Category: nonfiction

Raised in a Barn: Good House Keeping

personby Madeleine Robins
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The world overtook me this week, but here’s a piece from the past.

When I was a kid and my family lived in New York City but spent weekends and holidays at the Barn, guests were a way of life. At the beginning, that meant that everyone stayed in the old farmhouse across the driveway which had come with the property. It was probably a late-Victorian vintage, but not the charming vintage. More the utilitarian-structure-built-by-people-with-no-taste vintage. Its lack of curb-appeal aside, it was a perfectly serviceable house with heat, water, and electricity. And walls. All of which, in the early days, the Barn lacked. So we, and our guests, would kip in the house, sometimes three or four to a room (kids on camp cots), then rise and go our Barnish way.

The house, as I’ve said, was ugly, but it was not without its interest. In the attic we found all manner of weird, dusty, flyspecked treasures: framed academic certificates awarded to people whose names were rendered in such tortured ornate penmanship as to be unreadable; huge old school maps, one of them so old that it predated the Gadsden Purchase (1854!), unwieldy ugly dressers and chairs. Unlike the Barn, the house was not a refuge for livestock, but there were–or had been at some earlier time–mice, and their nests. Downstairs there were three or four small bedrooms (the one I slept in had cabbage rose wallpaper which I, at five, thought the height of elegance). Below that, the kitchen (with coal burning stove!), living room, and dining room, where my parents’ old paperbacks and furniture went to die. I have a strong, visceral memory of those paperbacks, with their lurid covers (even Mill on the Floss was rendered shocking! by the art and copy) and musty smell. Those books, which had names like Keep the Aspidistra Flying, were yellowed and crumbling and seemed very exotic to me, may account for my early onset book-lust.

Until we got plumbing in the Barn, which involved dowsing and drilling and many exciting things, we carried water across the 200-odd feet from the house to the Barn, where the electric stove and refrigerators were almost the first things to go in. Picture a make-way-for-ducklings line of family members, each with his or her pot or pitcher of water for cooking or washing up. O! Pioneers! And of course, unless you were really committed to roughing it, you retired to the house for the private use of plumbing.

At night, the kids would be tucked into bed in the house; then the parents would retire across the driveway to the Barn for whatever revelry seemed good to them. My brother and I were used to this, but guest-kids often had a problem going to sleep in a strange house in a strange place with strange sounds outside, and would start crying. It fell to me, as the hostess and presiding child, to cross the pitch-dark lawn to the Barn and alert the parents that one of their offspring was freaking out.

The minute the Barn was at all habitable, we shifted our base of operations over there. This left a perfectly serviceable ugly farmhouse, abandoned for daily use. My brother and I used it for hide and seek; we were the only kids I knew who had a whole house to play house in. But as we got older those games palled, and the poor house was left to become colder and more empty, until my father declared it an eyesore. He’d never wanted the farmhouse. So he put an ad in the local Pennysaver: free house for anyone who would move it away. When he got no takers, he sweetened the deal: free house and a quarter acre of land to anyone who would move it away. That got someone’s attention: the house was raised up off its foundations, ready to be rolled away. Except the taker defaulted: he couldn’t afford to move the house. So now we had a house up on jacks, and it stayed there for months. Without foundations, the once sturdy house began to droop toward the middle, at which point, like a car with a sprung frame, it was declared a junker.

What to do with a dead house? In the end, Dad offered it to the local fire department, and they came over and had practice fires: light ‘er up, put ‘er out, light ‘er up, put ‘er out. What was left was ploughed into the foundation, and seeded over; within a remarkably short time there was lawn there, and you’d never have known there had been a house there. Those school certificates and the map without the Gadsden Purchase Dad gave to the local historical society, and then there was no trace of the house at all. It was all a little bit like a structural version of A Star is Born–with the upstart upstaging the old veteran. I still remember the smell of those books, and that cabbage rose wallpaper, though.

