, and as you might imagine, its presence somewhat alters the mood.

Which in my case wasn’t entirely a bad thing. Before I made that sound upon seeing it, a sort of half gasp, half disbelieving chuckle, I was sitting on a bus, my breathing shallow with dread, a hand pressed flat over my clenching stomach. I had spent the previous couple of days in Krakow – actually, the months since buying the plane ticket – mentally preparing for what I thought would be the most moving, even epiphanic, event of my life. So, this wasn’t a complete surprise. I had anticipated being overwhelmed with sadness and disgust, and I was. Just not by the Nazis, as I’d presumed, but by a snack bar.