Nonfiction Views: Books on Jan. 6th, plus the week's notable new nonfiction

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday January 06, 2026 · 6:00 PM PST

2026/01/06 · 18:00

It’s January 6th, fifth anniversary of Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow our democracy by instigating his violent followers to lay siege to the Capitol and threaten death to Vice President Pence and many members of Congress. It has always been clear, and Jack Smith’s testimony before Congress a couple weeks ago made it even clearer, that Trump should have been tried for this crime and banned from ever holding office again.

But here we are, five years later. Trump is back in power, leading an orgy of criminal behavior, grift, self-serving acts, and dismantling the pillars of our democracy, our Constitution, our economy, our civic pact, our history, our educational system, our healthcare system, our scientific research, the international diplomatic order, and the very future of the planet itself. One of his first acts was to pardon his traitorous followers who had been convicted for their actions on that day. In less than a year, at least 33 of them have committed new crimes.

All because the Republicans protected him from the consequences of his criminal acts.

Leading off our roundup of this week’s notable new nonfiction is a book that came out on today: Storm at the Capitol: An Oral History of January 6^th, by Mary Clare Jalonick. You’ll find the full description below with the rest of the week’s new releases, but I thought I would first offer some of the other books that have been published.

Just a week ago was 24 Hours at the Capitol: An Oral History of the January 6th Insurrection, by Nora Neus, published by Beacon Press. While there is much overlap between Neus’ book and that of Jalonick, 24 Hours at the Capitol takes a much more scathing view, rooting the insurrection squarely in white nationalism.

January 6 was largely planned right out in the open, but lawmakers and government officials underestimated the threat in part because it was coming from white people. Neus examines the underlying racial implications of not only the attack itself, but also in the planning and coordination of the response.

Nora Neus also wrote 24 Hours in Charlottesville: An Oral History of the Stand Against White Supremacy.

Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn, who was in the thick of the battle with the seditionist mob at the Capitol that day, wrote a memoir, now available in paperback: Standing My Ground: A Capitol Police Officer's Fight for Accountability and Good Trouble After January 6th.

Standing My Ground is “a powerful, patriotic tale – told with striking moral clarity” (Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi) that provides a crucial, definitive firsthand account of what happened on that day our country was shocked to its core. But it will also share the story of a man who refused to stay quiet when he learned that some of the men and women he had risked his life protecting, who knew him by name, would deny the horrors they faced. That’s when he chose to speak up and to seek out what his hero John Lewis once termed “good trouble.” Dunn’s ongoing story as a witness willing to meaningfully engage with the media, lawmakers, and the public provides a backdrop for examining the political and racial divide in this country—one that we must overcome in order to demand accountability and preserve our precious democracy.

After the attack on the Capitol and the assualt on dozens of law enforcement officers, online sleuths began poring over the photographs and videos of that day to help identify the participants for investigators. The came to be known s the ‘Sedition Hunters,’ and journalist Ryan J. Reilly recounted their efforts in Sedition Hunters: How January 6th Broke the Justice System.

The attack on the Capitol building following the 2020 election was an extraordinarily large and brazen crime. Conspiracies were formed on social media in full public view, the law-breakers paraded on national television with undisguised faces, and with outgoing President Donald Trump openly cheering them on. The basic concept of law enforcement--investigators find criminals and serve justice--quickly breaks down in the face of such an event. The system has been strained by the sheer volume of criminals and the widespread perception that what they did wasn't wrong.

A mass of online tipsters--"sedition hunters"--have mobilized, simultaneously providing the FBI with valuable intelligence and creating an ethical dilemma. Who gets to serve justice? How can law enforcement still function as a pillar of civil society?

In this work of extraordinary reportage, Ryan Reilly gets to know would-be revolutionaries, obsessive online sleuths, and FBI agents, and shines a light on a justice system that's straining to maintain order in our polarized country.

And of course, there is always The January 6 Report itself, the official report and findings of the bipartisan Congressional investigation into the January 6 attack. 750 pages of their findings and evidence, accompanied by commentary from Ari Melber.

THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION

Storm at the Capitol: An Oral History of January 6^th, by Mary Clare Jalonick. The January 6th insurrection was a stunning and unprecedented attack on the center of American government. Unlike previous national traumas that united the country in the face of turmoil, the siege has only further divided Americans, as many continue to dispute the facts and downplay its significance.
In Storm at the Capitol, Mary Clare Jalonick delivers a deeply reported and definitive account of the violence at the Capitol told through firsthand narratives—from the rioters themselves and the police who fought them, to the lawmakers who fled the violence, and the staff, workers, and reporters who were there that day, including Jalonick herself. Her retelling begins in the predawn hours of January 6th, as Trump’s supporters travel to Washington, some with plans for violence, and ends in the early morning hours of January 7th, after Vice President Mike Pence slams his gavel on the House rostrum and declares Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election. “Storm at the Capitol is a gripping account of the events of January 6th. At a time when too many Americans are trying to erase that day from memory, Jalonick guarantees that it will not be forgotten. This is an important contribution not just for explaining our past but saving our democracy.” —Brendan Ballou, former January 6th prosecutor

Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster, by Jacob Soboroff. On the morning of January 7, 2025, a message pinged the phone of Jacob Soboroff, a national reporter for MS NOW. “Big Palisades fire. We are evacuating,” his brother texted within minutes of the blaze engulfing the hillside behind the home where he and his pregnant wife were living. “Really bad.” An attached photo showed a huge black plume rising from behind the house, an umbrella of smoke towering over everything they owned. Jacob rushed to the office of the bureau chief.
“I should go. I grew up in the Palisades.”
Soon he was on the front line of the blaze—his first live report of what would turn out to be weeks covering unimaginable destruction, from both the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire, in Altadena. In the days to come, Soboroff appeared across the networks of NBC News as Los Angeles was ablaze, and met with displaced residents and workers., and pressed Governor Gavin Newsom in an interview on Meet the Press. But no story Soboroff has covered at home or abroad could have prepared him for reporting live as the hallmarks of his childhood were engulfed in flames around him while his hometown burned to the ground. “A riveting recollection of one of the worst fires in American history. Almost as hard to digest as the extreme loss of life and environmental devastation is Soboroff’s reporting on how some of our most prominent public figures responded to the disaster. . . . It’s hard to find a sense of hope in this reportage, but Soboroff finds it, beautifully, in the small moments." - BookPage "An emotional and intrepid account of the Los Angeles wildfires. . . . A cathartically heartbreaking account of the unique horror of watching one’s community reduced to ash." - Publishers Weekly

American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate, by Eric Lichtblau. One night in early 2018, while he was home from college, an Ivy League student named Blaze Bernstein snuck out of his parents’ house in Orange County. Waiting for him in a car outside was an old high-school classmate: Sam Woodward, someone who Blaze mostly remembered as a brooding, bigoted loner. But that night, after months of flirtatious messaging, Sam had succeeded in coaxing Blaze—a gay, Jewish sophomore at UPenn—out for a rendezvous. No one would ever see him alive again.
In American Reich, veteran investigative journalist Eric Lichtblau uses the story of Blaze’s life and death to shine a light on the epidemic of hate in Southern California and, increasingly, the nation as a whole. Orange County has long been a bastion of the ultra-right: carved out of farmland as a haven for wealthy whites fleeing the diversifying metropolis to the north, it was the birthplace of the far-right John Birch Society, a hub for neo-Nazi recruitment, and a powerful springboard for race-baiting Republican politicians including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
Revealing how Orange County has exported racial hatred to the rest of the country and the world, American Reich weaves this tragic tale together with stories from across the nation, showing what this haunted place and the colliding paths of two of its residents reveal about America's fractured soul and our hope for healing. “With the resurgence of Neo-Nazism in the current political climate, this book is both timely and indispensable. To understand the history of white supremacy is to understand a crucial element of American history itself – and that recognition is essential if we are to continue striving to make ours a more perfect union.”—Anthony D. Romero, American Civil Liberties Union executive director

Tom Paine's War: The Words That Rallied a Nation and the Founder for Our Time, by Jack Kelly. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the Declaration of Independence marked the birth of the United States. But two essays of that era appealed even more directly to Americans’ feelings. In January 1776, Thomas Paine—a recent immigrant to America —published Common Sense. His straightforward argument upended the fraud of monarchy and dismantled the idea of aristocratic privilege that had dominated the world for centuries. His words convinced Americans that the king had no divine right to rule them—they could rule themselves. He turned a rebellion over taxes and representation into a true Revolution.

Having inspired patriots to declare their independence, Paine enlisted as a militia private. There, he wrote The American Crisis, the most stirring rallying cry in our history. It began: “These are the times that try men’s souls . . .” With Paine’s words ringing in their ears, Washington and his men crossed the Delaware River and defeated the enemy at Trenton. The battle reversed the fortunes of the campaign and of the Revolution itself. A tribute to the Revolution’s 250th anniversary, Tom Paine’s War is a riveting exploration of our nation’s birth. This is a story of the power of words—and the power of belief—and how both speak as well to America’s current crisis. "Kelly’s book focused on Thomas Paine is a timely reminder of the principles of human equality, justice, and reason that undergird the creation of our democratic republic. Accessible and entertaining – and a stern rebuke to contemporary political actors who have betrayed the American cause."—Katherine Stewart, author of Money, Lies, and God and The Power Worshippers

Polar War: Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic, by Kenneth R. Rosen. A gripping blend of travelogue and frontline reporting that reveals how climate change, military ambition, and economic opportunity are transforming the Arctic into the epicenter of a new cold war, where a struggle for dominance between the planet’s great powers heralds the next global conflict.
Russian spies. Nuclear submarines. Sabotaged pipelines. Undersea communications severed in the dark of night. The fastest-warming place on earth—where apartment buildings, hospitals, and homes crumble daily as permafrost melts and villages get washed away by rising seas—the Arctic stands at the crossroads of geopolitical ambition and environmental catastrophe. As climate change opens once ice-bound shipping lanes, the world’s military powers are rushing to stake their claims.

In Polar War, Kenneth R. Rosen takes readers on an extraordinary journey across the changing face of the far north. Through intimate portraits of scientists, soldiers, and Indigenous community leaders representing the interests of twenty-one countries across four continents, he witnesses firsthand how rising temperatures and growing tensions are reshaping life above and below the Arctic Circle. "Lyrical and deeply reported...Two years of travel to the Arctic regions and hundreds of interviews bolster Rosen’s hypnotic descriptions of the frigid crossroads where nations vie for domination and control."—Publisher's Weekly

Doctors' Riot of 1788: Body Snatching, Bloodletting, and Anatomy in America, by Andy McPhee. Throughout the seventeenth century, medical lecturers demonstrated human anatomy by dissecting a cadaver while surrounded by students. After the Revolutionary War, though, instructors realized that they needed many more cadavers to serve a growing number of medical students. Enter the “resurrectionists” – body snatchers. Resurrectionists were a cruel lot; men (almost always men and often medical students themselves) who would sneak into a cemetery under the cover of darkness, remove a body, and then sell it to a physician or anatomist – usually for around $100.
In April 1788, word of one particular body snatching quickly spread, and over the course of days, thousands of New Yorkers descended upon a New York City anatomy lab in a growing and dangerous riot. This book reveals the forgotten history of the so-called Doctors' Riot of 1788, along the way explaining the history of body snatching in the United States and England and exploring the moral questions behind an existential medical crisis: Does the need for medical students to learn anatomy on cadavers override society’s demand for maintaining the dignity of its dead?
As the Doctors' Riot boiled over, Founding Fathers Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and Revolutionary War hero Baron von Steuben were called in to quell the rioters, to no avail. Eventually, the state militia was ordered to fire into the crowd, killing several and injuring far more. “McPhee tells the story of New York in its colonial days, when familiar institutions were then new and the people whom city streets and landmarks are named for were still walking the earth. The author places his account in the medical, cultural, and racial context of the time . . . A brief, fast-paced history, loaded with surprising detail." — Kirkus Reviews

The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB, by Gordon Corera. The Spy in the Archive tells the remarkable story of how Vasili Mitrokhin—an introverted archivist who loved nothing more than dusty archives—ended up changing the world. As the in-house archivist for the KGB, the secrets he was exposed to inside its walls turned him first into a dissident and then a spy; a traitor to his country but a man determined to expose the truth about the dark forces that had subverted Russia, forces still at work in the country today.
Historian and journalist Gordon Corera tells of the operation to extract this prized asset from Russia for the first time. It is an edge-of-the-seat thriller, with vivid flashbacks to Mitrokhin’s earlier time as a KGB idealist prepared to do what it took to serve the Soviet Union and his growing realisation that the communist state was imprisoning its own people. It is the story of what it was like to live in the Soviet Union, to raise a family there, and then of one man’s journey from the heart of the Soviet state to disillusion, betrayal, and defection. “Corera conveys the dedication and uncertainty Mitrokhin faced and the discipline to carry on when hopes of publishing his horrific findings were extremely low. He deftly tells Mitrokhin’s life story and illuminates the valuable intelligence he brought to the West in a compelling narrative about standing up for justice and against tyranny.” — Booklist, starred review

Battle of the Arctic: The Maritime Epic of World War II, by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore. It is 1941 and Russia has been invaded. The terms of the new alliance were that Western nations would ship urgently needed war materials to Russia via the shortest but most dangerous route: sailing north of the Arctic Circle while being hunted by U-boats, the Luftwaffe, and a surface fleet spearheaded by Tirpitz and Scharnhorst. This endeavor was called the Arctic convoys.
Battle of the Arctic is about the conflict and naval battles that unfolded while Allied naval and merchant seamen, airmen, submariners, soldiers and intelligence officers delivered on this wartime commitment to Russia from 1941-45, passing through terrific storms, snow, ice and Arctic mirages.
In Battle of the Arctic, Sebag-Montefiore has used a remarkable collection of vivid witness accounts brought together at the passing of the last survivors and has been produced with the benefit of research in Russian, German, British and American archives. “Sebag-Montefiore takes a distinct approach by emphasizing the stories of survivors of sinkings on both sides. Granular details of personal experiences within a strategic context distinguish this naval history. — Booklist

Blood and Treasure: The Economics of Conflict from the Vikings to the Modern Era, by Duncan Weldon. Wars are expensive, both in human terms and monetary ones. But while warfare might be costly it has also, at times, been an important driver of economic change and progress. Over the long span of history nothing has shaped human institutions—and thus the process of economic development—as much as war and violence. Wars made states and states made wars. As the costs of warfighting grew so did state structures, taxation systems and national markets for debt. And as warfare became ever more destructive the incentive for governments to resort to it changed too.
Blood and Treasure looks at the history and economics of warfare from the Viking Age to the war in Ukraine, examining how incentives and institutions have changed over the centuries. It surveys how warfare helped drive Europe's rise to global prominence, and it explains how the total wars of the twentieth century required a new type of strategy, one that took economics seriously.
Along the way it asks whether Genghis Khan should be regarded as the father of globalization, explains how New World gold and silver kept Spain poor, ponders why some economists think of witch trials as a form of "non-price competition," notes how pirate captains were pioneers of effective HR techniques, asks if handing out medals hurt the Luftwaffe in World War II and assesses if economic theories helped to create a tragedy in Vietnam.

