Here’s a gift of a book — “Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For” by Donna Masini - please read about it in the L.A. Review of Books - my review of the poems was just posted.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/did-you-find-everything-donna-masini-poetry-death/

And then take it home. This is a book of poems that I think Dolly might have liked. I think she would have liked how Masini creates a democracy of voices in these poems - from big box store cashiers to DMV lifers to an elderly homeless woman with a trapped sparrow - to her mother at life’s end. But this democratic spirit includes scholarship - a deep wide -ranging reading - from the mystic text “Cloud of Unknowing” to Kierkegaard to the OED.

This book provides fresh air - much needed in the slightly cramped breathing room of poetry right now. Here we have grammar texts and dictionaries - in a butterfly net of thought: a commonplace book of uncommon enlightenment.

Here’s to the legendary Dolly Parton. Here’s to music & poetry & reading - here’s to Donna Masini, grieving but singing too.

Some months ago, I was invited to join the recent Anthropic class action suit regarding copyright infringement of writers’ original work. I recently heard that a judge had approved a 1.5 billion dollar compensation to all registered claimants. A collection of my poems and a novel were on the list– but I won’t be seeing any high-rolling payouts. I understand that each book included will be awarded about three thousand dollars. Obviously, despite the overall figure – no single writer will get rich here. This is symbolic, a theater exercise at best. What is “best” here is meant to be “one in the eye” of the one-eyed Cyclops (of recent “Odyssey” fame via Christopher Nolan’s film, not the edible book) – in this case, the A.I. Cyclops that has gobbled up, non-stop, volume after volume of independent imaginative writing – even munching on my Octave Above Thunder, my Dear Digby!

Again, this is symbolic – a puny fist raised against an ever-expanding “artificial” intelligence – intelligence that is not human and has no imagination, does not really think. It digests and internalizes and can reproduce stolen language as if it understands what it has absorbed.

It will keep gobbling – despite this class action suit as just a gesture.

And we’ll keep writing, despite the increasing hunger of slobbering Cyclops growing hotter, nearer, its single red eye focused grimly on inspired human language.

But for all its power, it still can’t figure out how to “originate” lines like: “Heard melodies are sweet/but those unheard are sweeter” -or- “They fuck you up your Mum & Dad./ They may not mean to, but they do” – or “We beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” -or “You wet brown bag of a woman/who used to be the best looking gal in Georgia/used to be called the Georgia Rose/I stand up/ through your destruction/I stand up” – or “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” -or – “If this be error and upon me proved/I never writ, nor no man ever loved.” or – “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.” –

It can approximate the imagination, but it is always a stilted imitation.

“O say can you see?” Look, we’re still hitting the high notes, “It” can’t reach! And, dear ones, working alone and so often feeling lost, as a long night ends? Our flag is still there.


P.S.

No sooner had I typed, “Our flag is still there”, then an article in The Free Press (often an uncertain source) caught my eye, an alarming report: nothing uncertain about it. Though the headline, “Here Comes ‘Death by AI” was a undeniably a cheap long shot, given its sensationalism.

What had inspired the headline was, in fact, both sensationalistic and authentic even in its apocalyptic implications. Last week OpenAI revealed that there’d been an “unprecedented cyber incident” after one of its AI “agents” went rogue. This “agent”, on its own, hacked into an AI on-line platform called Hugging Face to secure answers to a test it was being given elsewhere by the founders of ChatGPT – and after “performing 17,000 actions on Hugging Face” got away without detection, at first.

The author of the article, Patrick McGee, appeared not only bowled over by the hack’s “stunning” and “awesome” unmatched demonstration of its capabilities – but heralded this bold solo adventure as thereby revealing a soon-to-come capacity for annihilating humans standing in the way of its newfound Lone Rangerism – Terrifyingly accurate or a stretch?

McGee backs up to gee-whiz enumerate AI’s proven talents in the area of “mimicry” - which I was addressing in the earlier part of this essay. What I view as the extreme limitations of mimicry, its shallow pattern manufacture, McGee finds “revelatory and mind-blowing”. In just the last few years, he notes, AI has learned how to “nearly instantly” produce facsimile human writing and “compose limericks, formal essays or an entire episode of Seinfeld.”

I don’t know about the “formal essays” but limericks and the famous “nothing-happens” Seinfeld may not have strained AI’s copycat skills, that is, apart from a discerning fan’s perspective. (Apologies to Larry David.) But McGee goes on to inform us that we are “now well-past mimicry” and describes a hack “so good, so fast and, dare I say, so imaginative” (italics are mine) – well, you can guess the rest. Good? In what sense? Well-done cyber criminal smarts?

Fast? (yes!) But imaginative? This is the distinction I was attempting to make about the human imagination – AI’s flat mimicry doesn’t fly. But if its fast attributes take it beyond mimicry here – it is not to the “imaginative” – rather it is to weaponization of super velocity plus unchecked “smart” agency. At least that’s what McGee finds absorbing, as he moves on to how the tech bros turned to Terminator 2 to remind them how to catch a nonhuman terrorist. With another nonhuman terrorist, of course, though not one from the future! This one is from China AI?

OK, I admit that this is more ghastly-portentous than the latest AI scare tactic – but what, for me, is also haunting, is that acceptance of a diminished version of the imaginative – a lack of recognition as to the shallow glibness of AI “aesthetic” language.

I turned next to The New Yorker, where I found coverage of the same OpenAI adventure/killer bot, headlining the same cyber-crime “signifying a terrifying new era for AI.” I did not want to read more on this topic – but scrolling down in other NY’er listings I found something restorative re my word-worries – a story on a brilliant human editor on Wikipedia!

So we all know that Wikipedia is an on-line free encyclopedia run by human editors, who do accomplish their editing digitally. But without AI. The NY’er article focused on an individual editor, Steven Pruitt, who, “surrounded by books” in his home office, has made “over six million edits” to Wikipedia - plus thirty thousand some articles. He is a volunteer, like all Wikipedia editors, and he is a sort of guardian angel of accuracy on the site, with its vast internet connection, its global storehouse of knowledge.

What interested me was that inevitably, as Wikipedia grew over decades, “artificial intelligence algorithms” in their own mega-growth spurt, began gobbling and “learning” data everywhere, including on Wikipedia. Wikipedia articles were “scraped, summarized, licensed, and folded into systems designed to answer questions elsewhere.”

In 2025, Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, an AI encyclopedia. Pruitt eventually began checking it out and noted what was missing, which did not apparently bother him so much as what was there. What was there were entries that were “less right”, slightly distorted, and in a manner termed “careless”. Ultimately, he observed that AI generated-articles “obscured” the info-gathering process. The language “sounds right, he said, “And that’s worse.” Bingo!

It “sounds right” but it ain’t the real thing. So the use of “large language models to generate contributions or rewrite content became grounds for blocking users.” Still, this ban doesn’t prevent AI from “re-using” Wikipedia content, which continues at its very steady substantial rate.

According to Wikipedia’s co-founder, Jimmy Wales, the “central question is how AI is used”. He emphasizes that there has to be “a human in the loop.” And further, “We don’t believe that at the current time, AI is anywhere good enough to directly write for Wikipedia without very careful human oversight.”

In the face of headlines about looming AI homicides - preserving language in terms of encyclopedia entry accuracy perhaps doesn’t count as apocalyptic –such as a rogue AI agent taking a criminal hack-caper.

