The Mykhailo Boychuk Kyiv State Academy of Decorative and Applied Arts and Design was bombed in a Russian attack on 25 March. When I visited not long afterwards, a group of students were sitting on a grass verge, sketching what remained of their art school. ‘They’re destroying us, but we’re still drawing nevertheless,’ one of the teachers, Volodymyr Pryadka, said with a laugh.
‘Why are you crying, habibi?’ Mansoor Adayfi asked the elephant. He had got into the habit of talking to animals at Guantánamo Bay. Held in solitary confinement for years, he talked to the feral cats who prowled around his cage.
‘It is Vendler’s supreme critical virtue,’ Tom Paulin wrote in the LRB in 1998, reviewing Helen Vendler’s book The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ‘that she can write from inside a poem, as if she is in the workshop witnessing its making.’ A professor of English at Harvard for several decades, Vendler, who died yesterday at the age of ninety, also wrote books on Herbert, Keats, Dickinson, Yeats, Stevens and Heaney, among other poets, as well as editing several critical editions and anthologies. James Wood called her ‘the most powerful poetry critic in America since Randall Jarrell’. She wrote a dozen pieces for the LRB. The first, in 1993, was on Elizabeth Bishop:
‘The Rwanda bill is a legal fiction that makes the law look like an ass,’ Lord Anderson KC said in the final debate on the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill in the House of Lords on Monday, ‘and those who make it, asses.’ Shortly afterwards, the Lords, which had sent amendments back to the Commons again and again and seen them rebuffed each time, passed the bill. The Commons won the game of parliamentary ping-pong, and Rwanda became a ‘safe country’ in the eyes of British law.
Photo © Nancy Kricorian
It’s the first time the police have been invited onto Columbia’s campus since 1968. Like 1968, 2024 may go down as an inauspicious year for university administrations trying to defend the indefensible.
In Merchant Ivory’s 1981 adaptation of Jean Rhys’s first novel, Quartet (1928), Alan Bates and Maggie Smith play a predatory expatriate couple, H.J. and Lois Heidler. Their vulnerable and volatile young victim, Marya Zelli – Isabelle Adjani won an award at Cannes for her performance – is forced to take refuge with the couple after her husband is arrested and sent to prison.
There is always a tension between a union’s bread-and-butter role to protect its members’ jobs and the wider role that some unions, at some times, have used to improve the world their workers live in. The emphasis on ‘interests at work’ is a rebuke to that wider social role, but it seems increasingly obsolete in the face of the existential threats of nuclear war and ecological breakdown. What about workers’ interests in breathing clean air? Or in affordable rents? Or in protection from floods, droughts and social breakdown? Or in the peace of mind that comes from knowing that the products of their labour have not been used in genocide?