In Hopeful Times: Robert Reich on Optimism

personby Deborah J. Ross
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 At the beginning of Trump 1.0, I began a series entitled “In Troubled Times.” With the onset of the war in Ukraine (aka The War of Russian Aggression), I shifted to “In Times of War.” Today, Substackian Robert Reich offers reasons for cautious optimism. Let’s feed that hope!

This is a very brief summary. Click on the link to read the whole thing and to subscribe.

Friends, If you are experiencing rage and despair about what is happening in America and the world right now because of the Trump-Vance-Musk regime, you are hardly alone. A groundswell of opposition is growing — not as loud and boisterous as the resistance to Tump 1.0, but just as, if not more, committed to ending the scourge.
1.Boycotts are taking hold.
2. International resistance is rising.
3. Independent and alternative media are growing.
4. Musk’s popularity is plunging.
5. Musk’s Doge is losing credibility.
6. The federal courts are hitting back.
7. Demonstrations are on the rise.
8. Stock and bond markets are trembling.
9. Trump is overreaching — pretending to be “king” and abandoning Ukraine for Putin.
10. The Trump-Vance-Musk “shock and awe” plan is faltering.

In all these ways and for all of these reasons, the regime’s efforts to overwhelm us are failing.

Make no mistake: Trump, Vance, and Musk continue to be an indiscriminate wrecking ball that has already caused major destruction and will continue to weaken and isolate America. But their takeover has been slowed.

Their plan was based on doing so much, so fast that the rest of us would give in to negativity and despair. They want a dictatorship built on hopelessness and fear.

That may have been the case initially, but we can take courage from the green shoots of rebellion now appearing across America and the world.

As several of you have pointed out, successful resistance movements maintain hope and a positive vision of the future, no matter how dark the present.

Seeing things Jewishly

personby Gillian Polack
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So many strangers are telling me right now that I’m not Australian and that none of my relatives are Australian and… my mind keeps returning to what this means for the Arts in Australia. Certainly it’s much more difficult for anyone Jewish to earn money in the Arts here: there are some places I won’t even fill in the forms until I see that things have changed. I don’t have much physical capacity and when something is obviously a waste of my time, I do something else with that precious time. However… it struck me that I see the world through my upbringing. I talk about books from non-Jewish Australia a great deal, but my own view of the world is shaped by my family and their friends and the stories I was told as a child.

We all see the world from our own eyes. If someone were to ask me how I see the arts in Jewish Australia, I’d only give a partial answer, because there is so much stuff I forget. The first thing I think of, in fact, is what has impacted me and when and why. I thought, this week, then, I’d give you a little list. The list is little but it contains many words, because I annotated it. Welcome to the Arts in Australia seen Jewishly, through my life.

Let me begin with family and friends.

My mother’s family arrived in Australia before World War II or died in that war (save one person, who is not part of today’s story because he was not an artist, musician or writer). Mum’s immediate family was all here by 1918. It was a big family in Europe and is not the smallest family in Australia. Of all my mother’s cousins there are two who were well-known as writers. Very well-known, in fact.

Morris Lurie was Naomi’s brother. Naomi was so much a forever part of my life that even now she’s gone, I still think of one of Australia’s better known writers of plays through the fact that his sister was Naomi. Every time Naomi was in Melbourne, she’d shout “Sonya,” across the street to my mother, because they were very close. Mum hates loud voices and Naomi thought that Mum hating the noise and the laughter was hilarious.

I know about Morrie, and I collected his plays when I was a teenager. One of the lesser known facts of Gillian’s life is that, for twenty years, she collected plays. I still have my collection, but most of it needs a new home. I never met Morrie. He wasn’t much into meeting our side of the family. Even if we had met, I suspect we wouldn’t have had a lot in common. Naomi, on the other hand, was someone I would spend any amount of time with. She was my bridge to the Yiddish-speaking side of the family, and is the main reason why I don’t use that in my fiction: it’s her culture, not mine. My cultural self is from my father’s family. Loving Naomi, though, sent me to understand klezmer and Sholom Aleichem and so much else. I need to re-read Morrie’s plays. Maybe now I’m no longer a teenager I’ll like them more. Maybe not. I’ll see.

