For the past few weeks, you can’t open any social media platform without seeing Europeans visiting for the World Cup and discovering the America they never knew existed. The reports became so widespread that even the mainstream media began to notice. But these visitors also did something else – they reminded us of the great country Americans themselves forgot existed.
Following Keir Starmer’s resignation Monday, Britain will now have its seventh prime minister in a decade. That decade of instability started officially when Britain voted to leave the European Union in the vote known as Brexit. Douglas Murray argues in The Free Press that Britain’s leaders forgot how to lead. Arthur Reynolds at The Critic Magazine says the Civil Service was the ruin of Starmer. And writer Fred de Frossard looks at the decade and explains why Brexit was right.
It was the title that attracted me to David Livewell’s new poetry collection, Pass and Stow: Poems. It sounded like something related to transportation or hauling freight. It turned out to be people’s last names.
As Livewell explains, John Pass and John Stow worked in the foundry in Philadelphia that recast the Liberty Bell in 1753. The foundry was in the same neighborhood where Livewell grew up in the 1970s. In his words, the two men “serve as reminders about the city’s layered past and what outward and inward repair can achieve.”
In the collection, Livewell applies the idea of layered past and repair to tell a story through poetry. And he is a grand storyteller.
Until the late 1970s, my reading of science fiction was limited to the stories and novels of Ray Bradbury, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, and The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. I didn’t have any inherent bias against science fiction; it was more my reading interests were in other directions.
For some reason, I picked up a paperback edition of Lord Valentine’s Castle by Robert Silverberg. Then I went to the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov (published in the 1950s, it may explain American politics of the last decade). Then the novels of Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. And Arthur C. Clarke, whose Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood’s Endremain among my favorite books. But as much as I loved the writing of J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings, even then I knew how much it was changing science fiction. Fantasy was taking over.
Years passed. Reading interests changed. And then the old memories stirred when I read The Shivering Ground by Sara Barkat. The wonderful graphic version she did of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space, was another reminder, even though it’s usually called a horror story. And now she has a new novel, Otherside, which is about as close as you can get to mainstream science fiction as you can.
