Bernadette Mayer died on 22 November, aged 77. Earlier in the month, New Directions published the career-spanning collection Milkweed Smithereens. In ‘The Joys of Dahlias’, a nonsense taxonomy of sensual feelings inspired by flowers, Mayer writes:
sleep now, smart pants or the midnight dancer
will tutti frutti your fabulous memory
toodle-oo
I don’t know who the midnight dancer is, but if I’m up late, grinding away for some deadline or other, they’re someone I might hallucinate. Listen how lovely Mayer’s invented verbs are: ‘tutti frutti’ could mean to chop up, desiccate and sweeten, like the ice-cream topping, or to reduce your ‘fabulous memory’ into little more than a rolling playback of Little Richard’s rock and roll squeal. (‘A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom’ might be sound poetry produced in the witching hour, the cry of an insomnolent artist under pressure to make a hit.)
I hadn’t been to Printworks, the six thousand-capacity nightclub and events venue in south London, before this month. I doubt I would have been at all if it weren’t facing demolition. I mostly avoid ‘superclubs’, but the knowledge that I soon wouldn’t be able to go, even if I wanted to, made it more appealing. That’s the lure of the temporary.
Last weekend, something snapped. People had waited until after Xi’s coronation at October’s Party Congress. They had witnessed a flirtation with looser restrictions in test cities such as Shijiazhuang, only for lockdown to be enforced again. And they had followed horror stories of the human cost of zero Covid, from the quarantine bus crash that killed 27 to the needless death of a three-year-old boy in Lanzhou whose medical care was delayed by lockdown restrictions. A fire in a locked-down apartment block in Urumqi last Thursday killed ten people. Street protests hit Urumqi on Friday, Shanghai on Saturday and Beijing on Sunday, along with sixteen other cities. The marchers have been carrying blank A4 sheets of paper, which ‘represent everything we want to say but cannot say,’ in the words of one demonstrator.
On 12 November, a man travelled to the UK on a small boat across the Channel. On arrival in England, he was taken to Manston processing centre in Kent. On the night of 18 November, he became unwell and was taken to hospital. He died the following morning. The Home Office said there was ‘no evidence’ that he had died of an infectious disease. A week later, a follow-up PCR test came back positive for diphtheria.
Floodwaters in Rochester, Victoria on 14 October 2022. Photo © James Ross / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock
In the beginning, the rain was welcome. After years of drought and bushfire, the thrumming on the roof brought hope. Our plants resembled parched extras in a desert shoot-out. Rain sounded like the cavalry arriving just in time.
A pine marten in Argyll, Scotland in 2019. Photo © Roy Waller / Alamy
In September a camera trap monitoring hedgehogs in Kingston upon Thames caught an astonishing snap of a pine marten, the most elusive of English mammals. There had been no confirmed sightings in England for a century until July 2015 when a naturalist in Shropshire took a photo. There, gambolling in broad daylight, was an animal from the wishful world of cryptozoology, a fantastic beast, previously no more substantial than a plesiosaur in Loch Ness or a big cat in Surrey.
Along with Roslyn and Howard Zinn, and Carol and Noam Chomsky, Alice and Staughton Lynd belonged to a generation of radical married couples in the United States who took controversial, unpopular public stands – on Civil Rights at home, on Vietnam and subsequent wars abroad – regardless of the consequences, and held fast to lifelong commitments. Staughton died last week, at the age of 92. ‘I lost my opportunity to make a living as a teacher when I tried to go all-out to stop the Vietnam War,’ he said in 2009.