Arnold Zable is, as my mother explains, a family connection. His refugee cousin married Mum’s refugee cousin. Arnold is Victoria’s great storyteller. He also wrote an amazing book about the family left behind: Jewels and Ashes.

My father’s side of the family is so very musical. One of my father’s best friends was an extraordinarily well-known performer… but that’s another story. This is one of the days when stories lead to stories and those stories lead to more stories. Between family and friends, I grew up with music the way I grew up with rocks. Science and music and Doctor Who kept our family together for a very long while.

The most famous musician/composer/music critic in the family (she was never just one thing, nor was she a simple person) influenced me a great deal in my youth. Linda was my father’s first cousin, and spent time with me when I was very uncertain of where I fitted and who I was. She accompanied my sister on the piano when that sister was doing more advanced music. She told me some of the stories of her life, but never the really private ones.

Linda was Linda Phillips She described her own music as “light classics.” We played them on the piano at home… but never well. Her music was a lot more than ‘light classics’ as was Linda herself. Her daughter, Bettine, also wore her talents lightly. I knew that she had acted on stage with Barry Humphreys as an undergraduate, but I had no idea that she was a famous radio actor back when radio was the centre of so many people’s entertainment. They were both quiet about their achievements.

Here I need to explain that, not only were they modest and exceptionally fun to be with, but they were nothing close to my age. Linda was my father’s first cousin, to be sure, but she was born in the nineteenth century: she was sixty years older than me. Linda lived until the twenty-first century, and we lost Bettine to COVID. They were part of an enormous change in the Arts in Australia, beginning with Linda’s early career as a pianist over a century ago. I grew up with this, taking it for granted that there was a life in the Arts and a world and so much enjoyment… but seldom enough money to live on.

There is a third family musician, my own first cousin, Jon Snyder. His life is another story. He was in a very popular band (Captain Matchbox) and became a music teacher. His professional life began in the sixties, so the age differences are still there, but not as great. So many of the friends of my schooldays also became musicians, and three of them play in the same band, in Melbourne. That’s another story, however. I am no musician. I had some talent, but words were always more fun and, to be honest, I used to be tone deaf. I love music and the artists who create and perform it, though, because until I left home, it was part of my everyday. In fact, even when I left home, music crept up on me. I kept running into friends of Linda’s. They would send messages to Linda through me. Stories breed stories…

Also, this stopped being a list almost as early as it began being a list. I’ve only talked about a third of the writing side of the family. But this post is long enough. The rest can wait.

PS I have not at all forgotten the questions I promised to answer. There are only two questions, but the answers require a lot of thought. My everyday is a bit over the top at the moment. When things calm down, I will answer those questions. I promise.

Intermission

personby Gillian Polack
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I am barely in the US Monday as I type. By the time this post goes up, it will be your Tuesday. I meant to write something 24 hours ago, but everything became too complicated, and I needed to breathe. I took medicine and I breathed, then I went to sleep.

This morning, my body told me to go back to sleep. It does this from time to time. I’m chronically ill, and there are times when bedrest prevents a whole host of problems. I listened and I slept. Since then, I’ve been catching up with everything and finally, finally in the early evening of my Tuesday and the cusp of Monday and Tuesday in the US, I can write my post. In that intervening time, I have left the questions my readers asked in such a safe place that I can’t find them… and I don’t want to talk about which bits of my body hurt and why, or the fact that this summer is never-ending.

Summer is always never-ending in February in my part of Australia. Then autumn hits with storms and leaves and arbitrary weather and it is as if summer never was. Only some parts of Canberra have the leaves, and there is a moment when pretty colours seem very exotic and Canberrans go driving around admiring these foreign trees and watch them shed their leaves. Last year I took some spectacular photographs from a local park. It’s too early this year for spectacular photographs. We’re still at the period of spectacular fatigue.

