Set in Turkey and filmed on location in Germany with no attempt to hide the artifice, the trenchantly honest and terrifically acted new film from The Teachersβ Lounge director Ilker Γatak might be the most important film yet made about Donald Trumpβs America. Though it obviously has more specific ties to Turkeyβs authoritarian President Recep Tayyip ErdoΔan, Yellow Letters has plenty to share with western audiences about the role of art in political protest and the myriad forms that cancel culture can take.Β
So many of my fellow Americans think everything is about us β and also, apparently, that anything thatβs not about us isnβt worth paying attention to.Β
The Terlingua TardisΒ
A decade ago Robert Macfarlane published a wonderful book called Landmarks β I reviewed it here β which argues for the preservation and extension of the accurate description of our natural environments. The book collects, from a range of British places, local words for local things, and Macfarlane calls that collection his Counter-Desecration Phrasebook. It occurs to me that we need many Counter-Desecration Phrasebooks to help us protect and preserve what Gandalf calls “all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands.”
I’ve been trying to tutor Angus in the need for a sober and reflective Lent, but I don’t think he’s getting the concept.
The current POTUS issues a great many insults, but his linguistic capabilities are extremely limited, so he simply recirculates the same handful of vague descriptors: “loser,” “weak,” “traitor.” How dull. Let’s remember that American politicians used to have some skill in the art of invective. For instance, here, from 115 years ago, is Hiram Johnson, the Governor of California, on the publisher of the Los Angeles Times:
In the city of San Francisco we have drunk to the very dregs of infamy. We have had vile officials, we have had rotten newspapers. But we have had nothing so vile, nothing so low, nothing so debased, nothing so infamous in San Francisco as Harrison Gray Otis. He sits there in senile dementia with gangrene heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all the things that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy. This man Otis is the one blot on the banner of southern California; he is the bar sinister on your escutcheon. My friends, he is the one thing that all Californians look at when, in looking at southern California, they see anything that is disgraceful, depraved, corrupt, crooked, and putrescent β that, that is Harrison Gray Otis!
In church yesterday we began the service with the Great Litany. As the choir repeatedly circled the congregation, with our music minister chanting the versicles and all of us responding to them, I felt myself part of a much larger phenomenon, the penitential procession of the whole Church as we enter Lent. Good Lord, deliver us … We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord … Son of God, we beseech thee to hear us.
I can’t remember whether my review of a collection of poems by Czeslaw MiΕosz has previously been liberated from its paywall, but it’s free to read now.
Itβs a weird time, to say the very least, to be putting out a book about curiosity and wonder and freedom and fun and humor and imperfection and magic. But itβs also a time when, I think, we could desperately use those things in our lives. Watching my kids draw and make music and come alive to the world unlocked something in me that Iβve been trying to get into book form for over 10 years.