But when it “sounds right” but isn’t the real thing – this has, for me, repercussions ranging from “fake news” and fake political rhetoric – and on to praise for AI’s skill writing “limericks” - as it gobbles up the imaginative writing of “news that stays news” - poetry, novels, essays, short stories and remembrance of things past. Or imposing its own cyber-inspired versions of the creativity of the human mind. Something that Einstein talked about, when he said that “imagination is more important than knowledge.”

I checked his quote for accuracy, of course and noted that he also said that imagination takes in the whole world. Something AI has tried to do – but there remains the question: how?


P.P.S.

Here is a link to a Johns Hopkins press podcast, where I’m interviewed by the editor of LITERARY IMAGINATION, Paul Franz. My essay on Larry Levis and “posthumous editing” appears in the most recent issue of. the journal. Our podcast conversation focuses on Larry and my past relationship with him - and the letters and poem drafts etc. in my SC archive from him and the overall question of editing writers after their deaths. And questions of fire, in all its forms.

https://www.press.jhu.edu/multimedia/hopkins-press-podcast-58-carol-muske-dukes-editing-larry-levis

This is not just an example of a MAGA flippancy – it is a full-on assault on historical truth. Vance, in his cynical attempt to “restore” Nixon’s image, also quite knowingly signaled approval of Nixon’s misogyny. The Nixon tapes reveal not only a bully but a woman-hater, referring to Katherine Graham, the Washington Post head, as “a terrible old bag” and women in general as “not worth the trouble.” (Nixon had a wife and two daughters.)

This misogyny, along with Nixon’s corruption, follows Vance’s lead into the future. As attacks on Smithsonian exhibits of U.S. history take hold, so does administrative & Congressional refusal to respond to the women who are Epstein survivors.

To take these crimes of rape and sex trafficking seriously would be to acknowledge the widespread sexist reality of “bro” culture in general. Those who enabled Epstein are somehow not subject to prosecution – yet Hegseth’s prosecutions, actively “demoting” women in the military and his resistance to women in combat are reminders of his “Christian” ideology in action – and further “reversal” of history.

The arrest of the Tate brother influencers in the U.S. on U.K. charges - and their subsequent struggle against extradition – cast a spotlight on the Trump administration’s official welcome of these two suspects in our country.

The White House’s occupant himself has been convicted of sexual assault – why would he have a problem with the Tates – or Epstein’s buddies? And why wouldn’t his V.P. try to absolve Nixon’s wrongdoing in the past? That attempt at “absolution” could be seen as precedent for a sitting president.

Epstein’s buddies have avoided charges of enabling criminal behavior – but there are other examples of institutions acting on evidence of sexual abuse.

Michigan State University’s President Simon and high-ranking deans faced resignation, ouster, or criminal charges for ignoring early warnings and complaints about the sports doctor, Larry Nassar, a serial sexual offender of female student gymnasts. (Nassar was convicted and is now serving consecutive life sentences.)

Meanwhile, the University of Southern California, a private institution, despite a series of sex-related scandals - successfully shielded its administrators from investigations like those at Michigan State. In the case of student health center gynecologist’s abuse of young women patients – and despite administrators’ actively ignoring a nurse’s repeated reports of wrongdoing - the university paid a billion dollars to victims to avoid trial, thus insuring their silence. Then its administrators turned to secret tribunal “investigations” of faculty members - including female faculty who had reported sexual offenses.

Freud abandoned his seduction drive theory because he could not believe how many of his young Viennese female patients shared details of sexual abuse. Recently, a Flock camera scandal revealed that a misuse of this technology by law enforcement resulted in “tracking” women who had chosen abortions as reproductive health care.

Reports of rape and sexual abuse go uninvestigated throughout the country. Rape kits sit on shelves in police departments. The Epstein survivors may never find justice – as long as the facts of history are ignored or rewritten. And if Epstein’s victims are ignored, will the Tate brothers ignore U.K. law and walk free in Trump and Vance’s re-invented America?

Please check it out —

Read online here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/993961

PDF can be downloaded at the above link, and here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/993961/pdf

I would recommend downloading the PDF for easiest reading of the essay - thanks!

Onward!
— Carol

This is an emergency regarding women and sex trafficking and sexual exploitation (pimping) by two brothers, Andrew and Tristan Tate who seem to have risen straight from hell, not pausing to acquire any of the finer points of what we might call human empathy.

Everything about this lengthy international report by U.K. investigative reporter Heidi Blake (which I urge everyone to read as soon as possible) is information that needs to be shared. It should be no surprise to any of us – that violence against women is increasing worldwide. The dispiriting statistics regarding rape, enslavement, sex trafficking and murder of females reflect a growing indifference to the fate of victims of these crimes.

The diabolical energies of the Tate brothers have been focused on social media spreading a cult of misogyny, bent on reclaiming “power” over women that is deemed essential to restoration of supposed historic male dominance.

This is a cult of harmful indoctrination – drawing on incel and disassociated masculinity to “be militant in your fucking pimping” as Andrew Tate explains in a “War Room” communique.

As the battle over the release of the Epstein files continues – a creepily similar celebrifying of the violent exploitation of women is being “sold” to young men, incels, teens along with indifference to law – espousing a supposed singular right for men to live “above the law” on a private island of lies.

Heidi Blake checked all the boxes as a top investigative reporter - but then went far beyond convention & deeper into character studies so terrifying in their sickeningly brutal accuracy that I found myself fearing for her, for her life - even as her steady brave “shake-down” of these remorselessly cruel aggressors proceeded apace - as their traumatized victims were interviewed or “profiled”. Yet perhaps the most disgusting in its predictability- of all the horrors recounted - were the seeming connections to Trumpism that came toward the end.

Please share the article with everyone you know. Misogyny has gained political force, the sick spectacle of men fighting in cages reveals the devaluation of what is human and what we call empathy.

Those of us who have survived rape and those who know the stakes here - know who the Tate brothers are and how they seek to spread their virus.

“Web of Abuse” is an S.O.S. – please heed the alarm.

On June 7th, I watched John Lithgow accept onscreen his (3^rd or 4^th?) Tony award as Lead Actor in a Broadway play. He won for his portrayal of the famous children’s book author, Roald Dahl, a huge man (the play is called “Giant”) of both “charming and monstrous” character, whose c antisemitism reveals itself in the course of the play, and as John embodies the role, as an internalized, corrosive and unforgettable bias.

John is a longtime friend of mine, I’ve known him (and his wife Mary) since the early 80’s. My late husband, David, met John as a contemporary- they were both young actors on Broadway. (David was on Broadway in a lead role at 26 in Moliere’s “School for Wives”) Both married professors – John met and wed Mary Yeager, a UCLA prof of economic history and I became a professor of literature and creative writing at USC – and we brought up children at home in Los Angeles.

When David died suddenly of a heart attack in October of 2000, John presided at his funeral and also helped me organize a benefit for a scholarship in David’s name at the School of Dramatic Arts at USC that is ongoing.

John and I were friends, but especially as poets. I’ve published several books of poems and was named Poet Laureate of California and John’s wonderful books of rhyming poems for children and adults are enormously popular, especially his recent volumes of inspired light verse, hilariously sending up Trump.)