That we actively have to look for leaves in certain suburbs is why so many Australians subdue a chuckle when someone from the US talks about Fall. Not only is our autumn at a different time of year, but you need to be in very particular parts of Australia for there to be autumn leaves at all.

This moment of perpetual summer is when school has gone back after the long break, it’s when the heat is more likely to bite, and when university begins. Everything starts up, and so many of us just want to sleep until the more comfortable weather comes. It’s one of those times when all kinds of work deadlines present and many demands are made and those of us who are sensitive to the heat suddenly dream of the northern hemisphere.

Why do I call it an intermission? I’ve been writing about Todorov and that moment he describes as a hesitation, when you don’t know what the world of the novel will bring you. Anything’s possible. There could be horses, or unicorns, or fast cars, or slow bicycles. I often stop at that point in a novel and dream my own story, the plunge in and see where the real story will take me. That’s what life feels like now. As if it could go in a thousand different directions. Only I haven’t stopped to dream my own story (it’s tempting) because it’s too darn hot.

A Reading Practice

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I’ve been working on adding some new practices to my daily schedule. A key thing I added in December – even before the Solstice, much less the official New Year – was to spend about 15 or 20 minutes reading every morning.

The original purpose was to give myself a reason to sit quietly for a few minutes before checking my blood pressure – which I’m keeping a close eye on – but it quickly evolved into something I really wanted to do. And that was probably because of the book I started with: Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time.

I stumbled on that book in a used bookstore in Sebastopol (the one in California, not Crimea) last summer and bought it on impulse. When I started doing the reading back in December, I pulled it out with a couple of other books on much the same impulse, and quickly fell into it.

Rovelli is a physicist, and the book is about the understanding of time by physicists, and yet that doesn’t begin to completely describe it, not to mention that it doesn’t tell anyone what a joy it is to read.

Rovelli is a lyrical writer and a gentle one. He can make statements that might be controversial without issuing a challenge. While I’m reading the English translation of this book (it was translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell), I am quite sure the beautiful and gentle writing is all Rovelli and was there in the Italian original. Rovelli does speak English (and likely several other languages, given the different scientists with whom he has worked), so I imagine he has some idea of what his words should look like when translated.

In doing this reading, I began to keep something of a commonplace book in which I wrote down quotations from the book or, occasionally, my own reaction.

Here are some of quotes that struck me:

Nothing is valid always and everywhere.

[T]he world is nothing but change.

The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.

We are part of a network that goes far beyond the few days of our lives and the few square meters that we tread.

We are more complex than our mental faculties are capable of grasping.

I could go on, but perhaps that is enough to entice others to read this book. Continue reading “A Reading Practice”…

Raised in a Barn: The Tango

personby Madeleine Robins
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As I was making the bed this morning I found myself humming “Tango Jalousie.” It’s a melody* that has been used for ads and other things, and is familiar in that in-the-background-of-western-culture sort of way. But it’s also familiar to me because when I was… 9? My parents decided that my brother and I should learn to tango.

Insert glyph of “huh?” here.

This was in the 60s, mind, when the Bossa Nova was in. The Twist. The Frug. The Mashed Potato. Not the tango. But my father liked to tango, and felt that somehow this would be a civilizing influence on his hell-spawn young.

The tango was initially considered a scandalous dance, one which dismayed the proper citizens of Buenos Aires (where it first emerged) in the 1880s.  The partners stand so close together! (Bear in mind that seventy years the tango emerged, the waltz was considered vulgar and outré for the same reason.) The tango’s origins were a mix of African and European influences, and it was a dance of the poor people. Like jazz, the tango came from the margins and–like jazz–it took over. By the early 1900s the tango had become a European dance craze. It had its rises and falls, and by the time I learned it it was…quaint. Where some of my classmates might have been forced into dance classes where they learned the two-step or foxtrot, no one I knew was tangoing. Except me and my brother.

