“The Reading Room,” a regular feature of
the A-Line: a journal of progressive thought, will highlight fiction and non-fiction of note in this salon-style series. We encourage you to return to this section of the journal regularly to select from exciting content.
Arts & Culture / Health / The Reading Room / Vol 3. No. 1The August sunset burnished the room. People swarming in costumes–tangerine scarf and ballooning teal trousers on one woman, another with some kind of free-form jewelry, like golden arms encircling her neck. Men in suits and ties, younger ones in shirts with Beckett-styled hedged hair and Yeatsian rimmed glasses. Polyglot chatter: […]
Politics / The Reading Room / Vol 3. No. 1 Mom, I dedicate this to you. And then they had me, stripped me, battering my teeth into my throat till I swallowed my blood. My voice was drowned in the roar of their voices, and my black wet body slipped and rolled in their hands as they bound me […]
Arts & Culture / Dispatches / Politics / The Reading Room / Vol 3. No. 1We all need a break. Despite the fact that the murder of George Floyd, among too many other Black Americans, jolted an important and overdue conversation about racial inequity to the forefront; we all felt drained from a year in which we lived through a deadly pandemic and an election […]
Arts & Culture / Politics / The Reading Room / Vol. 2 No. 4The first time that I heard the word “otolith” was in a brief video from the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London. In it, their “curator of fish,” James Maclaine, demonstrated the new scanning technology that would allow him to examine the undigested stomach contents of the Museum’s rare, preserved […]
Arts & Culture / Politics / The Reading Room / Vol. 2 No. 4As in the United States and England, statues have been toppled and street names debated in Canada. The statue of John A. Macdonald came down in Montreal on August 29, 2020. Ma(d)Donald you ask? Well, in this case, the first prime minister of Canada (1867–1873, 1878–1891), associated with completion of […]
Arts & Culture / Politics / The Reading Room / Vol. 2 No. 4I remember reading Black feminist scholar Audre Lorde’s essay “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” and I was captivated by her use of the capitalization of Black, Color/ed, Black women, Black lesbianism, and Black men throughout the essay, while at the same time demoting “white” and “america” to […]
Arts & Culture / The Reading Room / Vol. 2 No. 1-2Poetry is best that governs least. No it isn’t. Poetry and citizenship are inconsolably incommensurable, conjoined at the heart but beating time to different drummers. From time to time. Aesthetic justice is symbolic and dwells next to, not in, the world of political action. Give me a break! The politics […]
Arts & Culture / The Reading Room / Vol. 2 No. 1-2“But God, such a long journey ahead for you and me”
~ Andre Brink
i
this is a hard poem to begin.
old hopes return just piece by serrated piece,
teeth of cut glass but making way for tears-
see how my finger tip is polished with water – […]
Arts & Culture / International / Politics / The Reading Room / Vol. 2 No. 1-2Jeff Nuttall (1933-2004) was a British artist, poet, critic, actor, and musician. The author of almost forty books, Nuttall was involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) from the late 1950s, and then played a major role in the British counter-cultural scene. During the 1960s, Nuttall edited My Own […]
Arts & Culture / Health / Politics / The Reading Room / Vol. 2 No. 1-2last night while I was dreaming two of my dearest friends (old loves) visited me (needing a place to stay they said as had once always been so) […]
Arts & Culture / The Reading Room / Vol. 2 No. 1-2Cringe
That’s how the earth wore you, bent,
Crushed by the sky, too,
As if the blue
Had always been too
Heavy with rain, scent
And chance, but not the chance […]
Arts & Culture / The Reading Room / Vol. 2 No. 1-2Look carefully, describe what you see. Choose a landscape provoking interest. Mull that carefully again and again. Concoct an assumption: what have you pursued, how does it work? Gather evidence, examine its relevance. Calibrate each fragment’s adequacy. Dissatisfied, pursue a new assumption. If clarity seems possible, push […]