Homeschooled: A Memoir, by Stefan Merrill Block. Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were "stifling his creativity." Hungry for more time with her boy who was growing up too quickly, she began to instruct Stefan in the family's living room. Beyond his formal lessons in math, however, Stefan was largely left to his own devices and his mother's erratic whims, such as her project to recapture her twelve-year-old son's early years by bleaching his hair and putting him on a crawling regimen.
Years before homeschooling would become a massive nationwide movement, at a time when it had just become legal in his home state of Texas, Stefan vanished into that unseen space and into his mother's increasingly eccentric theories and projects. But when, after five years away from the outside world, Stefan reentered the public school system in Plano as a freshman, he was in for a jarring awakening.
At once a novelistic portrait of mother and son, and an illuminating window into an overlooked corner of the American education system, Homeschooled is a moving, funny and ultimately inspiring story of a son's battle for a life of his own choosing, and the wages of a mother's insatiable love. “He resists sensationalism or blanket indictments of homeschooling, but his testimony offers a sobering glimpse into what lobbyists have wrought by convincing politicians to strip away federal oversight in the name of “parental freedom.” Lyrical, harrowing, and politically pointed, this is both a moving coming-of-age story and a clarion call for reform.” --Publisher’s Weekly

Always Carry Salt: A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture, by Samantha Ellis. Samantha’s mother tongue is dying out. The daughter of Iraqi Jewish refugees, Samantha grew up surrounded by the noisy, vivid, hot sounds of Judeo-Iraqi Arabic. A language that’s now on the verge of extinction.
The realization that she won’t be able to tell her son he’s "living in the days of the aubergines" or "chopping onions on my heart" or reminding him to "always carry salt" opens the floodgates. The questions keep coming. How can she pass on this heritage without passing on the trauma of displacement? Will her son ever love mango pickle?
In her search for answers Samantha encounters demon bowls, the perils of kohl, and the unexpected joys of fusion food. Her journey transports us from the clamour of Noah’s Ark to the calm of the British Museum, from the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages to the banks of the River Tigris. As Samantha considers what we lose and keep, she also asks what we might need to let go of to preserve our culture and ourselves. "Samantha Ellis’s powerful memoir Always Carry Salt exemplifies diaspora yearning and determination. Written with the belief that 'sleeping languages can be kissed back to life,' Always Carry Salt is a remarkable memoir about what we pass down and why."— Foreword, starred review

Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival, by Trina Moyles. When Trina Moyles was five years old, her father, a wildlife biologist known in Peace River as "the bear guy," brought home an orphaned black bear cub for a night before sending it to the Calgary Zoo. This brief but unforgettable encounter spurred Trina’s lifelong fascination with Ursus americanus—the most populous bear on the northern landscape, often considered a nuisance to human society. As a child roaming the shores of the Peace in the footsteps of her beloved older brother, Brendan, she understood bears to be invisible entities: always present but mostly hidden and worthy of respect.
After years of working for human rights organizations, Trina returned to northern Alberta for a job as a fire tower lookout, while Brendan worked in the oil sands, vulnerable to a boom-and-bust economy and substance addiction. When she was assigned to a tower in a wildlife corridor, bears were alarmingly visible and plentiful, wandering metres away on the other side of an electrified fence surrounding the tower. Over four summers, Trina begins to move beyond fear and observe the extraordinary essence of the maligned black bear—a keystone species who is as subject to the environmental consequences of the oil economy as humans. At the same time, she searches for common ground with Brendan on the land that bonded them. “Moyles intertwines her experience losing a sibling to drug addiction with the story of how she learned to coexist with bears. Through keen observations and captivating storytelling, Moyles shows that survival is about finding inner peace and learning to overcome fears. This personal history goes straight to the heart." — Publishers Weekly, starred review

Duet: An Artful History of Music, by Eleanor Chan. A lush new history of music that transcends eras, borders, personalities, and genres by revealing how music is something seen, as well as heard.
Classically trained musician and art historian, Eleanor Chan, takes us deep into the visual and material manifestations of music, transforming our understanding of the story of art and music. Plunging the reader into the body of a performer and the eyes of an art historian, this wonderful book explores the history of music through a series of objects, both everyday and unusual, revealing how music has always been something that we visualize. From the sumptuously illuminated manuscripts of Ethiopia and Safavid Iran to the decorated porcelain flutes of China, from Brazilian opera houses to the jazz-inspired abstract paintings by artists throughout the world, Chan opens windows onto the ways that art has been heard, and music has been seen, throughout time. “A swooping, capacious, and beautiful history of how we see music, of the intrinsic connection of eye and ear. The scope is breathtaking: no genre, context, or artefact seems out of bounds for Chan’s brilliant and insightful analysis. Duet is a testament to the musicality and artistry of the human experience and, frankly, I wish there were more books like this.” — Emily MacGregor, author of While the Music Lasts

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	6:00 PM	Young People’s Pavilion	The Book Bear
(LAST SUN OF THE MONTH)	7:30 PM	LGBTQ Literature	Chrislove
MONDAY	8:00 PM	The Language of the Night	DrLori
TUESDAY	8:00 PM	Contemporary Fiction Views	bookgirl
	10:00 PM	Nonfiction Views	DebtorsPrison
WEDNESDAY	8:00 PM	Bookchat	cfk et al.
THURSDAY	8:00 PM	Write On!	SensibleShoes
(FIRST THURS OF MONTH)	2:00 PM	Monthly Bookpost	AdmiralNaismith
FRIDAY	7:30 AM	WAYR?	Chitown Kev
(OCCASIONALLY)	8:00 PM	Books Go Boom!	Brecht
	9:30 PM	Classic Poetry Group	Angmar
SATURDAY	Noon	You Can't Read That! or Paul's Book Reviews	pwoodford
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Contemporary Fiction Views: The queen who wouldn't die and scenarios of calamity

bookgirl

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday January 06, 2026 · 5:00 PM PST

2026/01/06 · 17:00

Nefertiti and John Adams chat at a dinner party while Queen Victoria, Bluebeard and others roam the Victorian mansion in which it takes place. Henry VIII kills Anne Boleyn, but she keeps popping back up alive. Men turn into wolves, then back into men again when there is a full moon.

These fantastical tales and more are part of the debut collection of Senaa Ahmad, The Age of Calamities. Within the universes she creates in each short story, characters strive for freedom and self-determination. That the sometimes madcap situations existing in a story sometimes mirror history and oftentimes reflect current existential crises makes the book all the more relatable.

Ahmad, a Canadian short fiction writer, has a superb way of encapsulating a character's desires and dreams. She also is realistic about characters' situations within their off-kilter realities.

In "Let's Play Dead," in which Anne Boleyn refuses to stay dead despite her king's best efforts, returning to life is a way to affirm the ongoing quest of women to be recognized and wanted as their own selves. After all, do we really need just another dead girl? Or one who is something more? Even if nothing is hers and she has nothing else.

"I'm still here, she says to the wasps, the centipedes, the belladonna, the ragwort. I'm still here."

In "The Napoleons are Multiplying," new versions of the Little Corporal turn up at an English house. One climbs the roof and moves the sun and the moon, toying with them. Other Napoleons don't like him or what he does, but no one stops him. But are any of them understood? That's what at least one of them wants, if only to understand himself. A wish for many of us who aren't some would-be conqueror.

"The Wolves" is the story of those trying to flee Genghis Khan's wolves, which run through cities, villages and the countryside in a thunderous pack of death and destruction. During each full moon, they return to their human selves as weary men, mostly appalled at what they have done. But is there any escape outside death? One young woman in a group of women trying to escape them, she later tells a young man that disaster comes for every one. It may not look the same for each individual, but it will find us all.

Joan of Arc takes over the body of a modern cleaning woman. What is being sought in "Our Lady of Resplendent Misfortune" is a cleansing, a resurrection. But is the saint doing the seeking, or is she the sacrifice? She knows that "to give something up of your own free will, lets it be taken from you anyway" is her fate. The twinning of cleansing and fire are woven tightly together in the tapestry of this tale.

Existence outside history is what happens to several historical figures "Inside the House of the Historian." A dinner party looks to become a locked house murder mystery puzzle. But instead of investigating the death of the host, the guests look into the changing nooks and crannies of the Victorian mansion to which they were invited by the now-dead Historian. His female partner, known as the Professor (whether she is one or not), reassures them that they will go back to their own times even with this mishap. It's the misorder of their existence there, and of the house itself, that is central.

Never wanting a loved one to be alone features in "It Was Probably a Very Nice Day." The Empress Alexandra, sickly little Alexei and a man escape Russia, leaving his four sisters behind. They don't want their little brother to be alone. As the sisters waver between the Winter Palace, where they were left, and the ship with their brother, which turns into a tower and a forest and a ship in space, he thinks the weight of grief should be able to bring people back.

Then there is Nellie Bly sitting by a campfire with some of Julius Caesar's soldiers, taking notes of their stories. "She shines with anomaly." How delightful. A long time ago, when the Romans invaded her New York during a hot, humid summer and then left, some of the centurions still there caught her attention. They were delighted by soda pop, especially when one got some of the fizzy sweetness up his nose. Their "worship of the ordinary" made what was old to her new again, made it unknown.

In "The Houseguest," an actress plays Lizzie Borden in a series of horror films. Her greatest trick is to turn comedy into tragedy. When she comes home at night after filming, she makes a drink for herself, one for her cousin who is staying with her, and another for a guest they don't see but who leaves the emptied glass in various locations. The films become a cultural phenomenon, with people writing theories about Lizzie and one writing life stories and obituaries for her victims who are on the screen for such a short time they aren't even named. This is literally a story of haunting and redemption.

And then there is "Choose Your Own Apocalypse." It's a choose-your-own-adventure for the Manhattan Project. Regardless of the choice, they center on the notion of the atomic bomb's deadliness. Every place is like the ghost town in one scenario: "a skeleton of someone's future." Bones that have been stripped of the living matter that once surrounded them. Oppenheimer's presence is not reassuring.

Throughout The Age of Calamities, all the ages of calamity, the characters yearn to be seen, to be understood, to matter. Whether corporal or spirits, they reach out to the reader to be known. Ahmad's beautiful, haunting descriptions makes their humanity all the more poignant. As a guest at the Historian's house asks:

"What am I doing here?" and she could be asking herself, or the house. It might even be that she's asking you.

It is a question for both character and reader to ponder.

READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE

DAY	TIME EST/EDT	SERIES	EDITOR(S)
SUNDAY	4:00 PM	Let’s Talk BOOKS	Angela Marx
	6:00 PM	Young People’s Pavilion	The Book Bear
(LAST SUN OF THE MONTH)	7:30 PM	LGBTQ Literature	Chrislove
MONDAY	8:00 PM	The Language of the Night	DrLori
TUESDAY	8:00 PM	Contemporary Fiction Views	bookgirl
	10:00 PM	Nonfiction Views	DebtorsPrison
WEDNESDAY	8:00 PM	Bookchat	cfk et al.
THURSDAY	8:00 PM	Write On!	SensibleShoes
(FIRST THURS OF MONTH)	2:00 PM	Monthly Bookpost	AdmiralNaismith
FRIDAY	7:30 AM	WAYR?	Chitown Kev
(OCCASIONALLY)	8:00 PM	Books Go Boom!	Brecht
	9:30 PM	Classic Poetry Group	Angmar
SATURDAY	Noon	You Can't Read That! or Paul's Book Reviews	pwoodford
	9:00 PM	Books So Bad They’re Good*	Ellid (*on temporary hiatus)

The Language of the Night: Martha Wells takes on colonization

DrLori

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday January 05, 2026 · 5:00 PM PST

2026/01/05 · 17:00

Martha Wells often surprises me. Her writing combines an anthropological approach to human societies, keen observation, charismatic characters, and themes that sneak up on you. Her protagonists are far removed from the “average every-person” trope, so far removed that many of them aren’t even remotely human. Khat, in her early City of Bones, is kris, genetically engineered to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and outcast (if not outright hunted) among humans, while the Raksura of their eponymous series are sometimes-winged reptilian shapeshifters who are also outcast and sometime outright hunted. The protagonist in the Ile-Rien series is the city itself. SecUnit in The Murderbot Diaries is a bot construct who thinks a bot’s wish to be human is dumb, and the main characters in Wells’ latest series, The Rising World, are definitely not human: a Demon, a Witch, and an Immortal Blessed.* The protagonist, Kaiisteron, begins the series dead (although he gets better). Taking her work for all in all, she’s building a thorough interrogation of the human condition, from the viewpoint of an outsider.**

It’s such a remarkable strategy that you can easily miss the underlying themes, which examine the many ways that humans are actively inhumane and capriciously cruel, and the even more varied ways that people manage not only to survive, but thrive despite the world’s cruelty.

Tonight, I want to frame up a discussion about Queen Demon, the sequel to Witch King, and I’m glad I sat with the book for a couple of months and read it slowly, because Wells is the kind of writer who won’t beat you over the head with a theme, but will drop it in under the cover of plot.

The plot is a straightforward continuation of Witch King. At the end of Witch King, Kai and Zeide have disrupted the rebellious conspiracy (well, part of it, at least), Kai has revealed that he spoiled Prince-Heir Bashat imperial designs, and our gang has located and freed Tahren Stargard, Zeide’s missing spouse. That’s the present plot.

In the complementary past plot, Bashasa has led the rebels out of the Hierarch’s Summer Halls and confronted — and vanquished — the ruler of his own city. (I just read back through the last four sentences and, if you haven’t read the books, it sounds absolutely bonkers. If you have read it, you’re nodding right now, happy for the refresher.)

But I don’t want to look at plot; for one thing, we’re in the two year no-spoiler window. For another, plot addresses the what of what happens, but not the why, and it’s the why, the theme, that’s really interesting.

One of Wells’ most compelling gifts as a writer is the way she interrogates trauma, and trauma is very much in evidence in her recent works, especially in both Murderbot and The Rising World. Where the Murderbot stories form an enslavement narrative as personal journey and healing, the Rising World series applies a wider cultural lens to trauma and loss.

Kai has seen his world ripped apart twice: the way to the underneath, the world of his birth, is shut off; the world of his above existence, the world of the Saredi, is also gone, both of them murdered by the Hierarchs. (You could argue that the third traumatizing loss-of-world is losing Bashasa, but that lies in the gap between past and present narratives.) In the past narrative, a vanquished Kai himself is imprisoned in the Summer Halls until Bashasa frees him and he joins the ad hoc rebellion.

So far, a rather simple “what.” But in Bashasa’s very public confrontation with his cousin Karanis, ruler of the city-state of Benais-arik, she slips in the theme (yes, at the very end of the book). Displaying the banner of a destroyed city, Bashasa tells the watching crowd

“I took this from their wall of trophies, where they hung the stolen treasures of a hundred lands and the bones of the brave who fought them, disgraced and despoiled like animals. I ripped this banner from their wall and we redeemed the blood of our murdered kin in Hierarchs’ flesh.”