It’s not a difficult dance; the pattern is simple: 1-2   1-2-3. The steps can be taken in a straight line (a la Gomez and Morticia Addams) or, as we did, in a box. Step forward on my left, then right; step back on my left, step a little further out on the right, then bring the left in to join the right. The second three steps are a little faster than the first two. Once I could do that without falling over, Dad introduced other steps (my favorite was a sort of zig-zagging step where he held on to my elbows and turned me right and left, back and forth, for a count of five to the tempo of the music). And there were dips–Dad did not drop me backward as in the illustration here. Mine was just a slight bending backward, supported by his hand (nor did I wrap my leg around him. We didn’t have that kind of relationship). I assume my mother was teaching my brother roughly the same things: I wasn’t watching him, I was watching my feet.

Years later, when I was a theatre major in college, my ability to tango reliably (and to follow–or occasionally lead a dance partner who didn’t know how to lead) won me a certain amount of performance cred. “How did you learn that?” a director asked me. “My father taught me.” Silly me, I thought everyone learned the tango at home.

________
*familiar enough that Mad Magazine set lyrics to it, which I recall as “Jealousy, how could you do this to me? Because my eyeball just fell into your highball…” Which is hilarious if you’re eight years old… or my mother.

 

Summer and Eggs

personby Gillian Polack
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My little bit of Australia has a heat wave. This is not unexpected, given it’s summer. It does, however, mean my brain is fried. It didn’t reach 100 degrees (using US temperatures) today, so, in the measurements of my childhood, it was hot enough to fry an egg on a car bonnet, but not hot enough for the pavement to melt. In my childhood, I would have said that this is a day when I can’t go running, but I can still play and read. Alas, I am no longer a child. Also, alas, this week is full of work that has unchangeable deadlines. If I had the energy, I would sing you (badly), “Too darn hot.” I do not. Also I have 3,000 words of deathless academic prose to write before I can sleep tonight.

I had better start writing.

Maybe next week will be cooler. Maybe the week after. We’re in our last month of summer. Schools have gone back, and universities will begin again soon and life will pick up pace. Maybe then I’ll have the inner-oomph to write those answers to the serious and interesting questions my readers sent me. I hope so. Then I can complain about storms and blowsy autumn leaves. I’ll have more energy for complaint and far less interest in dreaming of frying eggs on car bonnets.

One last note to leave you with: if it were ten degrees hotter, then I could fry an egg on the pavement. I tested this when I was a child. My parents did not let me eat the egg, alas, which is why the car bonnet is now my theoretical place of choice. It’s still only theoretical because none of my friends are willing to let me destroy their car enamel. Which is just as well, because my US friends have egg problems and if I had wasted eggs in testing the heat outdoors it would be rather rude.

Elements, Man

personby Madeleine Robins
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Last week my husband and I drove from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Excitingly, when we were not quite half way there several friends who knew that we were driving down pinged us to let us know that a new wildfire had broken out near I-5 on our route. During the minutes when Danny and I were discussing whether this would impact our drive the fire grew so fast that we decided to head west at Paso Robles and take the coastal route the rest of the way. Thus our tidy six hour drive became a squalid 9 hour drive. But we got there and I moved in to the apartment upstairs where I stay when I visit, while Danny continued onward to Anaheim and the trade show he was going to.

By 11pm I was in my jammies and on the edge of sleep when Danny called. I thought this was just a “g’night, I love you” sort of call. Instead he said “you know about the fire, right?”

Um. Did he mean the Hughes fire which had caused our detour through Paso Robles and San Luis Obispo etc.? Or the Palisades fire which was (at that point) still not entirely under control. As it turns out, he meant neither. A brush fire had broken out a couple of miles north of my aunt’s house. Um.