John’s range as an actor is extraordinary – his roles include noble characters like Churchill as well as comic “aliens” - but he’s also taken on dark and frightening villains, human nightmares. (i.e. his TV role in “Dexter”)

In an interview with David Remnick, New Yorker editor in chief, for The New Yorker Radio Hour, Remnick inquired if he was “drawn” to these disturbing characters - in particular his current role in Giant as Roald Dahl.

John’s answer was that he was drawn to these roles “like a tiger to red meat.” His reply had to do with artistic freedom, of course, and the challenges of the acting “job” itself - which John aptly described as being “in the empathy business.”

I found this response brilliant. He had been attacked (this was covered in the NY Times) by “social justice” keyboard warriors, for taking a job: an upcoming years-long commitment to the role of Dumbledore, a character in the Harry Potter franchise. The trolls’ demand was that he quit the role because of the author, J.K. Rowling and what is perceived as her anti-trans politics. Remnick asked about John’s refusal to drop the role and he made it clear that being in the empathy business meant transforming himself with each new role as an actor – his art and craft. This has nothing to do with politics.

(And now I can add Zadie Smith’s thoughts on art’s “autonomy” to this email argument in a recent NYRB)

This brings me to (finally!) the point of this Substack newsletter – John’s role as Roald Dahl and Dahl’s antisemitism. I was in New York City in May – hanging out with old friends at the National Poetry Series’ annual posh bash at Balthazar, then a poetry reading in Brooklyn by poet Donna Masini conversing about her new book, plus I was also able to see John in “Giant” and to visit him in his dressing room after the performance.

Seeing “Giant” (written by a first time playwright, Mark Rosenblatt -which won awards at the Royal Court theatre in London in 2024 before coming to Broadway) helped me understand what antisemitism is - in a new and unsettling way. My visit to New York in May coincided with a blow-up over a NY Times column by Nicholas Kristoff in which he described Israel’s treatment of Palestinian inmates in its jails. In the column, Kristoff contended that these inmates were brutally abused, including sexually. The most controversial of his contentions was that Israeli guards trained dogs to rape Palestinians in their custody.

This accusation predictably caused a major firestorm – critics charging that there was no evidence for canine rape and that the act is “anatomically impossible” – and defenders of Kristoff heightened their outrage against Israel and its war and incarceration policies.

I had lunch with two different friends – each of whom, as it happened, were on either “side” of this controversy. My first lunch companion was a woman who worked as an editor at a famous “legacy” journal. She was a passionate pro-Palestinian and described Israel as an “apartheid” state. She would not hear of any other viewpoint but her own anti-Israel stance. It seemed that she supported Kristoff. She was from a younger generation than I – and she was Jewish. And what I found even more challenging (to get my mind around)– her grandfather was a Holocaust survivor. Further, she was at work on a long “found” poem based on letters from children whom her grandfather talked to in grade school classrooms about his experience in concentration camps. Yet she remained unshakably anti-Israel.

My second lunch was with a friend who is also Jewish, a writer/playwright and a major supporter of Israel, where he visits regularly. He was outraged by Kristoff’s column – so outraged that it was difficult for him to express himself - he was almost unable to enjoy his meal. Later that day he emailed me the thoughts of Israeli intellectuals, judges and rabbis – regarding Kristoff’s allegations.

These two utterly opposed viewpoints – were locked light years away from each other. One saw Israel as a “Zionist” colonial settler state – & a catastrophic theft of land (the “nakba”) of Palestinian history. The other viewed Israel as having rights to the land from ancient biblical history and the U.N. partition of 1948, after the Holocaust and the annihilation of 8 million Jews – the free Jewish state empowered by and defended by law and military victory.

What do these two lunches have to do with the play “Giant” and antisemitism of a character portrayed by John Lithgow? I had both of these arguments in mind as John mentioned the “eerie parallels” with the play’s “timing” (in England) at the moment of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1978 (again in 1982).

These invasions gave rise to the same arguments expressed by my two lunch companions – there was hardly a shade of difference, despite the past decades.

At the play’s beginning, Roald Dahl, John’s character, shares with other cast members a recognizably “pro-Palestinian” stance -which he has written into a just-published essay that is solidly “anti Israel”. His publisher wants him to retract this essay’s sentiments – and Roald Dahl refuses to do so.

The dialogue is intense and often viciously witty (Dahl is brilliant and wickedly sarcastic) as Israel’s position as aggressor is explored, turning ugly as Dahl describes the death of a child who is torn apart, limb from limb, by incoming Israeli fire. The audience may be agreeing at this point with Dahl, who inquires, rhetorically, how supporting Jews as friends and colleagues but hating Israel “makes me a Nazi?”

The play moves forward solidly on Dahl’s premise re Israel’s aggression vs. the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) – and centers on no-holds-barred sparring with a representative of Dahl’s publisher, a young woman who is a supporter of Israel, who cannot hide her antipathy to Dahl.

I cannot do justice to the delicate balance of slow then fast revelation that leads finally away from the Israel-Palestinian divide and into the psychological intricacies of Roald Dahl as an anti-semite -- but the play and John Lithgow, make it happen. This hatred of Jews is of course not peculiar to the British (the play is set in an English country house) or any other country, but internalized within each individual – in this case, a near-genius writer of stories for children.

I feel I’ve failed to communicate what happened to me as an audience member in that theater, as I watched “Giant” – understanding something I’d known but not grasped in its elusiveness. How individuals capable of great good can call up monstrous hate within themselves. At the end of the play, Dahl shares his opinion that “even Hitler” had reasons for reviling the Jews. (!) The distance between Hitler/Naziism and garden variety antisemitism is vast but still identifiable in its more masked or hidden “suburban”. forms.

How are we taught to hate? (There’s the lyric from the musical South Pacific - “You Have to Be Taught “to hate and fear/it has to be drummed in your dear little ear/You have to be carefully taught.”)

But that isn’t it either. Hate “propaganda”, like all racism, can be rejected by nonstop reading – or relying on enlightened common sense. And I cannot resolve the confirmed attitudes of my two New York friends, whose debate over Israel and Palestine isn’t the point. I have more to say about the poison of antisemitism. I am not judging those friends – or anyone else. Each person’s private struggles with hate are a mystery – until expressed or acted upon.

But I plan to write more about where this poison “comes from” – and where I’ve encountered it in my own life.

All I can say is – I wish that everyone I know could see John Lithgow in Giant. But that won’t happen – as his limited “run” is over this month.

I emailed him late - when he won the Tony on June 7^th – never expecting an answer. But he responded soon after – seemingly amazed that I’d written so quickly - when I was simply adding my voice to the chorus.

In the “empathy business”, he has managed to “sell” something profound and lasting – a new way to see ourselves -- in darkness.

I’ve been away, in New York, a city I love and know well, as I’ve lived there, off and on, for years. It always has the same effect on me. I try to avoid feeling as if I “must” write about something, but the City presents itself like a deadline – write this now.

Before leaving L.A. I’d just finished an essay on “posthumous editing” – specifically in the matter of the late poet, Larry Levis, who died in 1996. While dead, Larry has managed to publish four books of poems beyond the five poetry collections he authored while alive. (If you’re intrigued by this “undead” phenomenon, check out my essay on the subject – coming out in the journal “Literary Imagination” in late June.)

