I have been searching for magic realist works of Iranian fiction for a while. The genre, I believe, is the radical lens on modernity we need the most today.

And I happened to read a FINE example in this short story collection by Morteza Barzegar today: "Rāndeh Shodeh" (1396).

Let me know if you have any good suggestions!

Today, I led a sobering, stimulating, and challenging discussion of Forough Farrokhzad’s documentary short “The House is Black” (1963). The session was “sobering” as we watched the stark reality of life for the patients of a Tabriz leper colony as they resiliently struggled with isolation, povery, and stigmatization. It was “stimulating” for, while appreciating Forough’s poignant and poetic vision, we also deconstructed her voice-over narration to critique her ableism as she spoke for, and on behalf of, the alienated subjects of her film. Finally, the discussion was “challenging” because, as we watched and studied the film, we had to confront our problematic standards of beauty and attitude to our fellow citizens with disability in contemporary Iran.

Unlearning is a long, and painful, process. And I’m proud of my students for engaging with the film with courage and creativity.

Yesterday, I taught the most passionate session of my career. And I’ve seen students returning my love on social media.

We had planned to read Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1856). And because the weather was splendid, a beautiful Ordibehesht morning in Shiraz, the class suggested we go outside. The outcome was a collective reading of the poem just as Whitman had intended:

“Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face! / Clouds of the west—sun there half an hour high—I see you face to face. / Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me! / On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home / are more curious to me than you suppose, / And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, that you might suppose.”

So, reading Whitman’s meditations on the shores of the Hudson river, as he spoke across time and space to the reader that is yet unborn, we joined his “Dead Poets Society” and contemplated whether the future residents of Shiraz and the students of our campus years from now, would have the luxury of looking at the selfsame Eram heights as we did, receive our hopes of fears of the present, and returning our gaze tell us: We’re fine, things turned out to be OK. Many of us did not share Whitman’s optimism and faith in stability, but we ultimately chose to address our postery through his magical verse:

“Closer yet I approach you, / What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance, / I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born. / Who was to know what should come home to me? / Who knows but I am enjoying this? / Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?”