Witch King, p. 408

In other words, the Hierarchs have collected the sacred symbols of the Arike and the other conquered peoples and used them as trophies. If this sounds unfamiliar, you’ve likely never been to a museum. The Hierarchs live the language of the colonizer, the conqueror, and they seem to regard their conquered peoples as . . . less than human? Less than civilized? Useful only for plunder and wealth extraction? Perhaps on a par with livestock?

After the battle to depose Karanis, when Kai is just beginning to process everything he’s lost and feeling like he wants to set the world on fire, Bashasa challenges him to do something else: to “unburn” the world, to rebuild it. In other words, to unmake the Hierarchs’ world.

And Kai reveals to Bashat’s loyal scout Ramad that he disrupted Bashat’s plans to be named emperor because empire, any empire, was the very last thing that Bashasa would have wanted.

“The words Bashasa spoke to me before he died were ‘Don’t let everything we fought for be for nothing.’” Ramad’s expression was turning stricken. Kai pressed on. “He never wanted an empire to replace the Hierarchs. He wanted everything to go back to the way it was before they came.”

pp. 388-389

That’s as clear an announcement that this series is about anticolonialism as we’re likely to get.

As I started above, Queen Demon picks up where Witch King leaves off — in both timelines. It’s very much a middle-of-the-series book in that the balls are all still in the air, the gears are still turning, but the ending, the potential eucatastrophe, is not yet in sight. We know that in the past narrative that Bashasa’s uprising is victorious, but in the present narrative we’re not even sure about what the real threat is.

Yet it has none of the sag of a mid-series volume. That’s because the story shifts gears with the resolution of one part of the plot: the exposure of the conspiracy and the rescue of Tahren; the second volume is about Tahren’s brother Dahin and his secretive obsessive project, coupled with the dawning realization that Bashat’s plan to become emperor and the rebels from Nient-arik are not the worst things that might well be happening.

But that’s just the plot. The theme is about colonialism, the tale told from the viewpoint of the colonized, the people whose history, culture, dignity, and whose very lives, have been made into a trophy for a conqueror’s wall. How do you “unburn” that?

And that’s where I’ll pick up next week. That gives you some time for a refresher, if you’ve already read the book. And if you haven’t, it’s a chance to get up to speed. Until next week, then. I’ll bring receipts.

officebss

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Monday January 05, 2026 · 4:26 AM PST

2026/01/05 · 04:26

Forever is composed of nows. – Emily Dickinson

________________________________________________________

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you
have, and only you can determine how it will be spent.
Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
– Carl Sandburg

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The one thing I regret is that I will never have
the time to read all the books I want to read.
– Françoise Sagan,
French novelist, playwright,
and screenwriter

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Welcome to Morning Open Thread, a daily post
with a MOTley crew of hosts who choose the topic
for the day's posting. We support our community,
invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful,
respectful dialogue in an open forum. That’s a
feature, not a bug. Other than that, site rulz rule.

Morning Open Thread is looking for contributors —
either occasional, or weekly. If interested, please
contact officebss or Ozarkblue for more information

____________________________________________________________

NOTE: You will not find this week’s title in any of the poems below. It is the final line from a not very good poem I wrote when I was 17 years old – the only line worth saving, but I haven’t found a way to recycle it into a better poem.

This week I will reach my 77^th birthday. Since I haven’t found “the rest of it” in 60 years, perhaps it is already complete – a poem that says all it needs to say in just ten words.

____________________________________________________________

So grab your cuppa, and join in.

__________________________________

13 poets born in January,
a month of old endings and
new beginnings — time to
decide if the road you’re
on is the right one, or
to explore a new one.
________________________________________

January 4
________________________________

1883 – Max Eastman born in Canandaigua NY; his father was a Congregational minister, and his mother became one of the first women to be ordained as a Congregational minister. Eastman was an American journalist, peace and political activist, poet, essayist, translator, and literary critic. After graduating from Williams College, he moved to New York to attend Columbia University, and became involved with radicals living in Greenwich Village. He advocated for socialism, became a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as a number of liberal causes, including women’s suffrage. For several years, he edited The Masses. With his sister Crystal Eastman, he co-founded in 1917 The Liberator, a leftist magazine of politics and the arts. He lived in the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924, but was disillusioned by Joseph Stalin’s seizure of power, and the purges that followed, becoming an outspoken critic of Stalin. After Leon Trotsky was assassinated, Eastman translated several of Trotsky’s books into English. Though remaining an atheist, his views moved toward anti-communism and “free market” economics, but he did oppose U.S. involvement in the Viet Nam War. In addition to his two poetry collections Child of the Amazons and other Poems and Colors of Life, he also edited poetry anthologies and wrote Enjoyment of Poetry, a guide to appreciating poetry, and the poetic in everyday life. Max Eastman died after a stroke at age 86, in March 1969.

At the Aquarium

by Max Eastman
^.
Serene the silver fishes glide,
Stern-lipped, and pale, and wonder-eyed!
As through the aged deeps of ocean,
They glide with wan and wavy motion.
They have no pathway where they go,
They flow like water to and fro,
They watch with never-winking eyes,
They watch with staring, cold surprise,
The level people in the air,
The people peering, peering there:
Who wander also to and fro,
And know not why or where they go,
Yet have a wonder in their eyes,
Sometimes a pale and cold surprise.
^.

“At the Aquarium” from Colors of Life: Poems and Songs and Sonnets, originally published in 1918 by Max Eastman – reissued in 2015 by Leopold Classic Library

________________________________

1931 – Nora Iuga born, Romanian poet, writer, novelist, journalist, translator, and editor; she was censored between 1971 and 1978 by the communist government in Romania after the publication of her second collection of poems, Captivitatea cercului (Trapped in a Circle). Her books were also withdrawn from public libraries and bookstores. However, since then she has published 13 poetry collections. The first English translation of her work, a collection of poems called The Hunchbacks’ Bus, was published in 2016. Iuga won Germany’s Friedrich-Gundolf-Preis in 2007.

like a cat I rub myself

by Nora Iuga

^‘
like a cat I rub myself
against every chair
you sat on
I want to believe you continue to exist
to feel your leg’s shadow
on the top of my head
^.

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January 5
________________________________

1926 – W. D. Snodgrass born as William De Witt Snodgrass in Pennsylvania; American poet, critic, educator, and translator; he served as a typist in the U.S. Navy during WWII, then earned his degrees at the University of Iowa, where he studied with Robert Lowell. Snodgrass won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Heart’s Needle. He published over 30 books. His 1977 collection The Fuehrer Bunker, imagined dramatic monologues of the people who shared Hitler’s bunker in the last days, was controversial. W. D. Snodgrass died of lung cancer at age 83 in January 2006.

Who Steals My Good Name

by W. D. Snodgrass

^.
For the person who obtained my debit card number and spent $11,000
in five days
^.
My pale stepdaughter, just off the school bus,
Scowled, "Well, that's the last time I say my name's
Snodgrass!" Just so, may that anonymous
Mexican male who prodigally claims
^.
My clan lines, identity and the sixteen
Digits that unlock my bank account,
Think twice. That less than proper name's been
Taken by three ex-wives, each for an amount
^.
Past all you've squandered, each more than pleased
To change it back. That surname you affect
May have more consequence than getting teased
By dumb kids or tracked down by bank detectives.
^.
Don't underrate its history: one of ours played
Piano on his prison's weekly broadcast;
One got rich on a scammed quiz show; one made
A bungle costing the World Series. My own past
^.
Could subject you to guilt by association:
If you write anything more than false checks,
Abandon all hope of large press publication
Or prizes—critics shun the name like sex
^.
Without a condom. Whoever steals my purse
Helps chain me to my writing desk again
For fun and profit. So take thanks with my curse:
May your pen name help send you to your pen.
^.

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January 6
________________________________

1949 – C. D. Wright born as Caroline Wright in Mountain Home, Arkansas; prolific American poet, and editor of Lost Roads Publishers, which specialized in publishing new poets and translations. In 2010, her book One With Others won both the National Book Award for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. C.D. Wright died at age 67 of thrombosis in January 2016. Among her many poetry collections are: Room Rented By A Single Woman; Just Whistle: A Valentine; Steal Away; The Other Hand; and ShallCross, published posthumously.

only the crossing counts

by C. D. Wright
^.
It’s not how we leave one’s life. How go off
the air. You never know do you. You think you’re ready
for anything; then it happens, and you’re not. You’re really
not. The genesis of an ending, nothing
but a feeling, a slow movement, the dusting
of furniture with a remnant of the revenant’s shirt.
Seeing the candles sink in their sockets; we turn
away, yet the music never quits. The fire kisses our face.
O phthsis, o lotharian dead eye, no longer
will you gaze on the baize of the billiard table. No more
shooting butter dishes out of the sky. Scattering light.
Between snatches of poetry and penitence you left
the brumal wood of men and women. Snow drove
the butterflies home. You must know
how it goes, known all along what to expect,
sooner or later … the faded cadence of anonymity.
Frankly, my dear, frankly, my dear, frankly

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January 7
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1919 – Robert Duncan born in Oakland, California as Edward Howard Duncan Jr.; American poet, playwright, literary critic, essayist, and painter who spent most of his life in and around San Francisco. He was his mother’s tenth child, and she died gibing birth to him at home, to avoid the risks of exposure to the influenza that was killing thousands. His Father gave him up for adoption to Edin and Minnehahah Symes, who were devout Thosophist. They renamed him Robert Edward Symes in honor of a family friend. His childhood was stable, and his adopted parents were popular and social members of their community—Edwin was a prominent architect and Minnehaha devoted much of her time to volunteering and serving on committees. He grew up surrounded by the occult in one form or another; he was well aware of the circumstances of his birth and adoption, and his parents carefully interpreted his dreams. After the death of Edward Symmes in 1936, Robert started studying at the University of California, Berkeley, and began writing poems, often inspired by inspired by his left-wing politics and bohemian friends. During this time, he took back his birth surname. In 1938, he briefly attended Black Mountain College but left after a dispute with faculty over the Spanish Civil War. Duncan and his first lover, Ned Fahs, lived together off and on from 1938 to 1941, when Fahs married a woman. In 1941, Duncan was drafted and declared his homosexuality to get discharged. In 1943, he had his first heterosexual relationship, which ended in a short, disastrous marriage. In 1944, Duncan wrote the landmark essay "The Homosexual in Society." The essay, in which Duncan compared the plight of homosexuals with that of African Americans and Jews, was published in Dwight Macdonald's journal politics. After WWII, he returned to the Bay area, and to UC Berkeley, where he studied Medieval and Renaissance literature. His first book, Heavenly City Earthly City, was published. In the early 1950s. he started publishing in Cid Corman's Origin and the Black Mountain Review. His many poetry collections include: The Opening of the Field; Roots and Branches; Bending the Bow; and The Unruly Garden. He died at age 69 of kidney disease in February 1988.

A Little Language

by Robert Duncan
^.
I know a little language of my cat, though Dante says
that animals have no need of speech and Nature
the superfluous. My cat is fluent. He
converses when he wants with me. To speak
^.
is natural. And whales and wolves I’ve heard
in choral soundings of the sea and air
know harmony and have an eloquence that stirs
my mind and heart—they touch the soul. Here
^.
Dante’s religion that would set Man apart
damns the effluence of our life from us
to build therein its powerhouse.
^.
It’s in his animal communication Man is
true, immediate, and
in immediacy, Man is all animal.
^.
His senses quicken in the thick of the symphony,
old circuits of animal rapture and alarm,
attentions and arousals in which an identity rearrives.
He hears
particular voices among
the concert, the slightest
rustle in the undertones,
rehearsing a nervous aptitude
yet to prove his. He sees the flick
of significant red within the rushing mass
of ruddy wilderness and catches the glow
of a green shirt
to delite him in a glowing field of green
—it speaks to him—
and in the arc of the spectrum color
speaks to color.
The rainbow articulates
a promise he remembers
he but imitates
in noises that he makes,
^.
this speech in every sense
the world surrounding him.
He picks up on the fugitive tang of mace
amidst the savory mass,
and taste in evolution is an everlasting key.
There is a pun of scents in what makes sense.
^.
Myrrh it may have been,
the odor of the announcement that filld the house.
^.
He wakes from deepest sleep
upon a distant signal and waits
^.
as if crouching, springs
to life.

________________________________

1954 – Cornelius Eady born in Rochester NY; Black American poet, writer, writer-in-residence and workshop leader, and co-founder with Toi Derricotte of Cave Canem Foundation, which sponsors writing workshops, poetry prizes, and anthology publications for African-American poets. He has also worked with jazz composer Deirdre Murray on theatre pieces with music. His poetry collections include Kartunes; Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (winner of the 1985 Lamont Poetry Prize); The Gathering of My Name; and Brutal Imagination (a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award for Poetry).

Nina’s Blues

by Cornelius Eady
^.
Your body, hard vowels
In a soft dress, is still.
What you can’t know
is that after you died
All the black poets
In New York City
Took a deep breath,
And breathed you out;
Dark corners of small clubs,
The silence you left twitching
^.
On the floors of the gigs
You turned your back on,
The balled-up fists of notes
Flung, angry from a keyboard.
You won’t be able to hear us
Try to etch what rose
Off your eyes, from your throat.
^.
Out you bleed, not as sweet, or sweaty,
Through our dark fingertips.
We drum rest
We drum thank you
We drum stay.
^.

“Nina’s Blues,” from Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems, 2008 by Cornelius Eady – Putnam

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January 8
________________________________

1037 – Su Shi, aka Su Ting Po, Art name Dongpo, born in Meishan, Sichuan, China; Chinese writer, poet, essayist, painter, calligrapher, travel chronicler, and statesman of the Song dynasty, an important figure in the dynasty’s politics, and a highly accomplished author in classical Chinese literature. He wrote some of his best-known poems while banished (1080-1084) to Huangzhou.

Remembrance

by Su Shi
^.
To what can our life on earth be likened?
To a flock of geese,
alighting on the snow.
Sometimes leaving a trace of their passage.
^.

– translator not credited

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1914 – Norman Nicholson born in the industrial town of Millon, Cumbria, England; English poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. His father was a gentleman's outfitter. Norman was educated at Holborn Hill School and Millom Secondary School, but his education was interrupted at the age of 16 when he contracted Tuberculosis. He then spent two years at a sanatorium in Linford, Hampshire. Although he was regarded as a brilliant student, his poor health prevented him from attending university and instead he devoted his life to writing. Nicholson was influenced by the social and religious community around the local Wesleyan Methodist chapel in Millom, but later was confirmed into the Church of England. His many poetry collections include: Rock Face; The Pot Geranium; A Local Habitation; No Star on the Way Back; and Sea to the West. He was elected to the Royal Society of Literature in 1945. He received altogether five honorary higher degrees from British universities, and one of Britain's top poetry awards, the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1977. He reviewed literature frequently for the TLS, the Church Times, The Listener, and many other magazines. He also gave numerous talks on the BBC, and travelled around the UK giving poetry readings. Norman Nicholson died at age 73 in May 1987, from health issues related to his bout of tuberculosis as a teenager.