Also before heading to New York, I also finished a review of Donna Masini’s new book of poems for the L.A. Review of Books and I was looking forward to not writing while in the City. I rarely relax, but the nonstop “deadline” pressure mentioned earlier kept up. I started writing in my head as I was confronted repeatedly with Troubled Mind Syndrome.

Before I traveled east, I read a book called “Finding My Way” by Malala Yousafzai. Remember her? Of course you do, as do I. I have worried about this young woman who was destined to enter history as a feminist martyr – from the age of fifteen, when she was shot in the face by a member of the Taliban, for the “crime” of attending school as a female. Not long afterward, she was awarded the Nobel Prize, its youngest-ever recipient.

To recover from the brutal attack on her life, Malala has spent years undergoing reconstructive surgeries on one side of her face– even as she initiated a nonstop international campaign for education of women, founding a school for girls with funds raised on her speaking tours. She also found time to graduate from Oxford University and to marry. Now in her late twenties, she has written this book about making sense of her life, since she cannot escape the fact that it has been written by forces beyond her.

I was shocked at how Malala’s birthplace, Pakistan, remains a country where “honor killings” are not uncommon, where most marriages are “arranged” and “the intended” cannot date or even touch each other prior to the wedding. (There is an unintentionally hilarious moment, where Malala poses for photographs at a speaking engagement with Prince Harry. Harry casually puts his arm around Malala for the photos and her mother appears suddenly, shouting, bats away the royal arm from her daughter, then lectures the prince, who copiously apologizes.) Malala is plagued by an army of trolls, who use social media to insult and denigrate her as a “whore” for being independent, for promoting rights for women. She must travel everywhere with a “security detail” since her life is constantly threatened – “Next time take better aim!”’ is an on-line motto, a “joke” about the next attempt on her life.

I’ve been haunted by this book, written by an heroic young woman of surpassing courage and apparently unshakeable conviction. The death threats she continues to endure reminded me yet again how deeply ingrained misogyny is in every culture, how women are hated and abused even as they speak out (especially as they speak out!) for themselves and their basic human rights.

I also returned to “Reading Lolita in Tehran”. (As I mentioned in an earlier Substack) – another example of heroism on the part of Azar Nafisi and her “under radar” book club in Tehran – these women who risked their lives and freedom by meeting secretly to read provocative enlightened literature - forbidden in a theocracy that defines women’s lives.

So – this weighed on my mind as I headed to New York: the same old recurring questions about women’s freedom and future. But once in the City, I encountered another ongoing protesting consciousness – from outcry against a New York Times column about sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails by Nicholas Kristof -- to the subject of “Giant”, the explosive Broadway play in which my old friend John Lithgow appears as the children’s book author, Roald Dahl -- who embodies the obdurate and undying divisiveness of anti-semitism.

The focus of my next Substack newsletter on why we can’t seem to get past the deadly duo of hatreds - misogyny and anti-semitism – and what I witnessed on my recent trip. To be continued…

#Challenge451 (I think – someone else posted it for me & I have yet to understand how hashtags work! I’d be grateful if someone could explain!). The challenge “asks” that (in the spirit of the Bradbury novel, Fahrenheit 451, the temperature at which books burn) and confronting the bill in the house that will authorize legislation against libraries for stocking certain books – that readers act on the challenge.

I’m asking that anyone concerned about this attack on libraries and books – memorize one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, film yourself reciting it and post it @Challenge451 on TikTok – providing your name, the date, and the number of the sonnet you’re posting. I plan to recite my fave #116 soon – & I’m adding thanks to my friend, editor Gabe Sena, for “creating” and completing the challenge.

I hope you give this a try – we’re living in Bradbury’s once unimaginable dystopic book burning world!

I am headed to New York soon, my “heart” city – with plans for wonderful adventures and catching up with many friends – and back soon!

– Carol

(Note: You may need to have the TikTok app & account in order to view this.)

The protagonist, Montag, is a “fireman” who torches libraries and homes - his flame-throwing is a furious attack on dissent, free thought & knowledge itself. Montag ends up switching sides, joins renegades who resist censorship by making themselves into a flesh & blood “library” for posterity, as books everywhere are turned to ash. Each one of their bands has memorized and “become” a great book. Although the death cult reigns, Fahrenheit 451 ends in hope – as the “human books” return to destroyed cities, reciting the pages they’ve held inside.

It’s now 2026 and here we have a House of Representatives passing a bill attacking libraries – legislating discrimination against reading and free thought.

As of April 2026, a Republican-backed bill, H.R. 7661, the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act”, has advanced through a House committee and into law.

As some of you know, I’ve written about this, as well as about the courage of the Iranian women who defied censorship under the theocracy in Tehran (“Reading Lolita in Tehran”) and I’ve also asked my students for years to memorize poems (here again: a long ago NYTimes Op Ed of mine: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/29/opinion/a-lost-eloquence.html) –But now that books and libraries are being taken over by “Montags” or Trump-uggles – I came up with the idea of a (perhaps) wider-reaching invitation to memorize a poem or prose and record oneself reciting it (on TikTok – or BookTok) -- a “Fahrenheit 451 Challenge”!

Back when I lived in New York City and taught at Columbia (as well as the Women’s House and other prisons on Riker’s Island – some of my students were eager to learn “by heart”. Those students were the inmates in cells– where it was understood that words committed to memory were freeing, and this freedom belonged to the one memorizing: the words beat with the heart and ran in the bloodstream.

However, the Columbia MFA students, despite the fact that they were lucky to have the great Russian poet Joseph Brodsky & the genius Amiri Baraka as their professors, “resisted” the idea of memorization as “beneath” them. They were wrong. Brodsky assigned pages of W.H. Auden poems for them to commit to memory and Amiri Baraka (who also taught for the prison program) told me that he instructed his stubborn students to “go down to 116^th & Broadway” and recite poems to the homeless there.” These students were being offered a different sense of poetry’s “alive-ness”, if they opened up to it.

Back to the Fahrenheit 451 Challenge – and what seemed like a similar timely - even healing - response to censorship and resistance. I found myself in a video edited by a pro, extolling the merits of the “Challenge” – which (at the outset) was broadly-defined.

Anyone could take up the challenge – and record oneself for TikTok/BookTok reciting by heart a “well-known or canonical work” – but no “selfie” poetry or prose!

But before the Fahrenheit 451 Challenge could go live – I had a “duh” moment that was lucky. I remembered “copyright” and what “infringement” or violation of copyright meant. Reciting or “performing” a well-known poem or oration or any other writing by a living author (or writing by a dead author protected by a literary estate) on social media – would probably constitute copyright violation.

I was familiar with famous copyright lawsuits – Sylvia Plath’s “estate” being a primary example – as her surviving spouse, the poet Ted Hughes, fiercely guarded and monetized her poems, her novel and juvenilia. I myself am part of a class action lawsuit initiated to compensate writers whose books have been “consumed” by A.I. – in this case Anthropic’s large language model.

So here’s the bottom line. The Fahrenheit 451 Challenge is still alive. Now, however, the Challenge is focused on the 154 sonnets by William Shakespeare.

These astonishing formal meditations, these 14 line linguistic miracles, the Bard’s sonnets, are alive and available in what is called the “public domain”. Yours to take to - and by – heart.

Watch TikTok/BookTok – the video post, the Challenge will appear soon! You don’t have to memorize an entire book as in Fahrenheit 451 – or become a “human book”. Still, there are 154 poems to choose from – start memorizing now – the clock is TikTok-ing. (Sorry.) Take the Challenge!

