Just Des(s)erts
Brett Kavanaugh would like some privacy, 100 years of Ulysses, and more
July 14, 2022
In this week’s issue of Public Seminar, Jill Filipovic examines the right to privacy, Victoria Chang chats about writing poetry for pleasure, and more.
Post-Roe Politics
All of a sudden, privacy rights matter to the same conservatives who just stripped women of ours—because powerful men like Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh are seeing their privacy violated, writes Jill Filipovic. “Kavanaugh is apparently having a bad month. Protesters have gathered at his home. They shouted outside a steakhouse he was dining at—and ok, he didn’t see or hear them, but he didn’t stay for dessert. ‘Politics, regardless of your side or views, should not trample the freedom at play of the right to congregate and eat dinner,’ the restaurant chain, Morton’s Steakhouse, said in a statement. ‘There is a time and place for everything. Disturbing the dinner of all of our customers was an act of selfishness and void of decency.’” (July 12, 2022)
Claire Potter investigates the crisis pregnancy centers that masquerade as medical facilities, a deception often framed by anti-abortion proponents as a matter of free speech. “As one complained, ‘I feel that there shouldn’t be any laws looking at this as deceptive marketing just because they don’t offer a full-service scope of pregnancy services.’ Which is a lot like saying you could open a business and call it a car dealership, even if some of the vehicles were missing, you know, brakes and transmissions.” (July 11, 2022)
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Literary Experiments
“I think of this book as like a little skinny box of poem chocolates. You can just open it up wherever, and pick one, and just read it. It’s not meant to be particularly serious, even though the themes can be serious.” Poet Victoria Chang talks to Nomaris Garcia Rivera about grief and adventure her new collection, The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon, 2022). (July 13, 2022)
Reviewing the exhibition “One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses” at the Morgan Library, Mitch Abidor is reminded that Modernist writers often offered each other mutual aid—monetary and intellectual. “In 1922, there was no Master of Fine Arts (MFA) creative writing programs or academic literary conferences, so writers either lived by their pens or had day jobs. To meet another writer required actually making an effort. This mutual aid was a multi-lingual and multi-cultural affair. The world was not expected to speak English yet, and there was much literature to be explored in tongues other than a writer’s own. Joyce, we should remember, studied Norwegian so he could read Henrik Ibsen in the original.” (July 8, 2022)
In the latest episode of Multi-Verse poetry podcast, poet Mikko Harvey reads his poem “Let the World Have You” and chats with host Evangeline Riddiford Graham about the secret desires of objects and how to let go of reality in writing about the natural world. (July 13, 2022)