For the Grieg Centenary

by Norman Nicholson
^.
The fells are jagged in the shining air; the wind
Sharpens itself like a knife on the rough edges;
The sky is blue as ice, and clouds from the sea
Splinter above the land
And drive against the rocks in thin steel wedges.
^.
This of all England is the place to remember Grieg:
Here where the Norsemen foraged down the dales,
Crossing the sea with migrant redwing,
Thieving heifer and yow and teg,
Leaving their names scotched on the flanks of the hills.
^.
Leaving also the crackling northern tongues,
The dialect crisp with the click of the wind
In the thorns of a wintry dyke,
So that Solvieg sings
In the words which bind the homes of Cumberland.
^.
Therefore let Solvieg sing in the western dales
When the frost is on the pikes, and the raven builds again
Its next in February; let Crinkle Crags
Be thumped by the humpbacked trolls,
And the voice of Grieg ring loud through the sound of the
sea and the rain.

“For the Grieg Centenary” from Five Rivers, by Norman Nicholson, originally published in 1914 – reissued in 2021 by Hassell Street Press

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January 9
________________________________

1919 – William Morris Meredith Jr born in New York City; American poet, author, and educator. He graduated from Princeton in 1940, and his senior thesis was on Robert Frost. He worked briefly for the New Times before joining the U.S. Army in 1941, then transferred to the U.S. Navy as a carrier pilot, and served in WWII in the Pacific theater, and later in the Korean War, earning two Air Medals. He taught English and Creative Writing at Princeton, University of Hawaii, and Connecticut College. Meredith learned to be an arborist, and taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (1964-1971). He was the first known gay poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate (1978-1980), but suffered a stroke in 1983, and was immobilized for two years. He regained most of his language skills after intensive therapy. He won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Partial Accounts, and the 1997 National Book Award for Effort at Speech. Meredith died at age 88 in May 2007.

The Illiterate

by William Meredith
^.
Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.
^.
His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feeling for the words
That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?
^.

________________________________

1942 – Judy Malloy born in Boston, American poet, librarian, and innovator of online interactive and collaborative fiction and poetry websites; beginning with Uncle Roger in 1986, Malloy composed works in both new media literature and hypertext fiction. She was a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University in Social Media Poetics and Electronic Literature (2013-2014). Other works include Its name was Penelope; The Roar of Destiny Emanated from the Refrigerator; and Revelations of Secret Surveillance.

Tess

by Judy Malloy
^.
I remember the way my cat's tongue protruded from her mouth
in that odd way that cat's tongues sometimes do
as she lay between my legs
while I entered (in retrospect bad) poetry
on my roommate's Apple II+ computer in a studio apartment
not far from DuPont circle.
^.
I remember the way her soft black fur felt under my hands
and the sound the lapping of her tongue made
in counterpart to the constantly falling rain.
^.
Shadow Castle? It was a battered thin green book
about fairies. (of the mythical kind)
It was also about waiting - about absence and distance.
I looked for a copy in the library, but they didn't have one.
^.

“Tess” from The Well, New Media Poetry - https://people.well.com/user/jmalloy/index.html

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January 10
________________________________

1887 – Robinson Jeffers born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania; American poet, playwright, philosopher, pacifist, and conservationist. In 1914, he and his new wife Una first came to Carmel-by-the-Sea in Northern California. He was 26 years old, and he had found his place in the world. They bought land there in 1919. Jeffers reached the height of his popularity in the early 1930s. In the 1940s, his “free adaptation” of the play Medea by Euripides was a hit on Broadway, even as his star began to wane because he spoke out against America’s imperial ambitions and against the nation’s involvement in WWII. Embittered, he espoused a philosophy of ‘inhumanity’ – that people were detrimental to the Earth and, spurned by an uncaring God, they would eventually become extinct, leaving the planet to heal in a return to Nature. This was not popular in the 1950s. His work was re-discovered in the late 1960s by budding environmentalists, who rallied in the 1970s to save his home and writer’s retreat, his beloved Tor House and Hawk Tower, from developers. The property is now affiliated with the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Carmel Point

by Robinson Jeffers
^.
The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses–
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads–
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.–As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from
^.

“Carmel Point” from The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, © renewed 1966 by Jeffers Literary Properties – Stanford University Press

________________________________

1928 – Philip Levine born in Detroit, American poet and teacher; U.S. Poet Laureate (2011-2012). He was the second of three sons born to Jewish immigrant parents. His father died when he was five years old, and at age 14, he was already working nights in auto factories when a teacher told him, “You write like an angel. Why don’t you think about becoming a writer?” Levin earned an A.B. at Wayne University, then monitored classes at the University of Iowa taught by Robert Lowell and John Berryman. Levine got a mail-order master’s degree in 1954 with a thesis on John Keats’ “Ode to Indolence,” then earned an MFA at the University of Iowa in 1957. He taught for over 30 years in the English department of California State University, Fresno. Most of his best-known poems are about the working-class in Detroit. Levine served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets from 2000 to 2006. He died of pancreatic cancer in February 2015 at age 87.

An Abandoned Factory, Detroit

by Philip Levine
^.
The gates are chained, the barbed-wire fencing stands,
An iron authority against the snow,
And this grey monument to common sense
Resists the weather. Fears of idle hands,
Of protest, men in league, and of the slow
Corrosion of their minds, still charge this fence.
Beyond, through broken windows one can see
Where the great presses paused between their strokes
And thus remain, in air suspended, caught
In the sure margin of eternity.
The cast-iron wheels have stopped; one counts the spokes
Which movement blurred, the struts inertia fought,
And estimates the loss of human power,
Experienced and slow, the loss of years,
The gradual decay of dignity.
Men lived within these foundries, hour by hour;
Nothing they forged outlived the rusted gears
Which might have served to grind their eulogy.
^.

“An Abandoned Factory, Detroit” from Ashes: Poems New and Old, © by Philip Levine — Atheneum

________________________________

1952 – Dorianne Laux born in Augusta, Maine, American poet. She worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, and a maid, before receiving a B.A. in English from Mills College in 1988, when she was 36 years old. Her first published poetry collection, Awake, appeared two years later. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her second husband, fellow poet Joseph Millar. Laux is a professor of creative writing at North Carolina State University, and often travels with her husband team-teaching poetry workshops. Laux’s work has won awards, including the Paterson Prize for The Book of Men, and the Oregon Book Award for Facts About the Moon. Her book What We Carry was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected, which came out in 2019, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her other poetry collections include The Book of Women and Smoke.

For the Sake of Strangers

by Dorianne Laux
^.
No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy gives me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waiting patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another—a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees
offering their blossoms, a child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them—
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.
.

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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!

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What are you reading? January 2, 2026

Chitown Kev

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Friday January 02, 2026 · 4:30 AM PST

2026/01/02 · 04:30

In WAYR?, I note what I’m reading and comment...you note what you are reading and comment. Occasionally, I may add a section or a link related to books…

I am reading:

Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler by Susana M. Morris

How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays by Umberto Eco

READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE

DAY	TIME EST/EDT	SERIES	EDITOR(S)
SUNDAY	4:00 PM	Let’s Talk BOOKS	Angela Marx
	6:00 PM	Young People’s Pavilion	The Book Bear
(LAST SUN OF THE MONTH)	7:30 PM	LGBTQ Literature	Chrislove
MONDAY	8:00 PM	The Language of the Night	DrLori
TUESDAY	8:00 PM	Contemporary Fiction Views	bookgirl
	10:00 PM	Nonfiction Views	DebtorsPrison
WEDNESDAY	8:00 PM	Bookchat	cfk et al.
THURSDAY	8:00 PM	Write On!	SensibleShoes
(FIRST THURS OF MONTH)	2:00 PM	Monthly Bookpost	AdmiralNaismith
FRIDAY	7:30 AM	WAYR?	Chitown Kev
(OCCASIONALLY)	8:00 PM	Books Go Boom!	Brecht
	9:30 PM	Classic Poetry Group	Angmar
SATURDAY	Noon	You Can't Read That! or Paul's Book Reviews	pwoodford
	9:00 PM	Books So Bad They’re Good*	Ellid (*on temporary hiatus)

Write On! DaKoWriMo Begins!

strawbale

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday January 01, 2026 · 5:00 PM PST

2026/01/01 · 17:00

ginger cat hiding its eyes in its paws which are holding a ballpoint pen, on a typed paper or thin book.

Welcome to our Daily Kos Writing Month, where you can write anything at all, challenge yourself, and be cheered on by your fellow writers, or ask questions if you are stuck, or just talk about your work.

What will it be this month? Have you set a goal? Let us know in the comments. We'll put them in the box so you can report progress. ANYTHING IS ELIGIBLE. Fiction, poetry, nonfiction, educational materials, memoirs, diaries for DK, letters to your Senators, whatever you want to get written (well, not shopping lists)

Goal box:

Aashirs nani—two weddings and a murder. (This may be aspirational.)

CathyM — writing the bridge poems I need for my chapbook of family history

dconrad — just write

mettle fatigue — image library diaries, transferring DK drafts to safe storage.

reppa — just write. New-ish idea.

Rise above the swamp --

Write a letter to the editor about the futility of keeping track of user names and passwords of multiple unidentified doctor’s portals.

Research and maybe consider republishing Beyond Mars & Venus — Lessons of Dialogue & Peace, a Buddhist perspective as an e-book

sagesource — a short text on the basic ancient Chinese moral virtues

Strawbale -- work on scripts for short science videos, and figure out how to record them the right way around! Also Save The Images diaries, which aren't so much writing, but very time-consuming.

ThurzdaysChild -- I’m down to the last 40-some pages of ‘polishing’.

If you don't want to set a goal, try this challenge: write a scene inspired by this photo.

READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE

DAY	TIME EST/EDT	SERIES	EDITOR(S)
SUNDAY	4:00 PM	Let’s Talk BOOKS	Angela Marx
	6:00 PM	Young People’s Pavilion	The Book Bear
(LAST SUN OF THE MONTH)	7:30 PM	LGBTQ Literature	Chrislove
MONDAY	8:00 PM	The Language of the Night	DrLori
TUESDAY	8:00 PM	Contemporary Fiction Views	bookgirl
	10:00 PM	Nonfiction Views	DebtorsPrison
WEDNESDAY	8:00 PM	Bookchat	cfk et al.
THURSDAY	8:00 PM	Write On!	SensibleShoes
(FIRST THURS OF MONTH)	2:00 PM	Monthly Bookpost	AdmiralNaismith
FRIDAY	7:30 AM	WAYR?	Chitown Kev
(OCCASIONALLY)	8:00 PM	Books Go Boom!	Brecht
	9:30 PM	Classic Poetry Group	Angmar
SATURDAY	Noon	You Can't Read That! or Paul's Book Reviews	pwoodford
	Noon	Economics Books	Mokurai
	9:00 PM	Books So Bad They’re Good*	Ellid (*on temporary hiatus)

Save The Images: New Group Needs Everyone Who Cares and Can Help.

strawbale

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday December 31, 2025 · 3:25 PM PST

2025/12/31 · 15:25

As noted in Kos diaries on the transition to Wordpress, and discussed in this diary by mettle fatigue, the Image Library is going away. No more looking for a pic of a certain person, animal, place or whatever to put in your comment or diary on KOS, you will be finding your own and uploading each time. Also, any unpublished draft material will not follow you over there. However, all PUBLISHED diaries and comments will be ported over. With their images. But not in any way searchable for the image you want.

mettle fatigue

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday December 30, 2025 · 9:10 PM PST

2025/12/30 · 21:10

<tt>Latest update is at the end of the post._________________________</tt>

Per this diary by kos about the site migration to Wordpress (see also comments in that thread), and at this post querying on the fate of posting history, images, and drafts, we’ve been told some key facts about the the image library and everyone’s draft folders, the contents of both of which will NOT be carried over to Wordpress. We may each have only until March in which to devise ways to save/conserve draft and image material we’d hate to see disappear.

Daily Kos Staff has commented:

<big>Addressing the headline question: “will the 25 yrs of Daily Kos posting history be carried over to WordPress? Images and all?”

Yes, published stories will be migrated.

Yes, images in published stories will be carried over with the stories.

We will begin posting stories with information regarding the details of the migration in January, after the long holiday. </big>

Kosaks with powerful computers, Cloud access, or certain kinds of Google accounts, etc can copy and save their drafts and favorite images that way, to still have’em usable at wordpress.

For those of us without those options — e.g., many low income or disabled kosaks don’t — here are some tried and true other methods, and read down the thread for more.

🟢 One method I’ll be using is to copypaste drafts and images into emails to myself.

🟢 For entire categories of images, the volunteers of new dk group <big>SAVE THE IMAGES</big> are posting diaries collectiing worthwhile images from the library for search-ability and copy-ability when we’re in Wordpress. Diary titles state categories/subcategories. Use that link to reach the homepage, hit the FOLLOW button there to get those posts in your Activity Stream, explore the collections posted so far, and see what categories are spoken for. Each diary has an explanation of its scope, brief or lengthy. In the threads, if you have basic dk editor skillz, you can ask to join and say what category of images you want to diary for the group, or ask about getting reblogged there without joining. At the homepage, click on admin strawbale’s name to kosmail to her direct.

🟢 Another alternative is to repurpose the shells of old diaries of your own, if you’ve posted a fair number and consider the content of some not really worth preserving. This is based on our being told the site’s posting history WILL carry over, complete with images. It’s a method I’ve been using for years for saving all kinds of information, images, etc, and actually posted about clear back in a 2015 diary … but I’ve repurposed it this week! Some of the earlier details aren’t relevant now, so today I’m recapping for the Wordpress migration need.

DebtorsPrison

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday December 30, 2025 · 6:00 PM PST

2025/12/30 · 18:00

Here we are at the last Tuesday evening of the year, a time to look back and survey our 52 weeks of Nonfiction Views.

It has been a struggle to find the time to read, ponder and then write a review of a single title each week. In fact, it seems that only thirteen of this past year’s Nonfiction Views actually offered a stand-alone book review by me. I consider that a pretty dismal output, and I resolve to do better in the coming year. Another seven Nonfiction Views pulled together a collection of titles built around a theme, such as last week's look at books about Artificial Intelligence. Other examples include a look at books about concentration camps in US history, and an overview of recent books about politics for kids. Many of the other Nonfiction Views at least offered a variety of news snippets with from the world of books and publishing. But too many Nonfiction Views offered only my choices of the most interesting new nonfiction of the week, with descriptions drawn primarily from publisher blurbs and review quotes. Again, it’s difficult to find the time each week to produce the book reviews and thematic round-ups that I would like to do, and I hope in the new year I can do better.

But what every Nonfiction Views offers is the picks of the best new nonfiction. I’d like to offer some of my favorites. It’s a very random selection, a little bit of everything. In the comments, I hope you’ll contribute your own favorite books of 2025.