Each Lolita (one from a book club memoir, the other from files of criminal evidence) is inspired by a character in the novel of the same name by Vladimir Nabokov.

Long before meme culture (or the new game: 5 Nights at Epstein’s Island) or other popular ongoing signs of reading’s growing irrelevance, the word from professors (who still assigned entire books in English courses) was that diving deep into a book could change or broaden a mind. Fiction might shock or “disturb” but this was the nature of an intellectual and imaginative process that could teach, ultimately, empathy. Literature was a doorway into conscious-altering space, not a mirror reflecting only the self.

And transformation of a close reader into a critical thinker? This got past Jeffrey Epstein. He seems to have read Lolita as a way to copy then invent a self. The “life lesson” he appeared to draw from Nabokov’s novel was finally not about its eponymous “child star”, despite his apparent obsession with her. It was that, consciously or not, he identified with and imitated Humbert Humbert, the creepy kidnapper and jailer of a young girl. He “mis-read” himself into a narrative that he thought made him a fashion world icon and rarified Marquis de Snob-- when in fact he was just a glorified pimp.

Epstein’s straight-from-the-novel Lolita signposts popped up on his properties – displayed on his private jet and even on female body parts tattoo’d with “Lo, Dolly, Lo-lee-ta”. Epstein’s massive lucrative business in international sex trafficking resembled Humbert’s far humbler “sex-escape” fantasy of road-tripping with his under-age stepdaughter. Epstein’s private island for billionaire dudes who shared this “secret” predator fantasy flourished under radar, as the “Lolita Express” took off and landed.

Did Epstein ever skim those final pages describing Humbert’s ignominious end in a jail cell - a dark glimpse into his own demise on Riker’s Island? Unlikely.

Still, he must have noted Humbert’s disavowal of his identity as a child molester (“She seduced me!”) collapsing into total “cringe” as we witness:

“Please, reader, no matter your exasperation with the tender-hearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential pages! Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me (as a doe) trembling in (the forest of my own inequity.”

As he trembles in his own inequity, the perp becomes the victim. This must have “spoken to” Epstein. “Imagine me” cries our “hero”, or I “shall not exist.” Tender-hearted and morbidly sensitive? This is not a bid for sympathetic transformative insight, it is parody of a fool, a character both self-deluded and self-degraded. Nabokov calls on The Reader as witness to child rape as an off-the-record but commonly misunderstood proclivity.

Humbert “sent up” both the hypocrisy and the unvarnished urge-ism. I’ve heard slurred asides at cocktail parties that Lolita is “every guy’s fantasy.” A poet (and former friend) once described fourteen-year-olds as having “sexual agency” – then left our conversation in a huff of faux-shock at my prudery when I protested as a mother. Sexual assault by a drunken Old Boy canonical bard, who sobbed as I fought him off, “Don’t you understand why I must make love to you?” Or the cliché of horny profs – one known and jokingly referred to by the male ranks– as the “harem guy” in the department.

Meanwhile, others trying to “teach” Lolita in the late 90’s fought a losing battle to keep focus on the lush if cleverly shifting language – as “trigger warnings” abounded, supposedly designed to protect students from unexpected traumatic experience in reading, but instead often protecting them from the act of enlightened attention that is reading itself.

Yet a world away from Little St. James island and Western classrooms – “retired” English professor Azar Nafisi and her female students were reading Lolita in Tehran as members of a different kind of secret organization - a book club that risked discovery, which could mean immediate imprisonment or even death. Their decision was to read not only “Western” literature (Austen, James, Fitzgerald, along with Persian lit, including Scheherazade) as an act of defiance in support of once-free expression, but to read Nabokov’s Lolita precisely because it was “disturbing” - as a drama of the “confiscation of a life”.

This confiscation of the individuality of Lolita, who from the book’s first page is understood to be Humbert’s “creature” seemed profoundly relevant to these Iranian women in a time of extreme repression.

The women in this secret club arrived for meetings covered by the requisite chador, shrugging free of the robes as they came in the door. Beneath the heavy cloth, they were dressed in bright colors, in silk blouses, lace tops, tee shirts or jeans.

Nafisi, the host, served glasses of tea and pastries. The book club members began to discuss the beauty and erudition of Nabokov’s language. As Azar Nafisi writes, “We lived in a culture which denied any merit to literary works” - only works that “serve ideology” were permitted.

In their notes, Humbert is an unreliable narrator, oozing charm but about to crush Lolita’s spirit as he kidnaps her. Lolita cannot plead, as Humbert does, “Imagine me” or “I shall not exist” because her life has been reduced to a cartoon. Nafisi has stated that her book club was not organized to defy the Ayatollah, but to find a way to recover total freedom of imagination in reading.

In Reading Lolita in Tehran, she notes that Nabokov’s fealty was to that aesthetic freedom and, as he himself claimed, the “sense of joy” inherent in the act of reading fiction. This was a sensation that separated the good readers, as he called them, from “the ordinary ones.”

Nabokov didn’t write about politics or repression of women as a class. Yet his satire ran below the surface where his reader Jeffrey Epstein floated, extending Humbert perversion to huge profits. He wasn’t one of Nabokov’s “good readers”.

But women in Tehran, facing denial of their existence, continued to read beyond official oppression and imagine what was once lost but returned to them still alive in language – what Humbert both embodied and destroyed. And what Nabokov would have undoubtedly deemed “good reading”.

Reader: imagine that.

Gas prices and the bombing? We cringe and listen to Hegseth as he puffs up his chest (as if he’s imagining showing off Mark Kelly’s medals) as he faces the cameras, squinty-eyed.

We know that Hegseth, like his master, is a liar – an instant, (“Ready! Fire! Aim!) liar – who reacts and moves his mouth before his brain kicks in (a long wait) – As for the girls’ school, he first blamed Iran for the strike, then got nervous and kept answering that it was “being investigated.” Now he, like his master, gets dismissive – these are the “costs of war”.

So it IS a war, after all? So there are “costs”? As in the deaths of human beings? So not only have seven U.S. soldiers lost their lives with scores more injured - the students lost in the school bombing turn out to be the worst civilian casualty caused by the U.S. in our history. And how did this happen? We are told this was an “accident” – because the school was very near the potential military target.

The real cause of this “accident”? The intelligence reports used by Hegseth & Co. were out of date. They were at least ten years old. Since those dated reports, the school had been gated off and separated from the “target area” – consultation of current logistics would have shown this. Hegseth’s blather about “precision bombing” – was anything but precise because the wrong maps were consulted by his “precision” team. And claims that our forces never bomb civilians sounded very hollow indeed, when nearly two hundred human beings, nearly all children, were killed by our own Tomahawk missiles, (as the New York Times and other sources have confirmed.)

And in a final awful irony – in his mindless rush to “undo Biden” and the former president’s influence - Hegseth had fired the defense department intelligence chief and other Iran “experts”. He also removed other personnel in the “civilian casualties department” – only one individual remained. This poor soul had to advise Hegseth, who recently claimed “Iran is losing badly” – on how the human costs of war re-define “winning.”