I got hold of my daughter (in another apartment in the building) and my aunt’s caregiver’s daughter (a PhD candidate who also lives in the building) and we were discussing what, if anything, to do, when an alert siren went off on our phones: the area we were in (Bel Air, right next to the San Diego Freeway) was now on Level 2 alert, meaning “get ready to get the hell out.” 

I was, by now, fully dressed. I threw the things I’d taken out of my bag back in, and my daughter and I packed her car with various stuff. Then we went to my aunt’s house. There, things were in motion to move my aunt to her caregiver’s house in Central LA. Since other than standing around making un-useful suggestions (my aunt’s caregivers raise Awesome to a new dimension, and have their act down) and entertaining my aunt (who has lived in this neighborhood for over 50 years and, even with dementia, has a sense of humor about all this shit) there wasn’t much we could do to help, we took off to the valley and my daughter’s beau’s family house, where we spent the night. This meant actually driving past the fire that had rousted us out of our beds. It was, as these things go, small–I don’t think it got bigger than 45 acres (the Palisades fire, in contrast reached 23,448 acres; while it’s still active, it’s 94% contained, thank God). But driving past it, seeing the tongues of flame going from one dark patch to another, and seeing the firetrucks and a helicopter (I think it was a helicopter) dropping water on the area, was terrifying and impressive.

Years ago I was in London, walking up Baker Street toward Marylebone Street, and realized that there was a serious fire two blocks ahead of me on. I stood and watched, riveted, as the London firefighters took after this elemental force, fighting it with water and foam and all the tools they had. Gradually the tide turned; they kept the fire limited to the one six-story building it had started in, then began to quell it, one section of the building at a time. I was left kind of breathless: there are people who go out and face down this force with nothing more than water and the tools that science and experience has given them.

As I’ve said before: fire doesn’t care. Neither does water (if you have ever been caught in an undertow, you know this). Based on my experience with fire and water, I’d go so far as to guess that earth–in the form of earthquakes and mudslides– and air don’t care either. And yes, I realize that calling water, fire, earth and air “elements” harks back to ancient times and isn’t scientific. But these forces are powerful, and they do not yield to persuasion. Given my choice of facing down a guy with a gun or a wall of fire, I’d go for the guy with a gun. Who knows? I might be able to figure a way out, or talk the guy down or something. But Fire Doesn’t Care. Period.

In the end the fire fighters got the Sepulveda fire sufficiently contained that the “get set to go” alert was cancelled, and my aunt got to stay in her own bed. The next morning my daughter and I returned from Tarzana (a 20 minute drive that took almost two hours; thank you, LA traffic) and the rest of the visit went on as planned.

On Sunday Danny and I drove back to San Francisco. We’d had some rain on Saturday evening, and the rain on I-5 turned to snow on the grapevine (a twisty high-elevation bit of the highway above Santa Clarita), and then alternated with torrents and blue skies most of the way north. So we got more of the elements, which was occasionally exciting in the pejorative sense. We Modern Folk tend to discount the elements–it’s only rain. Or snow. It’s only fire. Or an earthquake. Or Santa Ana winds that draw every last iota of moisture out of the air so that a Los Angeles hillside is an easy target for a spark–any spark. 

All I’m saying is that the forces of nature don’t care, so we have to.

Shakespeare had a thing or two to say about tyrants

personby Deborah J. Ross
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What Shakespeare revealed about the chaotic reign of Richard III – and why the play still resonates in the age of Donald Trump

In this circa 1754 illustration, two women scold Richard III in Shakespeare’s play.
Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

by David Sterling Brown, Trinity College

Written around 1592, William Shakespeare’s play “Richard III” follows the reign of England’s infamous monarch and charts the path of a charismatic, cunning figure.

As Shakespeare depicts the king’s reign from June 1483 to August 1485, Richard III’s kingdom was wrought with chaos, confusion and corruption that fueled civil conflict in England.

As a scholar of Shakespeare, I first thought about Richard III and his similarities with Donald Trump after the latter’s debate with President Joe Biden in June 2024. Those similarities – and Shakespeare’s depictions – became even clearer after Trump’s election in November 2024.