From January 7th, a historical true crime mystery of an event that inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne. by Kate Winkler Dawson. On a cold winter day in 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead in a quiet farmyard in a small New England town. When her troubled past and a secret correspondence with charismatic Methodist minister Reverend Ephraim Avery was uncovered, more questions emerged. Was Sarah’s death a suicide...or something much darker? Determined to uncover the real story, Victorian writer Catharine Read Arnold Williams threw herself into the investigation as the trial was unfolding and wrote what many claim to be the first American true-crime narrative, Fall River. The murder divided the country and inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter—but the reverend was not convicted, and questions linger to this day about what really led to Sarah Cornell’s death. Until now. Applying modern forensic techniques and joining forces with her 19th century counterpart, Catharine Williams, who wrote what is likely the first American true crime narrative, Dawson takes the reader on an intrepid and utterly gripping journey of discovery. Written in shimmering transportive detail, The Sinners All Bow is an exceptional work of historical reportage that resonates all too strikingly today.”—Abbott Kahler, New York Times bestselling author of Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II

From January 14th, a zoomed-in look at a single event within the historic presidential run by Shirley Chisholm, and lessons for how to connect with voters: A More Perfect Party: The Night Shirley Chisholm and Diahann Carroll Reshaped Politics, by Juanita Tolliver. In 1972, New York Representative Shirley Chisholm broke the ice in American politics when she became the first Black woman to run for president of the United States. Chisholm left behind a coalition-building model personified by a once-in-an-era Hollywood party hosted by legendary actress and singer Diahann Carroll, and attended by the likes of Huey P. Newton, Barbara Lee, Berry Gordy, David Frost, Flip Wilson, Goldie Hawn and others.

Chisholm worked the crowd of movie stars, media moguls, music executives and activists gathered at Carroll’s opulent Beverly Hills home, forging relationships with laughter as she urged guests to unify behind her campaign. With the feminist movement on the rise and eighteen- to twenty-year-olds voting for the first time in American history, the Democratic Party and the nation were on the cusp of long-overdue change.
Zooming in on one party attendee per chapter, A More Perfect Party brings this whimsical event out of the margins of history to demonstrate that there is an opportunity for all of us to fight for a better nation and return power to the people. "Effective campaigns bring people together, and progress usually requires that we see each other as fully human and valuable; Tolliver explores those themes through the 1972 Democratic Party, and one dazzling, historic, literal party — with lessons that echo in today’s debates about liberalism, diversity and of course, winning.”—Ari Melber, host of MSNBC’s The Beat and MSNBC Chief Legal Correspondent

From January 27th. The end of the year is always a good time to think about the world coming to an end. This book offers an overview of apocalyptic thought through the ages. So many centuries of disappointment! The damn world just refused to come to an end. So far. Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, by Dorian Lynskey. As Dorian Lynskey writes, “People have been contemplating the end of the world for millennia.” In this immersive and compelling cultural history, Lynskey reveals how religious prophecies of the apocalypse were secularized in the early 19th century by Lord Byron and Mary Shelley in a time of dramatic social upheaval and temporary climate change, inciting a long tradition of visions of the end without gods.
With a discerning eye and acerbic wit, Lynskey examines how various doomsday tropes and predictions in literature, art, music, and film have arisen from contemporary anxieties, whether they be comets, pandemics, world wars, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Y2K, or the climate emergency. Far from being grim, Lynskey guides readers through a rich array of fascinating stories and surprising facts, allowing us to keep company with celebrated works of art and the people who made them. "[Lynskey] has the kind of omnivorous sensibility for a project like this. He has immersed himself in pulpy sci-fi, gloomy poetry, the literary criticism of Susan Sontag and the Book of Revelation. . . . A terrifically entertaining writer, with a requisite sense of gallows humor. . . . Lynskey moves smoothly from apocalyptic tales about comets and asteroids to killer robots and infected zombies." —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

From February 18th: The tragic story of a Ukrainian novelist turned journalist in war. Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary, by Victoria Amelina, with contributions by Margaret Atwood. When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Victoria Amelina was busy writing a novel, taking part in the country’s literary scene, and parenting her son. Now she became someone new: a war crimes researcher and the chronicler of extraordinary women like herself who joined the resistance. These heroines include Evgenia, a prominent lawyer turned soldier, Oleksandra, who documented tens of thousands of war crimes and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, and Yulia, a librarian who helped uncover the abduction and murder of a children’s book author.
Everyone in Ukraine knew that Amelina was documenting the war. She photographed the ruins of schools and cultural centers; she recorded the testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses to atrocities. And she slowly turned back into a storyteller, writing what would become this book.
On the evening of June 27th, 2023, Amelina and three international writers stopped for dinner in the embattled Donetsk region. When a Russian cruise missile hit the restaurant, Amelina suffered grievous head injuries, and lost consciousness. She died on July 1st. She was thirty-seven. She left behind an incredible account of the ravages of war and the cost of resistance. Honest, intimate, and wry, this book will be celebrated as a classic. "Unsparing and impossible-to-forget... its shape and urgency dictated by war and by its author’s shining life so abruptly shredded into night." —The Telegraph

Also from February 18th: Rescuing the books of the women authors who influenced Jane Austen. Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend, by Rebecca Romney. Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more.
But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work. Every character in Northanger Abbey who isn’t a boor sings the praises of Ann Radcliffe. The play that causes such a stir in Mansfield Park is a real one by the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald. In fact, the phrase “pride and prejudice” came from Frances Burney’s second novel Cecilia. The women that populated Jane Austen’s bookshelf profoundly influenced her work; Austen looked up to them, passionately discussed their books with her friends, and used an appreciation of their books as a litmus test for whether someone had good taste. So where had these women gone? Why hadn’t Romney—despite her training—ever read them? Or, in some cases, even heard of them? And why were they no longer embraced as part of the wider literary canon? “A powerful, page-turning journey… More than a literary excavation, this book is a feminist manifesto on who gets to shape our canon [and] a revelation for anyone who’s ever wondered who’s missing from the traditional literary landscape. This book practically demands that we rethink our shelves, ask who got left behind, and make space for voices that dared to speak up in a world that preferred them silent.” —BUST Magazine

On February 25th, I reviewed novelist/journalist Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, writing that it “hits you in the pit of the stomach from its very first pages. A tough book to read in these days of having that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach with every turn of the Trump/Musk news cycle, but a moving, beautiful and necessary book nonetheless.
It opens with a scene of his young daughter coming up to him at his computer with a spelling question. He is researching the destruction of Gaza, and has twenty tabs open with “footage of a girl not much older than my daughter, pulled out of the rubble after an Israeli airstrike. In another is a recording of a girl begging for help, shortly before her execution at the hands of Israeli snipers.” He quickly closes his computer. He wants to protect her.”

From March 17th, a book that reminds us of all the good, experienced, devoted people who make government work, the very people Trump and Elon Musk have demonized. Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service, edited by Michael Lewis. The government is a vast, complex system that Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss, and celebrate. It’s also our shared resource for addressing the biggest problems of society. And it’s made up of people, mostly unrecognized and uncelebrated, doing work that can be deeply consequential and beneficial to everyone.
Michael Lewis invited his favorite writers, including Casey Cep, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Vowell, and W. Kamau Bell, to join him in finding someone doing an interesting job for the government and writing about them. The stories they found are unexpected, riveting, and inspiring, including a former coal miner devoted to making mine roofs less likely to collapse, saving thousands of lives; an IRS agent straight out of a crime thriller; and the manager who made the National Cemetery Administration the best-run organization, public or private, in the entire country. Each essay shines a spotlight on the essential behind-the-scenes work of exemplary federal employees.

Also from March 17th, the story of a news satire site that continues to do great work today, even when the Trump administration can seem to be beyond parody. Funny Because It's True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire, by Christine Wenc. In 1988, a band of University of Wisconsin–Madison undergrads and dropouts began publishing a free weekly newspaper with no editorial stance other than “You Are Dumb.” Just wanting to make a few bucks, they wound up becoming the bedrock of modern satire over the course of twenty years, changing the way we consume both our comedy and our news. The Onion served as a hilarious and brutally perceptive satire of the absurdity and horrors of late twentieth-century American life and grew into a global phenomenon. Now, for the first time, the full history of the publication is told by one of its original staffers, author and historian Christine Wenc. Through dozens of interviews, Wenc charts The Onion’s rise, its position as one of the first online humor sites, and the way it influenced television programs like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Funny Because It’s True reveals how a group of young misfits from flyover country unintentionally created a cultural phenomenon.

From April 1st, a book from one of our most astute and prescient observers of the rise of Trump. CLICK HERE to read my review of the book last May. The Last American Road Trip: A Memoir, by Sarah Kendzior. It is one thing to study the fall of democracy, another to have it hit your homeland -- and yet another to raise children as it happens. The Last American Road Trip is one family’s journey to the most beautiful, fascinating, and bizarre places in the US during one of its most tumultuous eras. As Kendzior works as a journalist chronicling political turmoil, she becomes determined that her young children see America before it’s too late. So Kendzior, her husband, and the kids hit the road -- again and again.
Starting from Missouri, the family drives across America in every direction as cataclysmic events –- the rise of autocracy, political and technological chaos, and the pandemic –- reshape American life. Part memoir, part political history, The Last American Road Trip is one mother’s promise to her children that their country will be there for them in the future –- even though at times she struggles to believe it herself. "Kendzior is an absolutely terrific writer—a preeminent voice of her generation—and her love for this troubled country flows like a kind of lifeblood through her work....Every American, whatever their politics, will recognize a country that they love, that they miss—and that they might be able to reclaim." —Sebastian Junger
From May 12th, a close-up look at a young immigrant crossing the border and subsequent detention. Detained: A boy's journal of survival and resilience, by D. Esperanza, with Gerardo Iván Morales. The first-ever memoir of a child’s experience in detention on the US/Mexico border under President Trump’s infamous family separation policy.
D Esperanza was just thirteen years old when he lost his caregivers, his beloved grandmother and uncle. Since both of his parents were working and living in the United States, D was left on his own in a small town in Honduras. He quickly realized he simply could not make enough money to survive so he made the difficult decision to head north with his cousins and hopefully reunite with his parents in el norte.
When he is captured and processed at a facility, neither D nor his family are given an update on when he will be released or where he’ll go next. Over the next five months, he kept a journal of his experience. The pages tell a story of pain, cruelty, friendship, and resilience, a living testament to the reality of the border. Amidst the senseless inhumanity and violence of US immigration policy, D found hope in the friendship he and his fellow companions forged, and mentorship from one intrepid advocate who fought on his behalf named Gerardo Iván Morales.
From June 10th. He was Mr. Sulu in Star Trek in the 1960s, and today is one of the most astute anti-Trump people on social media. His memoir of coming out at age 68 is told in graphic novel form. It Rhymes With Takei, by George Takei and his team of graphic novel writers and illustrators Steven Scott, Justin Eisinger and Harmony Becker. George Takei has shown the world many faces: actor, author, outspoken activist, helmsman Sulu of the starship Enterprise in the original TV show and movies, living witness to the internment of Japanese Americans, and king of social media. But until October 27, 2005, there was always one piece missing—one face he did not show the world. There was one very intimate fact about George that he never shared…and it rhymes with Takei.

Now, for the first time ever, George shares the full story of his life in the closet, his decision to come out as gay at the age of 68, and the way that moment transformed everything. Following the phenomenal success of his first graphic memoir, They Called Us Enemy, George Takei reunites with the team of Harmony Becker, Steven Scott, and Justin Eisinger for a jaw-dropping new testament. From his earliest childhood crushes and youthful experiments in the rigidly conformist 1950s, to global fame as an actor and the terrible fear of exposure, to the watershed moment of speaking his truth and becoming one of the most high-profile gay men on the planet, It Rhymes with Takei offers a sweeping portrait of one iconic American navigating the tides of LGBTQ+ history.
From July 7th, a memoir by a man wrongly incarcerated and how he ultimately won his freedom, though not before becoming a ‘jailhouse lawyer’ and helping others get free. There is a great epilogue to this story: in the election this past November, he was elected clerk of Orleans Parish Criminal Court, the very office that helped jail him unjustly so many decades before. The Jailhouse Lawyer, by Calvin Duncan and Sophie Cull. Calvin Duncan was nineteen when he was incarcerated for a 1981 New Orleans murder he didn’t commit. The victim of a wildly incompetent public defense system and a badly compromised witness, Duncan was left to rot in the waking nightmare of confinement. Armed with little education, he took matters into his own hands.
At twenty-one, he filed his first motion from prison: “Motion for a Law Book,” which launched his highly successful, self-taught legal career. Trapped within this wholly corrupted system, Duncan became a legal advocate for himself and his fellow prisoners as an inmate counsel at the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola. Literature sustained his hope, as he learned the law in its shadow. “The legal system tried to destroy Calvin Duncan. But rather than submit, he used the law to fight back, both for himself and for hundreds of other incarcerated men. This brilliantly told story—at once maddening and miraculous—is among the most powerful indictments of our criminal justice system I’ve ever read.” —James Forman, Jr.

From September 16th, Jill Lepore takes a deep dive into the US Constitution. This was one of Barack Obama’s recommended books of 2025. We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, by Jill Lepore. Published on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding—the anniversary, too, of the first state constitutions—We the People offers a wholly new history of the Constitution. “One of the Constitution’s founding purposes was to prevent change,” Lepore writes. “Another was to allow for change without violence.” Relying on the extraordinary database she has assembled at the Amendments Project, Lepore recounts centuries of attempts, mostly by ordinary Americans, to realize the promise of the Constitution. Yet nearly all those efforts have failed. Although nearly twelve thousand amendments have been introduced in Congress since 1789, and thousands more have been proposed outside its doors, only twenty-seven have ever been ratified. More troubling, the Constitution has not been meaningfully amended since 1971. Without recourse to amendment, she argues, the risk of political violence rises. So does the risk of constitutional change by presidential or judicial fiat. "It is impossible to imagine a more instructive text on a more timely subject by a more accomplished historian."— Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny

And the final book of this very random trip down memory lane is from October 21st, and is a good book to steel us fro the electoral battle ahead in 2026. Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping a Democracy, by Joyce Vance. We’re in this together. For the past several years, Joyce Vance has signed off posts on her chart-topping Substack, "Civil Discourse", with these four words. In that time, she has guided readers through a continued erosion of democratic norms, the unprecedented felony conviction of an ex-president, and the constitutionally calamitous beginning to the second Trump administration. Here, Vance offers a blueprint for avoiding burnout and despair, and for strengthening our democratic muscle.

She is the constitutional law professor you never knew you needed, explaining the legal context and the political history— and why the rule of the law still matters. At the same time, she empowers the reader to do something, both as individuals and collectively.

Consider this the birth of a countermovement to Project 2025, a rallying cry for citizen engagement to combat the second Trump administration and save American democracy. “Joyce Vance’s optimism and faith in America is present on every page of this timely and inspiring book.” —Ruth Ben-Ghiat, New York Times bestselling author of Strongmen

And now, ON TO 2026!!!!!!!