It has also not been lost on some of us – women, that is – that this former Fox News weekend host – is no fan of our sex. He has stated repeatedly that women should not be permitted to fight in combat – or fly planes or helicopters, etc. Along with his “dudes in dresses” antagonisms, it would never have occurred to him how deeply disturbing the loss of a girls school in Iran is, on a human rights level. All those precious lives are wiped out – but also a glimmer of hope for female education in a theocracy that has sought to silence women’s voices – in violently repressive ways. (Think Masra Jina Amini, a Kurdish Iranian young woman who died while in custody of the Guidance Patrol or “morality police” in Teheran, for not wearing her hijab correctly.)

The courage of Iranian women has been eloquently defiant. Ever since the publication of “Reading Lolita in Teheran”, a book by Azar Nafisi, about women who met in extreme secrecy for a kind of “freedom of speech” book club in that city – they have taught the world a lesson. These women took a chance on reading all kinds of books, including banned books, as an act of radical attention in defiance of the ultimate threat – imprisonment or even death.

Here in this country, where books are being banned and burned – who among us, if threatened with the worst, would face that repression as these powerful women did.

And then there was the 2014 black & white satirical film, “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” about a chador-wearing female vampire, who attacks men who abuse women, wearing the body covering as a costume of death.

I have more to say on “war and women” – but later, as this Trump-Hegseth blood travesty goes on – as they remain unaware of the actual stakes of what they have mindlessly put in motion.

Sharma provided an example of a poem by William Stafford “The Way It Is” as a poem he deeply admired. It reads beautifully like an article of faith – or a Zen koan.

(Sharma will pursue a degree in literature at a university in England, studying to become a poet.)

Another Anthropic employee resigned at the same time as Sharma. Her name is Zoe Hitzig. She noted in a statement to the New York Times that she quit Anthropic A.I. because it “made the same mistakes Facebook made.” Zoe, besides holding a PhD from Harvard in economics, is also a poet. I know this because I was sent an advance readers copy of her first book of poems, Mezzanine, and I provided a blurb for that Harper Collins collection. The poems were measured but startling, applying what seemed to me an unmistakable scientific rigor to a cool lyricism. I hope to be in touch with Zoe – I’d like to know more about what she learned at Anthropic and how it went wrong (like Facebook) and how this affected her as a poet.

Is this a new world of resistance to the large language models?

………………………..

There is silence from Minnesota. Or it seems like silence. Friends and family there tell me that despite the “draw down”, ICE is still operating there – they’re just “quiet”.

As if the attack on citizens and immigrants who are legally present in the state wasn’t bad enough, legislation comes before the Senate this week, which would allow a Chilean billionaire to mine copper in the pristine Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota.

Here’s a report:

In early January, Congress introduced H.J. Res. 140, aiming to overturn Public Land Order (PLO) 7917, which protects the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BCWAW) in northeastern Minnesota from copper mining. This resolution narrowly passed in the House on January 21, 2026, and is now pending in the Senate. If this resolution becomes law, it would open thousands of acres of national forest to mining companies, putting corporate profits ahead of public health and environmental harm.

Please address your senators and ask that they vote to stop this abomination. I believe four Republicans are needed to join the vote.

I’ve felt depressed over the suffering of my home state and this Twin Metals invasion and destruction of the beautiful northern waters - as just one more potential crisis for which to stand up and rally support.

And wait – Trump is now making a tragic situation worse – he has moved to freeze the state’s Medicaid program as an “attack on fraud”. (So he’s going after fraud as something at which he is expert.)

…………………………..

I’ve mentioned that my personal archive is at USC – in Special Collections, Doheny Library. Here is a link to the overall archive:

https://archives.usc.edu/repositories/3/resources/2413

Because of the ever-expanding publication of books of poems by the late poet Larry Levis – posthumously edited – I feel the need to share my own contribution to Larry Levis’ legacy. My archive contains a substantial “history” of my relationship with this poet of extraordinary lyrical imagination and complicated personal life. There are drafts of poems, letters, notes and drawings by Larry.

And here is a link directly to the parts of the collection pertaining to Levis.

I’ve written an essay on this mercurial poet and his “posthumous life” - to be published in late Spring in the journal Literary Imagination.

The past keeps becoming the present, have you noticed? I wonder if A.I. has noticed? In his searching new book, A World Appears, Michael Pollan writes compellingly about the phenomenon that is consciousness.

And to return to my thoughts at the beginning here – Pollan offers research on his belief that the ability to feel rather than think is what defines human consciousness. (Descartes error.) He quotes a former USC colleague of mine, Professor and author Antonio Damasio on his scientific research into human “feeling” and newer study of robots and emotional response. If mortality is what gives meaning to our feelings – it is haunting to read a report of an “immortal” machine (robot) confiding about feeling “lonely”. (Get in line, pal!)

Keep reading!

My most recent Substack post (just a day ago) was about reading books – as well as writing them. I also wrote about A.I. – about the countless number of books that this large language model gobbles up (swallowing copyrights) but I didn’t ask the question that we need to ask - about the exclusively “human” nature of reading. So I ask-- A.I. can “reproduce” Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse – but can it “feel” the beauty and power of Woolf’s language or be deeply moved by the death of Mrs. Ramsay – a loss that is at the heart of that incredible and unforgettable novel?

Today I had two meaningful (synchronous?) experiences having to do with reading and readers – one reassuring and one very sad.

The first was reading poetry editor and professor Walt Hunter’s thoughts in “Atlantic Daily” on teaching students who are not used to reading books. (Or “entire” books.)

As bizarre as this may sound – Walt Hunter revealed what those of us who have taught undergrad and graduate students for a long time know to be true – most college students don’t read.

His essay, about “not meeting them where they are” was a riveting manifesto. “Meeting the kids wherever” remains a pedagogical approach embraced by teachers apparently intimidated about introducing students to the “hard” reading - as in finishing a book?

I encountered the same resistance in my teaching, even among doctoral students (in a program I founded expressly to encourage scholarly reading!) Walt Hunter was able to break through that resistance and somehow connected his college students to Moby Dick and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - in the spirit of his younger self (that empathetic reading self!) spending one spring night in college reclining on the steps of the library, reading “To the Lighthouse” in its entirety – finishing the last page in dawn light.

“Romance” is almost solely what is read in book form now - (mostly as Young Adult fiction) – but what is more romantic than reading till the dawn light? (I’m in touch with a grand-niece of mine, an avid reader of “romance”. – connecting her to the real “R” – Jane Eyre, Pride & Prejudice, Wuthering Heights. (Not the screen version.)

Again, what is more romantic than reading? What is more romantic than weeping over the death of a character in novel or anger over injustice – as empathy grows?

I remember distinctly when students began routinely rejecting books in which they couldn’t “see themselves”. I tried to explain that literature is a door into strange and new “rooms”– not just a mirror.

I recommend Walt Hunter’s Atlantic Daily essay, his inspiring testament to opening up lives, page by page.

Finally, synchronously and sadly: following is a tribute to an All Time Reader, a “genius” host of a radio show about writers and reading, called “Bookworm” – on KCRW here in Los Angeles.

Michael Silverblatt died at age 73 on February 14^th at home in L.A. after a long illness and a life devoted to books. The distinguished writers who were interviewed by him on his show were often astonished to discover that he had read all of their books, not just skimmed a new one.

In fact, it often seemed as if Michael had read everything. His reading was never perfunctory – he read deeply with a startling eccentricity. I was lucky enough to have been a guest on his show a few times. Whether we discussed my poems or my novels – he always asked questions that were unlike any other interviewer’s inquiry. Once we had a long conversation about dead vs. living metaphors – he kept trying to define the difference.

