Anahid Nersessian’s books include Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse and The Calamity Form. How to Have Sex in a Poem is due next February.
In the final minutes of Catherine Breillat’s film Fat Girl (2001), a man breaks the windshield of a car with an axe. Inside are a woman and her two young daughters, Elena and Anaïs; they have pulled over to sleep. Elena is killed by a single blow to the head and her mother is strangled. Anaïs, who watches the murders with unsettling detachment, her fear betrayed only by the...
The protests that broke out last weekend in Los Angeles are at once an autonomous phenomenon and a continuation of the George Floyd rebellion of 2020 and the student-led campaign against the war on Gaza. They have been met with no longer shocking displays of state violence, including the arrival of the National Guard and seven hundred marines. Protesters have been gassed, shot in the head with ‘less lethal’ munitions, beaten, trampled with horses, hit by cars and taken into custody.
In last November’s election, a majority of California voters declined to outlaw forced labour among incarcerated people, who make up around 30 per cent of California’s firefighters and are paid between $5.80 and $10.24 per day. At least eight hundred of them are now up against LA’s infernos. What the state will not pay to provide it will extract through coercion.
On 25 April, a large group of students at the University of California, Los Angeles, set up an encampment on the main quadrangle of their campus. Flanked on all sides by plywood barricades, the Palestine Solidarity Encampment included smaller tents for sleeping as well as larger enclosures for food, first aid, electronics (phone chargers, batteries), musical instruments and art supplies....
On 25 April, a large group of students at the University of California, Los Angeles, set up an encampment on the main quadrangle of their campus. Flanked on all sides by plywood barricades, the Palestine Solidarity Encampment included smaller tents for sleeping as well as larger enclosures for food, first aid, electronics (phone chargers, batteries), musical instruments and art supplies. There was also a library, which a paper sign taped to a tree designated the Refaat Alareer Memorial Library, in honour of the Palestinian writer and teacher who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023.
Keats was deeply interested in suffering. He came by it naturally and also medically; sometimes it appeared as an impulse towards poetic tragedy. He wants what he has always wanted, to soothe pain. If...
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