So listen to this. Ariana Reines–poet, playwright, translator, publisher and frequent target of this site’s affection–has been invited to join a UN Mission to Haiti which leaves on Thursday. She will spend March 12-19 traveling with a group of trauma clinicians, serving as the team’s only French-English interpreter. Ariana writes:

“the group will be working primarily with traumatized doctors, nurses, and other medical workers, as well as children, orphans in particular. I know you have plenty of places to put your $: into the mouths of your children for example.  i must raise $2500 in order to cover airfare, travel insurance, immunizations, malaria medication, mosquito netting, art supplies (for the children we will work with), and feminine hygeine + contraceptive items (for the grown people)”

$2500 is an imminently crowd-sourceable figure, and with such a firm sense of this mission’s purpose and time-table, the impact of your giving can hardly risk being lost in the general abstraction of “charity.”  So what do you say, team? I say let’s send Ariana Reines to Haiti. Whatever you can give will help. I’m going to go kick down twenty bucks as soon as I finish writing this post.

The last book I loved was Bleak House by Charles Dickens. It was one of those books I had been putting off reading for forever, because even though I love Dickens, and usually try to get through one or two of his books a year, that one is just SO long (even by his standards) and the plot—it’s ostensibly about a dragged-out court case—just didn’t seem all that interesting. I finally ended up reading it because of Harold Bloom. …more