October 10, 2019
Ann Snitow May 9, 1943-August 10, 2019 Ann Snitow, a founding faculty member of Lang College and the creator of the Gender Studies Program at the New School, passed away on August 10, 2019. She was a beloved member of the Literary Studies faculty. While indeed her books and essays are crucial texts in feminist studies and in the life of the mind, as Literary Studies colleagues our remembrances here are more personal, testaments not just to her work but to the power of her being.
October 19, 2016
By Brendan Heldenfels, Eugene Lang College, Class of 2015 In the days after Professor Robin Mookerjee’s passing in May 2016, I scoured Facebook for memories and recollections of him, desperate to hang on to pieces of him left behind. Among those memories was a posting Robin made: “Common sense is a form of insanity. […]
When Robin Mookerjee died last year, in May 2016, he left behind a considerable amount of unpublished writing, including poems and short stories. Lucy Mookerjee, Robin’s wife, has given Colette Brooks and Mark Statman the work for publication.
The two poems featured here embody qualities that marked Robin’s writing and being. As Statman observes, “They are dark and witty, intelligent, wise, a little smart-alecky but in a way that is at once forgiving and generous, even kind.” As was Robin himself.
Cyrillic Diary
Haven’t slept since Inverness
Lapping and narcotic shores, ways to fall
Tor I hadn’t seen in a while
Next to our finger-dances, sublime‑
I no longer recall.
Kindly I sprinkled water on you again
You slept like a child with belly fever
Brown-eyed moons shone in the reservoir
Anchored me to the sky‑
Made of me a believer.
Maps smoothed out on my library table
Lost you with the invention of the steam engine
Riadh through to South Korea
Every port a new bed‑
A dream each destination.
Rainbow Table
(for my wedding)
You are or you were the green liquid,
bubbles up & down cylindrical translucent housing;
but that’s just a mental thing.
You are all over me like the microscopic dust that parachutes down,
invisible cloud from the new towers & the ones we’ve known a long time –
proof from regret or foresight,
transports itself from you to me via the skin trade, and
with a parlance in which we are not conversant;
and accounts for all knowledge held in common between us.
So it goes: that which is most essential, elixir or quintessence, is
intangible, not found in Diderot or Johnson, compilers of known things.
It is of the rays and gases, atmospheric stuff, rumored to embower, conspiring to
maintain life or cue death to reappear as life.
So it is: we live, happily, in a world of things, distributing autumnal leaves
like immigration papers, oblivious yet versed in knowledge of the law,
unacknowledged arbiters of the nicest adjustments that
forestall daily calamity, doing God’s work with idle hands, which we
now will do under the auspices of this architecture and augury ad infinitum.