I’m adding more books every week to my RESIST! 20% off promotion. The coupon code RESIST gets you 20% off any of the books featured there.

READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE

DAY	TIME EST/EDT	SERIES	EDITOR(S)
SUNDAY	4:00 PM	Let’s Talk BOOKS	Angela Marx
	6:00 PM	Young People’s Pavilion	The Book Bear
(LAST SUN OF THE MONTH)	7:30 PM	LGBTQ Literature	Chrislove
MONDAY	8:00 PM	The Language of the Night	DrLori
TUESDAY	8:00 PM	Contemporary Fiction Views	bookgirl
	10:00 PM	Nonfiction Views	DebtorsPrison
WEDNESDAY	8:00 PM	Bookchat	cfk et al.
THURSDAY	8:00 PM	Write On!	SensibleShoes
(FIRST THURS OF MONTH)	2:00 PM	Monthly Bookpost	AdmiralNaismith
FRIDAY	7:30 AM	WAYR?	Chitown Kev
(OCCASIONALLY)	8:00 PM	Books Go Boom!	Brecht
	9:30 PM	Classic Poetry Group	Angmar
SATURDAY	Noon	You Can't Read That! or Paul's Book Reviews	pwoodford
	9:00 PM	Books So Bad They’re Good*	Ellid (*on temporary hiatus)

Contemporary Fiction Views: Watching the night sky and kissing lips

bookgirl

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday December 30, 2025 · 5:00 PM PST

2025/12/30 · 17:00

Community life is singular and universal in the ways people celebrate and put up with each. Jon Kalman Stefansson's Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night proves this is as true in a small Icelandic village as it is in any metropolitan area.

In the village Stefansson chronicles, people look for and cherish love, coffee and alcohol. They keep track of others' foibles, work like fiends when inspired to do so and occasionally realize how much time has passed. Even though many don't often realize it, they search for meaning among the travails of daily life and in the night sky.

The book begins with a successful businessman who one day forsakes his expensive clothing and cars, and his family, for becoming an amateur astronomer. He spends his money on ancient tomes and learns Latin to be able to read the oldest texts available to him. The Astronomer, as he is called, leaves home to live in a shack, while his wife and one of his two children go to the city to live. His other son remains in the village, where he eventually discovers his previously unknown talents and adds to the beauty of the town.

Although not everything that happens is good or kind, there is a lightness to the descriptions in this facile translation by Philip Roughton that is as warming as a crackling fire in a comfortable home. For instance, this is a character who commits acts of betrayal:

He liked to sing during sorting, which was fine as long as he stuck to the low notes, women's knees trembled at the deepest of them, but his voice was so false when he went higher that it could conjure rain from a clear blue sky; dogs howled and the smoked lamb went rancid where it lay on slices of flatbread in the coffee lean-tos.

The description is light-handed and fanciful. As it carries on to the end, the eventual spoiling of the day is as clearly rancid as the lamb. That kind of description conveys the characters and what they do throughout this short book.

When things go wrong, as they do for people in any community, that deft lightness continues to be the underpainting that displays their endurance.

We've seen the night fall over the mountains and have stood outside as a mild tremor passed through the air, the birds looked up and then a ball of fire rose in the east. Why do we live; is it safe to answer such a question? Perhaps not, do we have any tasks besides kissing lips and so on? But sometimes, and especially right before sleep overcomes us at night and the day has passed with all its restlessness, when we're lying in bed, listening to our blood, and the darkness comes in through the windows, sometimes there awakens the deep and uncomfortable suspicion that this newly passed day was not used as it should have been, that's there's something we should have done but we simply don't know what it was. Have you ever considered that, throughout our history, we have never had it so good as now, that individuals have never had more opportunities to have an impact on their environment, that it has never been as easy to participate, to change things, but rarely has there been such lack of will -- how is this possible? Perhaps the answer can be found in another question: who profits most from this situation?

Stefansson includes his answer to who the profiteers are, and how they are not the best and brightest among us. But more important to the people in the village are watching the night sky and kissing lips.

May your new year be filled with more watching the night sky and kissing lips.

------------------------------—

Looking ahead, here are a few of the fiction works coming out next year I want to explore. Looking forward to your discoveries.

Vigil by George Saunders (January)

Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion.

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes (January)

Shortly after our narrator, a writer named Julian, begins this compact book by discussing the workings of involuntary memory, he interrupts himself with a bulletin to the reader: "There will be a story—or a story within the story—but not just yet.”

Of course, whether Departure(s) is mostly fiction or not, there is a lot of its author in it, including Barnes's reckoning with the blood disorder he has been living with since he was diagnosed in 2020, his long preoccupation with dying and grief, and his mordant sense of the indignities and lost opportunities we're prey to in love. The story he promises to deliver is a love story, that of two friends he met at university in the 1960s, that time of touted but rarely experienced sexual freedom. Julian played matchmaker to Stephen (tall, gangling, uncertain) and Jean (tart and attractive); as the third wheel he was deeply invested in the success of their love and insulted when they broke up. Time is swift, and forty years later, he tries again, watching as their rekindled affair produces joys, betrayals, and disappointments of a different order.

Brawler: Stories by Lauren Groff (February)

Read alone, each story in Lauren Groff’s electric collection is an individual triumph, bold, agile, and packed with power. Read together, they hum in exhilarating resonance. Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region -- from New England to Florida to California -- these nine stories reflect and expand upon a shared theme: the ceaseless battle between humans’ dark and light angels.

This is Not About Us by Allegra Goodman (February)

When their beloved sister passes away, Sylvia and Helen Rubinstein are unmoored. A misunderstanding about apple cake turns into a decade of stubborn silence. Busy with their own lives—divorces, dating, career setbacks, college applications, bat mitzvahs and ballet recitals—their children do not want to get involved. As for their grandchildren? Impossible.

Go Gentle by Maria Semple (April)

Adora Hazzard has it all figured out. A Stoic philosopher and divorcée, she lives a contented life on New York City’s Upper West Side. Having discovered that the secret to happiness is to desire only what you have, she’s applied this insight to blissful effect: relishing her teenage daughter, the freedom of being solo, and her job as a moral tutor for the twin boys of an old-money family. She’s even assembled a "coven"—like-minded women who live on the same floor in the legendary Ansonia—and is making active efforts to grow its membership. Adora’s carefully curated life is humming along brilliantly until a chance meeting with a handsome stranger.

Soon, her ordered world is upended by black-market art deals, secret rendezvous, and international intrigue . . . and her past—which she has worked so hard to bury—lands like a bomb in her present.

Last Night in Brooklyn by Xochitl Gonzalez (April)

At twenty-six, Alicia Canales Forten feels smothered by her future. She’s in a long-distance relationship, living at home with her mother’s beliefs, saving up for her wedding to a future doctor. But after Alicia ventures out one night in the neighborhood of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, she finds herself lured by the siren song of youth and possibility that the striving crowd of creatives holds, and moves in.

No one embodies this more than La Garza, a larger-than-life, up-and-coming fashion designer whose epic house parties fuel neighborhood lore. La Garza’s life, observed by Alicia from her apartment across the street, seems to hold the allure and fearlessness Alicia has never dared to imagine for herself.

But when Alicia’s wealthy banker cousin moves to the neighborhood, she finds herself increasingly drawn into both his and La Garza’s precarious lives.

Land by Maggie O'Farrell (June)

On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.

The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is unexpectedly sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás, and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both home?

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead (July)

From New York Times bestselling author and two-time Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead, an exuberantly entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York in the final volume of his Harlem Trilogy.

READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE

DAY	TIME EST/EDT	SERIES	EDITOR(S)
SUNDAY	4:00 PM	Let’s Talk BOOKS	Angela Marx
	6:00 PM	Young People’s Pavilion	The Book Bear
(LAST SUN OF THE MONTH)	7:30 PM	LGBTQ Literature	Chrislove
MONDAY	8:00 PM	The Language of the Night	DrLori
TUESDAY	8:00 PM	Contemporary Fiction Views	bookgirl
	10:00 PM	Nonfiction Views	DebtorsPrison
WEDNESDAY	8:00 PM	Bookchat	cfk et al.
THURSDAY	8:00 PM	Write On!	SensibleShoes
(FIRST THURS OF MONTH)	2:00 PM	Monthly Bookpost	AdmiralNaismith
FRIDAY	7:30 AM	WAYR?	Chitown Kev
(OCCASIONALLY)	8:00 PM	Books Go Boom!	Brecht
	9:30 PM	Classic Poetry Group	Angmar
SATURDAY	Noon	You Can't Read That! or Paul's Book Reviews	pwoodford
	9:00 PM	Books So Bad They’re Good*	Ellid (*on temporary hiatus)

Morning Open Thread: "Sitting in the Plainest Light, in the Silk of Morning”

officebss

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday December 29, 2025 · 3:44 AM PST

2025/12/29 · 03:44

________________________________________________________

“You can bail water 24/7, and no matter how good you
are at not sinking, you still have a hole in your boat.”

― Kelli Jae Baeli,
Crossing Paths

________________________________________________________

The national interest cannot be defined as a common interest of the
industrial, commercial, and financial companies of a country, because
there is no such common interest; nor can it be defined as the life,
liberty, and well-being of the citizens, because they are continually
being adjured to sacrifice their well-being, their liberty, and their
lives to the national interest. In the end a study of modern
history leads to the conclusion that the national interest
of every State consists in its capacity to make war.

― Simone Weil,
French philosopher, trade unionist,
political activist, and Christian mystic

________________________________________________________

Morning Open Thread is looking for contributors —
either occasional, or weekly. If interested, please
contact officebss or Ozarkblue for more information

Sekhmet-goddessofwar-tallBlackcoffeemug.jfif

So grab your cuppa, and join in.

__________________________________

13 poets born in December and
January, ending and beginning
a cycle of years — some new,
others whose words are still
remembered, while some have
been lost, only to be found again
________________________________________

December 29
________________________________

1893 – Vera Brittain born in Newcastle-under-Lyme, England, United Kingdom; English writer, poet, VAD nurse during WWI, journalist, novelist, pacifist, peace activist, socialist, suffragist, and feminist. She was the daughter of a well-to-do paper manufacturer. The family moved to Macclesfield, Chesire when she was 18 months old, and moved again when she was 11 to Buxton in Derbyshire. She was sent at age 13 to a boarding school where an aunt was co-principal, and in 1914, she began studying English Literature at Somerville College, Oxford, but delayed her studies beginning in 1915 to work as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse for much of WWI. She served initially at the Devonshire Hospital in Buxton, and later in London, Malta, and in France. While she was stationed close to the front at Etaples, her experience nursing German prisoners of war significantly influenced her journey towards internationalism and pacifism. Her brother, her fiancé, and two close friends were all killed in the war. She found returning to Oxford difficult, but became close friends with Winifred Holtby, and they shared a series of London flats after coming down from Oxford. In the 1920s, she was a widely published journalist. Brittain is best known for her novel Testament of Youth, based on her WWI experiences, which was published in 1933. In November 1966, she suffered a fall in a badly-lit London street en route to a speaking engagement at St Martin-in-the-Fields. She attended the engagement, but afterwards found she had fractured her left arm and broken the little finger of her right hand. These injuries began a physical decline in which her mind became more confused and withdrawn. She died at age 76 in March 1970.

The Lament of the Demobilised

by Vera Brittain
^.
'Four years,' some say consolingly. 'Oh well,
What's that ? You're young. And then it must have been
A very fine experience for you !'
And they forget
How others stayed behind and just got on -
Got on the better since we were away.
And we came home and found
They had achieved, and men revered their names,
But never mentioned ours;
And no-one talked heroics now, and we
Must just go back and start again once more.
'You threw four years into the melting-pot -
Did you indeed !' these others cry. 'Oh well,
The more fool you!'
And we're beginning to agree with them.
^.

________________________________________

December 30
________________________________

1865 – Rudyard Kipling born in British India; prolific English novelist, short-story writer, children’s author, poet, and journalist. Known for The Jungle Book, Kim, Just So Stories, The Light That Failed, and Captains Courageous, as well as his poems “Recessional”, “If”, and “Gunga Din.” Though he enthusiastically supported the “War to End All Wars,” privately he was deeply critical of how the British Army was fighting the war. He paid a very high price for his support of the war. His only son John immediately tried to join up, but was turned down by the Royal Navy because of his very poor eyesight, and was also turned down twice by the army. Kipling asked his friend Lord Roberts, a Colonel of the Irish Guards, to use his influence, and John was accepted into the Irish Guards in August 1915, just before his 18^th birthday. A month later, John Kipling was listed as “wounded and missing” in France. In the confusion of the ongoing battle, he was not found. In vain, Kipling and his wife searched field hospitals and spoke to his fellow soldiers. Eventually, it was determined that John was killed on September 27, 1915, and had been buried in France. Kipling wrote, “If any question why we died, / Tell them, because our fathers lied.” Because of his support for Britain’s expansive colonialism, Rudyard Kipling’s reputation has suffered, but he remains a consummate storyteller, and a memorable poet.

Recessional

by Rudyard Kipling

(1897)
^.
God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
^.
The tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
^.
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
^.
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
^.
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!
^.

“Recessional” from A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, published in 1943 by Charles Scribner’s Sons

________________________________

1917 – Yun Dong-ju aka Yoon Dong-ju or Dongju Yun, born in Longjing, Manchuria; Korean poet who grew up and wrote during Japanese Colonial rule (1910-1945) of Korea. He was educated at schools in Pyongyang (now the capital of North Korea) before attending Yonhi College in Seoul. In 1942, he went to Japan to study English literature at Japanese universities, but in 1943, he was arrested for “anti-Japanese activities” because he joined a movement for Korean independence. He was sent to the notorious Fukuoka Prison, where he died at age 27, of unrevealed causes. His book, Sky, Wind, and Stars, was published posthumously.

The Cricket and I

by Yun Dong-ju
^.
The Cricket and I
Talked each other
At a lawn.
Chirp! Chirp!
Chirp! Chirp!
^.
We made an appointment
Not to tell anybody,
To keep in our hearts.
^.
Chirp! Chirp!
Chirp! Chirp!
^.
The Cricket and I
Talked each other
At a bright moonlit night.
^.

