San Francisco’s School Board Is Spending $600,000 To Destroy A Mural

Bari Weiss: “The notion of erasing art has an American pedigree. The [immigrant New Deal-era artist] Victor Arnautoff was intimately familiar with it, having been interrogated in 1956 by the House Un-American Activities Committee for drawing a caricature of Vice President Richard Nixon. But I suspect he would have been surprised to learn that more than 60 years later, progressives in charge of educating San Francisco’s children are merrily following this un-American playbook.” – The New York Times

Why Do So Many Ignore The Suffering In The Poems Of Mary Oliver And Elizabeth Bishop?

Maybe because it’s easier on certain types of reviewers and critics to ignore clear evidence of suffering and pain? “Oliver and Bishop share a clear appetite for animal flail and gore and death. But many readers don’t seem to make very much of this. Critics praise the work, but tend to smile gently, indulgently, upon Bishop’s rhymes, her received forms and elegant impersonality, Oliver’s ‘old-fashioned’ subjects.” – LitHub

The Author Who Just Won The Dylan Thomas Prize On Code-Switching And Superpowers In London

Guy Gunaratne, whose novel is written in ”a pungent first-person patois,” explains that of course he speaks differently to an interviewer. “publishing is pretty middle class and I’ve had to accommodate. In London, you learn to code-switch quite well and I’ve always thought of that as a superpower in a way. You’re able to express yourself with different vocabulary in different situations, not through any pretence but because the way you express yourself matters, and your social condition is inherited through your inheritance of dialect.” – The Guardian (UK)

Isabelle Sarli, Whose Films Challenged Censors And Created A Sensation In Argentina And The World, Has Died At 89

“Sarli became an instant sex symbol in her feature film debut, in El Trueno Entre las Hojas (Thunder Among the Leaves) in 1958, when she became the first woman to appear fully nude in a mainstream Argentine movie” – and during Argentina’s military dictatorship, her movies were censored, one not being shown until the return of democracy. – The New York Times