Shakespeare’s play highlights the flawed character of a man who wanted to be, in modern terms, a dictator, someone who could do whatever he pleased without any consequences.

In his 1964 essay, “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare,” writer James Baldwin concluded that Shakespeare found poetry “in the lives of people” by knowing “that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.”

“It is said that Shakespeare’s time was easier than ours, but I doubt it,” Baldwin wrote. “No time can be easy if one is living through it.”

A black and white drawing of Richard III.
An undated portrait of Richard III.
Universal History Archive/Getty Images

A villain?

In Act 2, Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s play, a common citizen says Richard is “full of danger.”

“Woe to the land that’s govern’d by a child,” the citizen further warned.

Beyond hiring murderers to kill his own brother, Shakespeare’s Richard was keen on belittling and distancing himself from people whom he viewed as being not loyal or being in his way – including his wife, Anne.

To clear the way for him to marry his brother’s daughter – his niece Elizabeth – Richard spread what now would be called fake news. In the play, he tells his loyalists “to rumor it abroad that Anne, my wife, is very grievously sick” and “likely to die.”

Richard then poetically reveals her death: “Anne my wife hath bid this world goodnight.”

Yet, before her death, Anne has a sad realization: “Never yet one hour in Richard’s bed / Did I enjoy the golden dew of sleep.”

That sentiment is echoed by Richard’s mother, the Duchess of York, who regrets not strangling “damned” Richard while he was in her “accursed womb.”

As Shakespeare depicts him, Richard III was a self-centered political figure who first appears alone on stage, determined to prove himself a villain.

In Richard’s opening speech, he even says that in order to become king, he will manipulate his own brothers George, the Duke of Clarence, and King Edward IV, “in deadly hate, the one against the other.”

But as his villainous crimes mount up, Richard shares a rare moment of self-awareness: “But I am in / So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.”

Shakespeare’s Richard III and Trump

While the details of Trump’s and Richard’s lives differ in many ways, there are some similarities.

Much like Trump during his first term, Shakespeare’s Richard did not lead with morals, ethics or integrity.

Richard lied compulsively to everyone, as his soliloquys that contain his innermost thoughts make clear.

A black and white illustration of William Shakespeare.
An illustration of English writer William Shakespeare (circa 1600).
Rischgitz/Getty Images

Like Trump, Richard used empty rhetoric to persuade people with “sugared words” – he was not interested in speaking or promoting truth.

Moreover, Shakespeare’s Richard was a sexist and misogynist who verbally and physically disrespected women, including his wife and mother.

In the play, for example, Richard calls Queen Margaret, widow of King Henry VI, a “foul wrinkled witch” and a “hateful withered hag,” thus disparaging her older age.

He refers to Queen Elizabeth, wife of Edward IV, as a “damned strumpet” or prostitute, which she wasn’t.

Additionally, in order to cast doubts on his nephews’ legitimate claims to the throne, Richard spread false rumors about his mother, claiming that she was unfaithful.

A white man and a Black woman shake hands.
Kamala Harris shakes hands with Donald Trump before their debate.
AP Photo/Alex Brandon

For his part, Trump has no shortage of disparaging remarks about women. He once called his Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton “the devil” and characterized former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “crazy.”

Trump repeatedly peppered Vice President Kamala Harris during the presidential campaign with sexist and racists attacks.

He initially refused to pronounce her name correctly and openly mocked her racial identity as a Black woman, even questioning her “Blackness.”

A new day?

Like Trump, Richard III used religion to manipulate and confuse public perception of his amoral image.

In the play, Richard stages the equivalent of a modern-day photo op, standing between two “churchmen” with a “prayer-book” in his hands.

Much like Richard, Trump has courted evangelicals and used organized religion to his political advantage, most publicly by selling a “God Bless the USA Bible.”