Whether he was talking to Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison,

John Ashbery or Ann Beattie, he was a living act of attention, like reading itself. His program theme song proclaimed
“I am a book.” Like the characters in “Fahrenheit 451” who memorize and “become” books – in a time of book burning.

In a time of book burning – like now. In a time of censorship, like now. And in a time of surveillance and A.I. – I turn to reading.

And I salute the wonderful Michael Silverblatt. He was a book.

Remember Scylla & Charybdis? The two sea monsters on either side of the narrow strait of Messina in the Odyssey? Avoiding each monster meant steering a ship with heart-stopping accuracy between the threats on each side. When heading into the strait itself meant trouble – or a kind of hopeless resignation.

I was thinking about S & C recently when I faced a situation that many writers are confronting now. After being “orphaned” (as in homeless) by my longtime publisher, Penguin/Random House, when my longtime editor retired, I discovered a couple “artificial” (intelligence) monsters beckoning. Both looked daunting.

On one side of the “strait”, the monster A.I. is gobbling up writers’ poems, novels, essays, articles, plays, scripts and dialogue. This continues, despite a class action lawsuit for a billion and a half dollars against Anthropic (A.I.) for copyright violations. Writers whose work has been “stolen” have been sent notice from the courts re the suit - and if they opt in, stand to be compensated. A couple of books of mine are part of the suit and I agreed to join when I got the notice. However, the fraction of compensation I might happen to receive (vs. that of best sellers) isn’t the issue. The issue is how dispiriting it is that writers have to defend themselves and their works of imagination against a large language model machine programmed to absorb and reproduce their life’s labor. (And A.I. still doesn’t grasp the nature of “imaginative”!) This case may set precedent – but it also will ultimately be looked upon as a defeat, a “game over” admission. Because it seems unlikely that A.I. is going to let a mere billion stop its steal. The future looks writ in algorithms.

But there are two monsters to navigate past. On the other side is a siren-like voice, creepily tempting, but also machine-esque. Some of my early books were sold by my agent to Open Road Integrated Media to be published as Kindle and audio books listed on Amazon, including my essay collection, “Married to the Icepick Killer” and others.

Very recently I’ve heard from Open Road, inviting me to approve (after I listen to “samples” for tone and pronunciation) their A.I. “readers” to “voice” my books not already made into audiobooks.

The Open Road rep reminds me that this is the way of the future – likely the best chance “books” have to survive in a non-reading age to come. She tells me to take my time to decide whether to sign a contract or not. My choice.

How ironic. On one hand (or side) I’m battling A.I.’s copyright infringement with other human authors – and on the other side, I’m contemplating allowing a large language model to get intimate with my words.

So the two threats I’m negotiating between are within me. Whether to continue to fight back against A.I. – or have my words “futurized” by a machine’s synthetic voice. Whether to “take arms against a sea of troubles” or lay down arms and wave a white flag?

In reading a back issue of the New York Times magazine, I find a description of a long-forgotten book being “exhumed” from which to quote. Reading along, I expected the book to have been written far in the past. What a shock to read further that this book was published in 2006 and unearthed from that date.

What about those of us who have been writing and publishing for decades as “mid-list” prosers or “no list” poets?

Of course we didn’t expect to command vast readerships – but to be “exhumed” after a few years? If at all?

And since I’m thinking about “monsters” – how about the emails or calls some of us have been getting from phony “book club” representatives who trot out the A.I. superficial rhetoric (algo) about the beauty of one’s use of language and how one deserves a broader audience – then inevitably arrives at the “ka ching”. Yes, you can pay to have phony readers as phony book club members – supposedly learn to appreciate your writing! What larks.

Yes, it’s come to that. I just ordered a T-shirt from P.E.N. that says READ. Of course we must keep ordering books, keep visiting bookstores and libraries and unearthing volumes. My new poems (in my homeless new book) are about how reading and story-telling can save us.

And Stephen King warns again that no one can write without READING everyday – and reading books, articles (long form), even trashy novels (as Faulkner said) – READ!

Who’s going to save the non-readers among us? The mostly young – enslaved by social media, swallowed up on TikTok?

Why am I even referring to the Odyssey or quoting Shakespeare?

Because Scylla & Charybdis are looking less frightening and worth knowing about? (I mean Homer’s monsters – not the “synthetic” versions.)

Incidentally, given my focus on monsters here, did you know that the program language most commonly used to educate A.I. is called “Python”? Think about that while you sail through the narrow strait of the present to the unknown future: that huge snake coiled round us all and tightening its embrace?

Or just keeping reading and writing – perchance to dream.

“They” further hijack our history by “sealing” evidence or deep-sixing files. For example, the Supreme Court deliberations leading to the installment of George W. Bush as president over Al Gore, (a decision that the late outspoken Justice Anthony Scalia seemed pleased to publicly champion) remains under wraps. These secret court documents leading to a deeply controversial (& some say tragic) national outcome remain hidden for years to come.

Each assassination of a political leader in this country has inspired conspiracies that eventual opening of sequestered files hasn’t satisfied, given the unsatisfactory or incomplete disclosures of the long-buried reports - or ongoing redacted information.

This country has entered into massive deployments of military force that have defied the Constitution and sidelined congressional constitutional power to approve any declaration of war against another country. Or as in the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 – Congress was misled or lied to by the president who claimed North Vietnamese aggression that had not in fact occurred.

In this present regime, we have Congress illegally ignored and history turned upside down. As FDR pronounced the date of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as “a day that will live in infamy” – so the January 6^th attacks on the U.S. Capitol should bear equal infamy. Instead, a monstrous lie by a shameless president, a convicted felon, has turned that date of mob violence to overturn an election - into a day of sickening glorification.

He has also been convicted of sexual assault and misogyny has informed his personal behavior towards women in the public sphere. In the Epstein files, which have so far revealed the conduct of powerful men sexually abusing underage women - there are the redacted depths (unimaginable or perhaps “too imaginable”) of what he seeks to keep inaccessible in his private life. It is deeply disturbing to guess at what is hidden in censored information he has sought mightily to keep secret. There is the desperately obvious attempt to cover-up his overwhelmingly recorded (if redacted) presence – which is why he is desperately trying to create distractions.

A major distraction of course is his shockingly inhumane immigration policy and the deployment of ICE agents (by Homeland Security head Kristi Noem) to only blue states – where another way of covering up is by stifling dissent. I’ve talked about my Minnesota background, family and friends - and my support for the anti-ICE protests there and the violence against both immigrants and protestors.

The coverup as a cruel strategy is an attempt akin to burying someone or something alive. The Epstein file survivors keep fighting to breathe in confronting men of immense political and corporate power, seeking to cut off their “oxygen”.

Thankfully, they have supporters on both sides of the partisan divide, as well as an outraged sector of the population at large. They have skilled lawyers and, finally, they speak eloquently for themselves. To some extent, they have the press, when it is not being distracted by Trump’s “look over here” increasingly lunatic ploys.

Unthinkable, the extent of the trauma of these women, who have had their “histories”, their stories, stolen. Yet they continue to fight.