“The Cricket and I” from Sky, Wind, and Stars, Yun Dong-ju poems — translation
© 2003 by Kim-nuyung Kim Richards and Steffen F. Richards — Asian Humanities Press

________________________________

1950 – Safiya Henderson-Holmes born in The Bronx, NY; African-American poet, professor, and anthologist. She published two collections of poetry, had her work included in multiple anthologies, and received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. For some time, she worked as a physical therapist at Harlem Hospital, and also assisted pregnant women with a natural birthing practice. After earning an MA from City College, Henderson-Holmes held a number of teaching posts She was an assistant professor at Syracuse University when she died of cancer at age 50 in April 2001. Her two poetry collections are Madness and a Bit of Hope and Daily Bread: Poems.

failure of an invention

by Safiya Henderson-Holmes
^.
i am not any of the faces
you have put on me america
^.
every mask has slipped
i am not any of the names
^.
or sounds you have called me
the tones have nearly
^.
made me deaf
this dark skin, both of us
^.
have tried to bleach
i can smell the cancer.
^.
this thick hair, these thick lips
both of us have tried to narrow
^.
begging entrance through
the needle of your eye
^.
some of me broken
in the squeeze
^.
and even as i carry
a bone of yours in my back
^.
your soul america
no matter what we’ve tried
^.
i’ve never been able to bear

________________________________________

December 31
________________________________

1936 – Clarence Major born in Atlanta, Georgia; prolific African-American short story writer, novelist, poet, painter, and anthologist. In 1959 became the founder-editor of the literary magazine Coercion Review. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California at Davis. As a finalist for the National Book Award, he won a Bronze Medal for his book Configurations: New and Selected Poems 1958-1998, and in 2015 he was honored with the “Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts” by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. His poetry collections include: Swallow the Lake; The Syncopated Cakewalk; Surfaces and Masks; Parking Lots; Down and Up; and Sporadic Troubleshooting.

Undulating Contours

by Clarence Major
^.
We’re both bourgeois audience
and performance.
We live with the dominance
of a certain tendency.
Yet we long for a joyous communion.
No doubt about it.
We’re headed to a blurred indefinite place.
Not that we want to go.
We certainly don’t fully believe
in its prospects.
The garbage truck comes.
Half the garbage is left in the can.
I ask what’s the context of the climate.
Yes, there’s a dominance
of a certain tendency.
It has become a rigid mission.
But not all is lost.
We make peace with our forebodings.
We love old movie posters and film noir.
We love trees reflected in water.
Shimmering, they somehow look coquettish.
We still read George Orwell.
We read Conrad too.
We watch voyeuristic melodramas.
We love silent cinema and the color mauve.
We say freedom, not emancipation.
Meanwhile, high in the hills above our city:
secret carvings on boulders.
We are struggling to understand them.
If we have the discipline
they may redefine us—for the better.
^.

________________________________

1969 – Jane Springer born in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee; American poet and academic. In 2007, her debut poetry collection, Dear Blackbird, won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize. Her second book, Murder Ballad, won the 2011 Beatrice Hawley Award. She also won the 2010 Whiting Award for Poetry. Springer has published a third collection, Moth, and Genocide: A Groundwork Guide, a nonfiction book designed for use in teaching young students. Springer is a professor of literature and creative writing at Hamilton College near Utica, New York.

Pretty Polly

by Jane Springer
^.
Who made the banjo sad & wrong?
Who made the luckless girl & hell bound boy?
Who made the ballad? The one, I mean,
where lovers gallop down mountain brush as though in love—
where hooves break ground to blood earth scent.
Who gave the boy swift words to woo the girl from home,
& the girl too pretty to leave alone? He locks one arm
beneath her breasts as they ride on—maybe her apron comes
undone & falls to a ditch of black-eyed susans. Maybe
she dreams the clouds are so much flour spilt on heaven's table.
^.
I've run the dark county of the heart this music comes from—but
I don't know where to hammer-on or to drop a thumb to the
haunted string that sets the story straight: All night Willie's dug
on Polly's grave with a silver spade & every creek they cross
makes one last splash. Though flocks of swallows loom—the one
hung in cedar now will score the girl's last thrill. Tell
me, why do I love this sawmill-tuned melancholy song
& thud of knuckles darkening the banjo face?
Tell me how to erase the ancient, violent beauty
in the devil of not loving what we love.
^.

________________________________________

January 1
________________________________

1911 – Audrey Wurdemann born in Seattle, American poet and novelist; at age 24, she became the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1935, for her collection, Bright Ambush. She was the great-granddaughter of Percy Bysshe Shelly and published five books of poems, her first, The House of Silk, when she was only 16. After graduating from the University of Washington, she traveled through Asia. She married Joseph Auslander in 1932, and they moved to New York City, then to Washington DC when he was named as the first Consultant in Poetry (1937-1941) to the Library of Congress. They collaborated on two novels, My Uncle Jan and The Islanders. She died at age 49 in May 1960.

Persephone

by Audrey Wurdemann
^.
When she first came there, Pluto wept,
Streaking cinders down his face,
While she competently slept
In her alloted place.
She catalogued the little hells,
Cupboarded the fires,
And placed in tabulated wells
Old lost desires.
She made His Lordship stoop to gather
Ashes from the floor;
She regulated stormy weather,
And polished Hades’ door.
The Devil was unhappy in
Such cleanliness and space.
She said it was a mortal sin,
The way he’d kept the place!
Now, after several million years,
(For time can reconcile),
He tip-toes with quite human fears
About their domicile.
^.

________________________________

1959 – Elise Paschen born in Chicago IL; American poet, anthologist, educator, member of the Osage nation, and daughter of renowned prima ballerina Maria Tallchief. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Poetry in Motion, a program which places poetry posters in subways and buses across the country. Dr. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poetry collections are Houses: Coasts (1985), Infidelities (1996), Bestiary (2009), and The Nightlife (2017). She was the Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America (1988-2001), and has edited numerous anthologies, including Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America (1997).

Parents at Rest

Fairfax, Oklahoma

by Elise Paschen
^.
How, in the afternoon,
after performing chores
in sync – grocery shopping,
his cooking, her cleaning up –
they would lie on the angled couch,
toe-to-toe, his side, hers,
books in hand, his biographies,
her murder mysteries,
listening to Beethoven.
He’d nod off while she read
to the rhythm of his breath.
Outside the open windows
waves thumped on stony beach,
seagulls buffeting wind.
^.
The houses of their birth,
both yellow brick, now crumbled:
one perched hilltop above
pasture, the other, Prairie-school
city house with sunken garden.
How he waited for her
these many years in the graveyard
below her childhood home
where now they sleep together
beneath the rhapsody
of meadowsweet.
^.

________________________________________

January 2
________________________________

1894 – Robert Nathan born in New York City; American novelist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and children’s author; known for the novels The Bishop’s Wife (which was made into the film that was nominated in 1948 for a Best Picture Oscar) and Portrait of Jennie. His poetry collections include: A Winter Tide; The Green Leaf; Dunkirk: A Ballad; and Evening Song: Selected Poems. He was a screenwriter for MGM in the 1940s, and also wrote for radio and television. Nathan was a cousin of poet Emma Lazarus and jurist Benjamin Cardozo. He died at age 91 in May 1985.

At the Symphony

by Robert Nathan
^.
The ‘cellos, setting forth apart,
Grumbled and sang, and so the day
From the low beaches of my heart,
Turned in tranquility away.
^.
And over weariness and doubt
Rose up the horns like bellied sails,
Like canvas of the soul flung out
To rising and orchestral gales;
^.
Passed on and left irresolute
The ebony, the silver throat . . .
Low over clarinet and flute
Hung heaven upon a single note.
^.

________________________________

1960 – Rebecca Elson born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada; Canadian-American astronomer, essayist, and poet. She earned her PhD at the Institute of Astronomy and Christ’s College Cambridge, where she was awarded an an Isaac Newton Studentship, an overseas research student award, and a vice chancellor’s bursary. Her PhD thesis, ‘The rich star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud’ which developed the Elson-Fall-Freeman (EFF) luminosity profile and resulted in the discovery of unexpectedly extended profiles in star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud. In 1987, she was the first-named author on a major review article on star clusters for the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, after which she took up a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe College in 1989, where she taught creative writing, followed by a term teaching a Harvard expository writing course on science and ethics. In 1989, Elson was the youngest astronomer selected to serve on a U.S. National Academy of Sciences decennial review of the field. In the early 1990s she returned to the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge, UK to accept the research position focusing on globular clusters, chemical evolution and galaxy formation. She was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma at the age of 29, and died 10 years later in May 1999. Her collection of poetry and essays, A Responsibility to Awe, was published posthumously.

Antidotes to Fear of Death

by Rebecca Elson
^.
Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.
^.
Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.
^.
Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:
^.
No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.
^.
And sometimes it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:
^.
To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.
^.

________________________________________

January 3
________________________________

1892 – J.R.R. Tolkien born as John Ronald Reuel Tolkien in Bloemfontein in South Africa, where his English parents worked in a bank; English author, philologist, and poet. His mother took him and his younger brother back to England in 1895. In addition to being the beloved British author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tolkien was also a philologist, poet, and academic. He graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, in 1915, with first-class honors. Tolkien reluctantly served in WWI, as he wrote in 1941 in a letter to his son Michael: “In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly. It was a nasty cleft to be in for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage.” Finding himself commanding enlisted men in France, who were mainly miners and factory workers, he lamented, “The most improper job of any man … is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.” Tolkien was at the Somme in 1916, and his battalion attacked Regina Trench, but he was invalided out a few weeks later because he had contracted trench fever, a disease carried by the lice which infested the trenches. Weak and emaciated, he spent the remainder of the war alternating between hospitals and garrison duties, being deemed medically unfit for general service. In July, 1919, he was taken off active service, with a temporary disability pension, then he left the army in November, 1920. Tolkien next went to work at the Oxford English Dictionary, mainly on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter W. After that, he took a post as a reader in English language at the University of Leeds, the youngest professor there. Because he was married, he often privately tutored undergraduates from the women’s colleges, as it was not considered suitable for bachelor dons to tutor undergraduate maidens. In 1925, he returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, with a fellowship at Pembroke College, where he wrote The Hobbit, and the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings. He later became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford (1945-1959). Though he was trained at the beginning of WWII as a codebreaker, he was informed after completing the course that his services would not be required. Tolkien finally completed The Lord of the Rings in 1948. He retired from academic life in 1959, and received steadily increasing public attention and literary fame. In a 1972 letter, he deplored having become a cult-figure, but admitted that “even the nose of a very modest idol … cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense!” He lost his beloved wife Edith in 1971, and died himself 21 months later, on September 2, 1972, at the age of 81.

CAT

by J.R.R. Tolkien
^.
The fat cat on the mat
may seem to dream
of nice mice that suffice
for him, or cream;
but he free, maybe,
walks in thought
unbowed, proud, where loud
roared and fought
his kin, lean and slim,
or deep in den
in the East feasted on beasts
and tender men.
The giant lion with iron
claw in paw,
and huge ruthless tooth
in gory jaw;
the pard dark-starred,
fleet upon feet,
that oft soft from aloft
leaps upon his meat
where woods loom in gloom —
far now they be,
fierce and free,
and tamed is he;
but fat cat on the mat
kept as a pet
he does not forget.^.

“pard” = leopard

“CAT” from Poems and Stories, by J.R.R.Tolkien, 1994 edition – Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

________________________________

Anne Stevenson born on January 3, 1933, to American parents in Cambridge, England, where her father, C.L. Stevenson, was studying philosophy under I. A. Richards and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The family returned to America when she was six months old. She grew up in New England, while her father taught at Harvard and Yale. Stevenson played cello and piano, and assumed she would be a professional musician. But while studying music and languages at the University of Michigan, at the age of 19 she began to lose her hearing, so she shifted to writing instead. After graduating, she moved to the United Kingdom, and lived and worked almost entirely there, at Cambridge, the University of Dundee in Scotland, at Oxford, North Wales, and Durham. While she considered herself an American, she said, “I belong to an America which no longer really exists.” Stevenson also wrote, “it took me two unhappy marriages and three children to make me reconsider my assumptions.” She was the author of over a dozen poetry collections, and several books of essays and literary criticism, as well as a controversial biography of poet Sylvia Plath, and two critical studies of Elizabeth Bishop. In 2007, she was honored with the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. Stevenson died from heart failure on September 14, 2020, at the age of 87.

Making Poetry

by Anne Stevenson
^.
‘You have to inhabit poetry
if you want to make it.’
^.
And what’s to ‘inhabit‘ ?
^.
^.To be in the habit of, to wear
words, sitting in the plainest light,
in the silk of morning, in the shoe of night;
a feeling bare and frondish is surprising air;
familiar…rare.
^.
And whats ‘to make’ ?
^.
To be and to become words’ passing
weather ; to serve a girl on terrible
terms, embark on voyages over voices,
evade the ego-hill, the misery-well,
the siren-hiss of success, publish,
success, success, success.
^.
And why inhabit, make, inherit poetry?
^.
Oh, it’s the shared comedy of the worst
blessed; the sound leading the hand;
a worldlife running from mind to mind
through the washed rooms of the simple senses;
one of those haunted, undefendable, unpoetic
crosses we have to find.
^.

___________________________________________________________

G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!

_________________________________________________

_Visual:_{Sekhmet - Ancient Egytian Goddess of War}

📚 LGBTQIA+ Lit: The Intermediaries by Brandy Schillace Pt. 2; Reverses, Rifts, Entanglements

Clio2

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday December 28, 2025 · 4:54 PM PST

2025/12/28 · 16:54

Filtered negative image, from photo taken at one of several costume galas held by the Institute for Sexual Science, Berlin. From 1919 to 1933 the Institute provided health services, psychotherapy, marriage counseling, informational outreach, community connections, and in some cases, short- or long-term lodging to persons of all genders and sexualities. Undated. (Filtering, Clio2)

all ignorance toboggans into know
and trudges up to ignorance again:

--e.e. cummings

History never travels in straight lines. It's a long arc, as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King famously said. And anything but smooth.

At times, it seems like history is folding back on itself.

Tonight's installment of LGBTQAI+ Literature isn't just a review. It's as much a set of reflections cast by last month's Part I.

I will tell you straight up, this is another tough read, and was a tough one to write, more than expected. Take breaks if you need to, blow it off if you need to, I won't be offended, it's something I promised and all I have to offer just now. With utmost respect.

So if you're still here, we're again discussing

====================

The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story, by Brandy Schillace. W W. Norton and Co., 2025

====================

If you didn't happen to see that earlier column, no worries; what follows should stand on its own.

(But if you'd like to look back, it's here.)

In brief, The Intermediaries tells the story of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld and the LGBTQ-supporting scientific and activist community he established in Berlin, which flourished until the Nazis destroyed it in 1933.

He and his associates succeeded remarkably in advancing scientific understanding around sex and gender; educating segments of the general public; making life better for many gay people; and helping trans individuals--including, in some cases, through gender-affirming surgeries. Activists including Hirschfeld got tantalizingly close to persuading lawmakers to legalize gay sex between consenting adults; only for the Nazi onslaught to bring everything down.

Tragedies followed: deaths, imprisonments, returns to the closet, destruction en masse of books and scientific notes. Hirschfeld himself died in exile, too soon.

Yet The Intermediaries also tells of escapes, survival against the odds, documents smuggled to safety, ideas seeded abroad. So that by the 1950s, a process began--in the U.S.--of picking up the interrupted threads.

Besides its excellent writing and narrative drive, the scholarly apparatus in The Intermediaries allows a reader easily to look back in the text, separate specific threads and rethink from various perspectives.

In Part 1 last month I was emphasizing what was accomplished by Hirschfeld and what survived.

Other angles come easily to mind. Commonalities stand out between our situation today and the Nazi takeover that ended Germany's liberal Weimar Republic. We are even dealing with actual neo-Nazis! Is the same arc fated? What are the similarities and differences?

