I had shelved the fourth and final season of Succession for over a year. I do this with my top favorite shows to postpone the farewell. But I finally started watching today, searching for inspiration in the midst of a daunting summer. Succession is celebrated for its dark humour and dramatic performances, its Shakespearan arch and satirical treatment of power and wealth. For me, the magic lies in the stunning soundtrack!

https://open.spotify.com/track/7aNUzAjnpWMEct8P1z2ajq?si=mEdRPRr1TNqJdFx7Q6fHkQ

In How We Write Now (2024), Jennifer C. Nash describes the best mode of scholarly writing for precarious times. It is what I aspire to in my own work: “a voice that is not just documentary in its capacity to record the life of grief but also pedagogical in its capacity to offer tools for living with and living on. Beautiful. That is the term I have landed on to name the singular Black feminist voice that I describe—and at times deploy—here.”

https://www.dukeupress.edu/how-we-write-now

EO (2022) is a film about a donkey’s journey into the Polish countryside, from the circus that holds him captive to the slaughterhouse where he ultimately dies.

EO is an animal rights film about multiple forms of benign and malignant cruelty against animals in modern society, and does a great job to invoke our sympathy, even bring us to tears. Yet, having just watched it, I am wondering if, besides a sympathetic representation, EO has managed to also portray the donkey as an animal, a sentient being that exists as a nonhuman critter, and not just as a tragic figure whose sorrow is anthropomorphized through good music and fine cinematography.

It's revision time! I have 6 weeks to address two reviewers of opposing aesthetic and political persuasions. One loved it. The other hated it.

How will the next draft keep them both happy? I'm about to find out.

For a long while, I've been limited to ebooks, my only means to the latest in the worlds of Anglophone publishing. It's the way of the world if one lives within the closed borders of Iran. (And, no, I do not like counterfeits.)

Which is why when you finally pick an old original paperback from the library, as I did today, you realise that reading is not just a cognitive, but also tactile and olfactory, sensation.

One of the finest, most thoughtful, feminist projects in media today!

https://pca.st/podcast/616dcc40-aaf5-013b-f39d-0acc26574db2

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?”

Teaching Whitman over nibbles and munchies! -- Long caption to follow:

So much Bartleby memorabilia and I wonder why I procrastinate! The important thing, tho, is my coffee now tastes like resistance ✊?