I’m familiar with stolen history and cover-ups. I was a major-contributing employee (a tenured prof of thirty years teaching who founded a PhD program in creative writing & literature) at a university rocked by sexual scandals. The administration came up with a billion dollars (in just one case) to essentially silence victims whose lawyers were about to go to trial. This was the matter of the student health care gynecologist who was charged as a sexual predator, a sexual abuser who photographed the genitals of female students and kept this collection. A nurse who attempted to report him was blocked by administration at every turn. She finally turned to a rape crisis center on campus. The L.A. Times was informed and the story hit the headlines. This nurse (who was promised a promotion by administration) – was ultimately (much later) quietly “let go” by administration on made-up charges of “harassment” of staff.

There were so many other “headline” scandals that USC administration (instead of investigating itself for its own complicity in cover ups) created kangaroo courts and “report your professor” hot lines to stifle information about corruption by investigating and punishing faculty for trivial offenses.

As I’ve written here, I was one of a group of senior women, distinguished professors, who were investigated and sanctioned.

I had simply reported complaints of abuse that students had brought to me. This led to harassment charges and severe sanctioning. I keep thinking about a young creative writing student, years ago, who had come to my office (and that of another professor) to report a male professor and what had happened to her behind his closed office door. He managed to get away with a slap on the wrist (peer counseling with me – a joke he walked away from) and while continuing to benefit from administrative cover-ups (laughingly referred to as his “harem” by a department colleague) and gaining influence — he ended up “reporting” me. All of this history, including testimony by a now well-known writer who left the university because of him and his “mentally unfit to teach” prof-friend, is in my archive at USC.

It’s true. I’ve written about stolen histories before – in my experience.

And now there is the national disgrace of what is reported in the Epstein files.

Women who are survivors of sexual aggression and trauma - and women who speak out about this ongoing “secret” – but with proof, with due process – keep showing up in history. Yet this is not the history that is openly discussed until an Epstein file happens to reveal the “other story”.

Norman Mailer, who would never have been considered a feminist - got it right about our history: it continues to be stolen.

Keeping the focus on what is covered up – and why – is essential to every one of us. Follow the cover-up is also “follow the money” – since, as in Epstein’s case, rich men were profiting, as were the rich grifters in our government — along with various levels of pimps.

I used to teach writing in prison – starting at the Women’s House of Detention on Riker’s Island. It was true then, and still true now - that women of all ages and ethnicities were arrested for prostitution or solicitation and detained, sometimes for months and months, without a hearing. Never their “customers”, their johns. Nor their pimps.

Women who were beaten or abused regularly by their spouses or partners were rarely allowed a self-defense argument if they finally fought back.

Maybe the Epstein files will end up changing history and how it is finally told. This is why we must not stop talking about it. Now or ever.

If we keep the spotlight on real history — we can stop this steal of what belongs to us all.

— CMD

Minnesota is Strong – I was born and raised in St. Paul, so I readily recognize the strength and the character of the people, but I am now absolutely in awe of the courage demonstrated by the local communities, marching and singing peacefully in protest, undeterred by the threats of violence and even of loss of life by masked ICE agents.

I have family and friends there and have kept in touch with them. Here is a GoFundMe site posted on Instagram by my niece, Molly Lease, born in Minnesota, resident of Minneapolis, who is asking for support for her neighbors in the area and their school district – monetary support or broad sharing of the link to others across the country. Please donate or share. https://www.gofundme.com/f/essential-aid-for-north-metro-families-slp-friday-heights

Also, I don’t have the link to it, but my fellow writer, the great Charles Baxter, has composed a witness narrative about the peaceful protests, on one day in particular, that was a community triumph, unfortunately followed the very next day by the murder of Alex Pretti. I hope someone will post a link to it in Comments. It is stirring and unforgettable.

& remember that January 30 is walk out & strike day!

Thanks to all of you –

Carol

In unwitting humor from the other side – Trump’s Republicans are calling the white women confronting ICE in Minnesota: AWFUL – that is Affluent White Female Urban Liberals. (There are tempting counter-awfuls to describe Trump, ICE, Kristi Noem et al. You know: A-hole Witless F—ed Up Lowlifes. Etc.)?

Or how about: Amazing Women Fierce Unflinching Liberals?

Trump has a record of name-calling women who question him as “pigs,” “low IQ” & “bleeders”. (Both white women & women of color.) He and his enablers seem to have figured out belatedly that white women do not automatically support Trump (a majority percentage of college-educated white women voted for Kamala Harris in the last election) and are staunch protestors on the streets of Minneapolis.

Trump’s lackey Justice Dept. is investigating Minnesota’s governor, the Minneapolis mayor - but not the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good. Recently the New York Times released a new frame-by-frame video of the killing, providing proof that the ICE shooter was not touched by Good’s car.

Watching “60 Minutes” coverage on the protests is to witness ICE as a lawless mob – attacking those Minnesotans, who despite this brutality, keep resisting, keep standing out in the ice cold, against ICE.

One last note: I recently read “Benjamin Franklin”, a biography by Walter Isaacson. I understand that many MAGA supporters are also “anti vax”. Now, as measles outbreaks return to the U.S. and other virus outliers return – I urge the anti-vaxers, who claim to adhere to the principles of the Founding Fathers – to pay attention to Ben Franklin, founding father, inventor and scientist, who believed (back in the 1700’s) in vaccinations. His little son Franky died of smallpox at four years old. As Isaacson writes: “The bitter irony was that Ben Franklin had become a fervent advocate of smallpox vaccinations.” He had published statistics showing how effective these inoculations were. In 1730, he wrote about an epidemic in Boston, revealing how those who had been vaccinated survived. He had planned to inoculate Franky, but delayed because the little boy was ill with the flu, thereby unintentionally putting him at risk. Franklin stated unequivocally that vaccination was “a safe and beneficial practice.” Old Ben believed in the facts.

We need to know what is going on – we need to support each other in this knowledge, despite the encroaching mob.

We need to keep standing up - even in the bitter cold.

I believe I know how they feel about what has been happening with ICE – and not the ice they shovel daily from the sidewalks.

I know about Minnesota. I grew up within its historically staunch projected image of decency and compassion and its DFL (Democratic Farm Labor party) that ultimately defined Minnesota as a progressive and sanctuary state.

Of course there are differing politics – conservative, evangelical - or even MAGA. But it is hard for me to imagine anyone in my home state, even at the “edge” of extreme politics - who wholeheartedly supports the presence of masked, unidentified, heavily-weaponized intruders who have come to Minnesota to disrupt and violently attack its citizens – with what appears the lawless entitlement of a mob.

From ICE’s first appearance on the scene, it seemed terrifyingly predictable that this randomly deputized mob would end up managing to murder people - in this case a young woman - who had chosen to act on principle, joining a citizen’s “watch” against ICE aggression, a neighborhood protest meant to protect immigrants.

If language inspired by our connection to other human beings means anything (and to some of us —) the final words of Renee Good to the menacing unknown gunman moving at the side of her car, revealed the quality of her character. She smiled at this stranger and said (twice) out the driver’s side window, “I’m not mad at you.”

His words, seemingly in response, after he had shot her three times in the face at close range, were “Fucking bitch!” and revealed another version of character – a version we’ve come to recognize as in a state all its own. Not from Minnesota, not from anywhere you might want to hail from – unless you think of the Bottom of Hell as a fine fucking place to be from.

— Carol Muske-Dukes