Trump’s 2020 photo op in front of St. John’s Church in Washington is another example. It occurred during protests over the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man killed by a white police officer. Police in riot gear used tear gas to force protesters away from the White House; then Trump was escorted to the nearby church along with several administration officials.

As a political leader, Richard III left a legacy in English history as one of England’s worst monarchs.

That legacy includes his decisive defeat in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 that led to his death and to a new era for England under King Henry VII.

After winning the throne, the new king offered a message of hope that suggested England would one day emerge from its time of civil discord:

Let them not live to taste this land’s increase
That would with treason wound this fair land’s peace!
Now civil wounds are stopped, peace lives again.
That she may long live here, God say amen.The Conversation

David Sterling Brown, Associate Professor of English, Trinity College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The Pretty Past

personby Madeleine Robins
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I am working on spiffing up and making small revisions to my first three Sarah Tolerance mysteries, preparatory to reissuing them before I bring out #4 (title still in discussion watch the skies, etc.) One of the things I want to do is add a brief essay to each book about some aspect of the setting (and how, since these are books set in an alternate version of the English Regency, I might have changed it). This had led me to a whole lot of distracting but fun rumination, as well as an examination of why I wanted to write these books in the first place.

One of my favorite bits in the 1995 film of Sense and Sensibility is a throwaway line: as the Misses Dashwood and their hostess, Mrs. Jenkins, leave a carriage to attend an evening party in London, Mrs. Jenkins says “Mind your slippers, ladies! The horses have been here.”

Why do I love this? The line doesn’t appear in Austen; it’s there to remind the modern audience that this is a different world. It’s not just that social mores have changed. The day-to-day process of life has changed. We don’t get around using horses and carriages, so you don’t have to worry about horseshit soiling your nice dancing slippers. I love it because it’s a very mild antidote to the sorts of romances I grew up reading, which zipped right over the physical difficulties of life in the Olden Days. When I was writing Regency romances I would occasionally be asked (breathlessly) “don’t you wish you lived then?” To which my answer was always “Hell, no.” No painless dentistry, no antibiotics, no central heating, no reliable refrigeration, heating with wood or coal fire… Add to that my certainty that I would not have been the daughter of a wealthy peer, but more likely a maid or factory girl, dying early from a disfiguring disease (although in fact, dying early, particularly in childbirth, could happen to any woman up or down the social scale). The sanitized past of the Regency romances I gobbled by the ton began to annoy me.

One thing I knew when I started writing Point of Honour, the first of the Sarah Tolerance books, was that I wanted it to be largely set in London, and I wanted to at least nod to the physical rigors of life in the Olden Days. T0 the smells, particularly of the Thames, which was breathtakingly polluted, and particularly in the summer had a stench that penetrated to the city, even in the nice neighborhoods. To the waste and the necessity for crossing sweeps (hordes of little boys who haunted street corners and would swee the mud, dust, fecal matter and urine out of the path of a pedestrian willing to pay). To the darkness: gas lamps were installed in Pall Mall in 1807, and there was an ordinance that every house must have a lamp or torch outside the front door, to dispel a little of the darkness. In poorer neighborhoods this law was largely ignored, and the streets could be pitch dark.

Regency romances don’t mention the outhouses, but I wanted to. I wanted to get dentistry (and its lack) and medicine (and its well intentioned and often wrong-headed notions) and to at least reflect the difficulty of daily life for the people who are not in the top tier of society. See, I knew, given the premise of the book, that I would be playing with the social conventions of Regency London. If I–or my Fallen Woman protagonist–was going to spit in the eye of social norms, the least I could do was give her a milieu that was equally brave. And un-sanitized.

And I admit that I have a small frisson of delight in detailing the dental shortcomings and smallpox scars of my characters, and in writing a scene where a “gold finder” (a slang term for the guy who cleaned out your privy when such was needful) disrupts the orderly working of a household. It’s not that the past wasn’t pretty: it’s just that that’s not all it was.