Questioning, I employed The Intermediaries' timeline, thumbnail biographies, glossary, index and footnotes to thread back and forth.

The bibliography clued me in to another eye-opening and helpful volume, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of Modern Identity by Robert Beachy (Knopf, 2014). The Berlin of Christopher Isherwood. Of Cabaret (more the musical than the film). In what follows, I've also drawn on Beachy here and here. Plus, my own viewpoint's partly folded in.

So, in this installment I wanted to try a sort of social mapping and see if that might have any lessons in it. Here goes.

...

What today we would call LGBTQ+ activism in Germany started very modestly: with one person.

Karl Ulrichs

He began way back in the 1860s, before Germany was even a unified nation.

Ulrichs, a lawyer, had given deep thought and study to the subject of homosexuality -- and lost a government career over his sexual orientation.

Ulrich began to publish his perspective, the first public voice representing Germany's mostly closeted gay male community. He described gay men as a supressed minority within the population, born with a "female soul."

In 1867 Ulrich dared to give the first public speech ever, defending homosexuality as an inborn quality, not a choice. This was at a major conference of jurists assembled from all over the loosely organized German Confederacy.

To quote Schillace:

He spoke of the rights of homosexuals, their citizenship, and of how many had been shamed into suicide.

In the process, Ulrichs even deliberately outed himself. But his hopes were vain.

The room erupted in shouts and hisses. "Crucify him!" the audience cried.

He had to leave without finishing that speech.

Four years later the nation unified under an emperor. Jurists set about developing a uniform code of justice. Much of the new criminal code simply was lifted from Prussian law.

Ulrichs campaigned against national adoption of Paragraph 175, Prussia's stringent ban on "sodomy." Parts of Germany had been less judgmental about homosexual relations between consenting adults. Bavaria especially had served as a haven.

Ulrichs lost this fight when Bavaria too signed onto Section 175. He moved away to another haven, Italy, and there, age 73, he died.

But a spark had caught. Just two years after Ulrichs' death, and greatly influenced by his writings, Magnus Hirschfeld formed the Scientific Humanitarian Committee (SHC), aiming to get Paragraph 175 repealed.

This was -- think of it -- 1897, seventeen years before the first World War! The SHC would go on to serve as an activist hub for some 35 years.

The gay community, including the SHC, had its divisions. Some of these might seem paralleled in U.S. history. Others not so much.

The masculinists

Hirschfeld had a real knack for bringing people together. He wanted the SHC to be as broad a coalition as possible. This meant including figures we might abhor.

Adolf Brand, among others, represented a subset of gay men who detested everything they associated with women or femininity.

These men pictured themselves as avatars of an ancient Greek ethos, in which two warriors might bond for life, or a mature man form a relationship with a youth, becoming both lover and mentor. Brand dismissed women as negligible beings, only of use for birthing children.

He also edited a journal, Der Eigene, which pushed a gospel of extreme individualism, drawing on Nietsche and very much prefiguring Ayn Rand.

Strategically, Brand believed that the legislature could be convinced to repeal Paragraph 175 if sufficient well-respected men in high places were to to out themselves en masse. Some did; but most of even his fellow masculinists disagreed with the tactic and nothing came of it.

Hirschfeld disagreed with Brand's male-supremacist ethos, but reached out to anyone who might contribute to his initial DHS project. This was a petition for repeal of Paragraph 175; Hirschfeld and his associates hoped to gather so many signatures from respected and influential persons that the national legislature would rethink the law.

Brand and his associates eventually quit the HSC over the committee's inclusion of women.

Their ideology aligned with a persistent masculinist theme in German society: militarism under the Kaiser; between the wars, a proliferation of boys' clubs, promoting single-sex recreation and physical fitness; finally, Nazi propaganda.

Highly performative maculinity did not protect this group. Hitler tolerated a gay male enclave within the Nazi party for only as long as he had a need, then disposed of them. By that time, Brand had already lost his audience and gone silent; he survived till an Allied bomb found him, in the last year of WWII.

The feminists

Like the U.S. and England, Germany had a substantial women's movement leading into the 20th century.

Women were joining the SHC by 1901. These included lesbians. Hirschfeld "saw women as critical allies in the fight for homosexual emancipation and the rights of sexual and gender nonconforming people as human beings..." Schillace writes. They were among the most effective members.

Notably Helene Stöcker -- a co-founder of the feminist League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform -- became a member of the SHC board of directors. She and Hirschfeld joined forces, campaigning together for homosexual rights and female reproductive self-determination, including birth control and abortion.

Lesbian relationships, initially ignored by Paragraph 175, had been prohibited before in only one German province -- Austria. As feminists feared, by 1909 a proposal was placed before the national legislature to extend Paragraph 175 over lesbians as well. It was averted.

With formation of the Weimar Republic after WWI, German women gained the vote. Issues remained including the quest for reproductive self-determination and no-fault divorce.

At the time there seems to have been little or no public discussion about whether trans women ought to count as women; they simply lived as such. Hirschfeld also assisted a few trans men to transition.

Women were prominent in an international movement for sexual reform on all fronts, which started in Germany and was destined to seed a legacy elsewhere.

Yhe Nazi party -- formed in 1920 -- framed feminists as "conspiring with homosexuals and Jews against German men."

Hirschfeld was Jewish as well as a campaigner for both gay rights and women's rights: trifecta. Hitler demonized Hirschfeld from the start. He literally was labeled "public enemy number one."

Not long into Hitler's start, a Nazi-inspired mob attacked with fireworks a meeting where Hirschfeld was to speak. Hirschfeld was then followed to another city by the same group and ambushed in the street, sustaining a skull fracture.

Non-activists

Not everyone, of course, was politically active. Some thought elite connections kept them safe. Others were fully consumed in just surviving. And politics was, for the most part, a pursuit for bourgeois and professional classes.

Pilot fish

A metaphor (responsibility for this one is mine): "Pilot fish" are a species known for living in the shadow of a much larger creature such as a shark. These fish benefit their companion by removing external parasites. In turn the pilot fish are tolerated and indirectly receive protection from other predators.

Kaiser Wilhelm II was a very big fish. He ruled Germany from 1888 until establishment of the Weimar Republic after WWI.

Among the Kaiser's courtiers, friends and advisers were a number of gay men. With a little discretion, and in the privacy available to the upper class, surely they ran no risk of trouble over their sexuality.

Until they did.

First to fall was Friedrich Alfred Krupp, wealthy scion and executive of the armaments firm. Krupp became a target because of liaisons with underage boys.

A police inspector, who made it his business to surveil the gay population, included Krupp's name in a set of index cards he forwarded to the Kaiser. Wilhelm destroyed the cards unread.

Then an indiscretion led to Krupp's ejection from otherwise liberal Italy. People talked. A blackmail letter reached Krupp's wife, who turned to the Kaiser himself for help.

Schillace:

"...Wilhelm did not suddenly agitate for homosexual freedom. Instead he destroyed the blackmail letter and arranged for four psychiatrists to have Margarethe briefly committeed to an asylum for the insane...."

This failed to quash the Krupp story. A newspaper reporter then named Krupp in print as a pederast.

Krupp, afraid to sue for libel, took his own life.

It was just a prequel.

The next round starting in 1907, proved yet more serious. Embroiled in the scandal this time were the Kaiser's chief confidant, Philip, Prince of Eulenberg; Lieutenant General Kuno von Moltke, commandant of Berlin and another close friend of Eulenberg; Raymond Lecomte, the French ambassador in Germany, often socializing with Eulenberg and appearing the virtual stereotype of "effeminate gay"; and the chancellor of the Reich, Franz Josef von Bülow.

This in-group was already much resented as having formed an insulating bubble around the Kaiser. The scandal's fallout threatened to compromise Wilhelm himself.

In a time of sensitive negotiations, suspicion was raised that secret information had been leaked to the Frenchman by Eulenberg, or possibly even Wilhelm himself.

The fuse was lit by the selfsame reporter as before. Schillace again:

[Journalist Maximilian] Harden claimed that he wasn't against homosexuals...only that they shouldn't be in positions of power where they could undermine the masculine character of the country. Harden....Homosexuals, he claimed, were a 'pink' international group...united...'in a brotherhood of protection and defense'....

Foreshadowing our McCarthy era, Harden framed this alleged gay cabal as an inherent danger to national security. He compared gays to Communists -- and alluded to conspiracy thinking about Jews as well.

Harden claimed actual treason on the part of Eulenberg.

There followed a long-running, eye-crossing, often ironic series of lawsuits that entrained even more people, including masculinist Adolf Brand.

Harden would lose the libel case but win the high-profile public relations battle.

Von Moltke, without a scrap of evidence for any homosexual behavior, would find himself an adjudicated homosexual -- ironically, due to some well-meaning testimony by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld.

Eulenberg would be convicted of perjury. Brand was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Beyond that, in Schillaces's words,

...the aristocracy came under fire....accused...of being...unmanly and unfit for office. What had begun as an inconsequential libel case now threatened the Kaiser's own masculinity...[H]e enacted a purge of state....He is also rumored to have suffered a nervous breakdown.

One survey in the early 1920s counted 12,000 gay men in Germany who were Nazis or adhered to other right-wing parties.

The fate of Ernst Röhm as a pilot fish in Hitler's inner circle is all too well known. The so-called "Night of the Long Knives" (June 30-July 2, 1934) comprised a still-unknown number of extrajudicial executions, including the entire leadership of the Storm Troopers, headed by long-time Hitler loyalist Röhm. Hitler claimed a conspiracy against himself, and his real motives were probably mixed; but he explicitly cited Röhm's homosexuality.

"The life which the [SA] Chief of Staff and a circle around him began to lead was intolerable from any National Socialist viewpoint," Hitler stated.

The survivalists

Dodging the radar as well as they could is where you would likely have found most gay German men. Their situation: much like that in the U.S. before decriminalization.

In one sense, avoiding trouble was fairly easy: Paragraph 175 had been narrowly written, and proof of a crime had to be direct.

A remarkably free press allowed for plenty of information sharing. Gay and lesbian-oriented publications were openly sold on newsstands, for example.

On the other hand, an arrest was possible for less-than-criminal behavior, if it even in theory could have scandalized even one member of the general public. Cross-dressing in public was also illegal. For the respectable, blackmail remained a threat.

Beachy's Gay Berlin describes the kind of semi-clandestine gay meeting places frequented by ordinary people, from tiny working-class dive bars to elaborate ballrooms where straight people dropped in to gawp. Any might be raided by the police, but some parts of the city saw less harassment, and certain establishments might be amost exempt.

In the ever-worsening economic decline after WWI, out-of-work young men, gay or straight, in increasing numbers -- despite the risks -- rented themselves out to gay customers, or at least tried.

Hirschfeld himself might resort to manipulating the law, when it could be managed.

Describing trans women and men as invisibly intersex, for example, could gain them a life-saving license to "cross-dress." Court testimony that an arrested gay man was suffering from mental illness might spare him a prison sentence, though the tactic risked conflating homosexuality itself with mental illness -- the position of, among others, Hirschfeld's contemporary Sigmund Freud.

The shifty allies

In the 1920s what seemed like one and then another chance arose to persuade the legislature into ditching Paragraph 175.

At the same time, the organizational scene got a lot more complicated.

Kurt Hiller, a young lawyer in the HSC, more interested in justice than in science, proposed that all homosexual organizations should join up and form an Action Committee. He included SHC, the Friendship Society -- a more generally liberal and pacifist group -- and once again, the masculinist Brand. Hiller wanted to fight for Jewish rights along those of both gays and women. For a while he held it together. In the event, however, Hiller ended up pushing Hirschfeld out of his own HSC.

Several other groups, including women's organizations, combined to create a Cartel for the Reform of the Sexual Penal Code, seeking broad reforms in women's rights as well as rights for homosexuals.

A political publisher, Friedrich Radzuzweit, formed the League for Human Rights. He created a very broad mainstream coalition, but that very fact made it difficult for the members to work together; and he sidelined women, thinking little of their abilities. Radzuzweit's group also distinguished between "respectable" gays deserving legal protection, and the un-respectable: rent boys, trans people, effeminate gays, and those who failed to measure up to the gender binary. Hirschfeld strongly objected to this distinction; Hiller, not so much.

In 1921, the Action Committee leaped into action, responding to a draft revision of Paragraph 175. They impressed the Minister of Justice with an all-day presentation at the HSC and were optimistic. But before the legislators could vote, the justice minister retired. The legislature turned about and made the paragraph more stringent.

In 1929, activists were optimistic once again. An advisory committee recommended repealing the hated paragraph; but did so in such a way that Hirschfeld's hopes were dashed -- recommending a crackdown on sex under 21 and outlawing, in very broad language, any exchange of "money or influence."

In any case, it was too late. The nations was in turmoil, the economy desperate; legislature never voted on the recommendations.

When Hitler came to power he tightened Paragraph 175 still farther. And instead of a prison sentence, gay men were sent to the camps; and lesbians, if detected, were forced into bearing children "for the Reich."

It's a terrible place to end the story; but remember, please, there were still survivors; and the legacy of these activists has carried on. So that in spite of everything, in spite of very legitimate apprehensions, we are still in a better place at the moment than Germany in the Great Depression.

I have a lot of thoughts about the patterns revealed by this history, the ones that seem to match the present or recent past, the ones the don't, the lessons we might take.

But at the moment, I'm exhausted and probably, so are you.

To the chase:

…

Is history folding back upon itself?

The poet William Yeats thought it always would.

Another Troy must rise and set,

Another lineage feed the crow,

Another Argo's painted prow

Drive to a flashier bauble yet...

.

--"Two Songs From a Play," 1928

But is that true?

I don't think so.

Because we are not where we were, and the world is not where it was, before all of that happened.

You can never step into the same river twice.

--Heraclitus of Ephesus (fragment), ca. 500 B.C.

Moreover, I do not, will not, believe that any of the many losses, and tragedies along the way, were utterly in vain.

So, in memoriam:

Nor is the earth the less, nor loseth aught,

For whatsoever from one place doth fall

Is with the tide unto another brought,

And there is nothing lost but may be found....if sought.

--Edmund Spencer, The Faery Queen, Book V, 1596

And from from Congresswoman Shontel Brown (D-OH), in closing, a final thought:

The arc of the moral universe will bend toward justice—but only if we pull it.

…

Footnote: I still haven't really done justice to this very compelling volume, so dense with fact and feeling. For instance, I've almost completely neglected the science and philosophical issues twined into the human lives and political struggles.

The Intermediaries has now collected three different literary awards and recognitions (I think, last count). Simultaneously, the author reports getting death threats.

Par for the era. :-/

If you're inclined to follow up, in lieu of Amazon you could try online the Literate Lizard (DK's DebtorsPrison) or Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores.

I guess we could think about whether it's worth doing an open thread next time, for further discussion of this...or something else.

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📚 LGBTQIA+ Lit: The Intermediaries by Brandy Schillace Pt. 2; Reverses, Rifts, Entanglements