* A.L. Major *
In sophomore year of college, I tell my writing mentor I don’t know if I can write stories from the Bahamian perspective. I tell him, “I don’t trust myself to get the voices right.” He asks me what a Bahamian voice sounds like? A black voice? Aren’t you Bahamian? “I am,” I stutter. “I am Bahamian.”
Inconsistent Voices Read More »
* Claire Skinner *
I’m writing to you from the public library in Pahrump, Nevada. We’re here for the free Wi-Fi. Outside, the Spring Mountains rise jaggedly to the east. A few bedraggled clouds, ripped apart by wind, speed over the peaks. Inside, senior citizens stare suspiciously at laptop computers as if they will explode. Occasionally, they type, bird-like. I’m suspicious, too, but for other reasons. This town, like so many Nevada towns, is strange and inscrutable. There’s a man who’s lived in Pahrump as long as anybody can remember, who walks up and down the main drag, waving his huge, bright American flag at the passing cars. There are two legal brothels here—Sheri’s Ranch and Chicken Ranch—and numberless slot machines. A big Wal-Mart. I can’t say I recommend it. Which is saying something, coming from me: I love a dive desert town. I don’t love Pahrump.
Postcards from the Desert Read More »
To travel in linguistic isolation is not to live between cultures but to live in parallel to the current culture as an observer and sometimes a participant whose actions are determined and informed by wholly foreign terms.
Warsaw Dispatch: Where Benches Play Chopin Read More »
* Paula Mendoza *
I’ve always found it strangely calming—the excision of texts and images, the disposal of objects, the burning of papers. To destroy or erase cleanses me of something’s aura, that miasma of living memories pervading an inanimate presence. It was upon reading an article, and the study—“Design for Forgetting: Disposing of Digital Possessions After A Breakup”—it summarized, that got me thinking lately about what it means to document and to forget.
A Poetics of Forgetting Read More »
* Kristie Kachler * I say I’ve lost so much and you imagine something awful, but I just mean the boring things, the standard things. The first that comes to mind: shortly after we moved to Berlin my love bought me a pair of hand-knit gloves at a market. On the ride home I fell off my bike and wore a hole straight through the gray and purple-striped palm; I mended them, but they soon fell out of my pocket. A friend in the know mailed a replacement pair, but these I left in the U-Bahn. I didn’t lose the precious incense holder, almost paper thin and perfectly celadon, that I had bought as a student in Strasbourg, but my cat broke it. When I moved abroad the cat moved in with a friend who fell out of touch.
Tracking Pants and Soul Read More »
* Gina Balibrera *
GAYEV: “‘Dear old bookcase! Wonderful old bookcase! I rejoice in your existence. For a hundred years now you have borne the shining ideals of goodness and justice, a hundred years have not dimmed your silent summons to useful labor. To generations of our family (almost in tears) you have offered courage, a belief in a better future, you have instructed us in ideals of goodness and social awareness….’
(Pause.)”
Tableau Vivant, Part III: Dear Old Bookcase Read More »
* Zhanna Vaynberg * If you consider that in the past twenty, thirty years, life has only gotten more and more fast-paced, it’s a little strange that the tradition of marriage advances at the opposite rate. Sure, plenty of people still get married straight out of high school or in their early twenties, though this seems to happen mostly in smaller towns or within very religious communities. And sure, half of all marriages end in divorce, so perhaps enough people are already rushing to the altar. But is there something else, something deeper at work here?
* Kevin Haworth * One possible future of Palestinian society is being built, at a breathtaking pace, just north of Ramallah, on a hilltop facing the small Jewish settlement of Ateret. It is the town of Rawabi, which bills itself as the “first planned Palestinian city,” and which sits in a formerly bare stretch of the West Bank like an oasis of construction equipment and activity.
What Do People Do All Day? Palestinian Version Read More »
One afternoon last week, on vacation in British Columbia with my family, my boyfriend and I slipped away from the boozing and card playing for a quick visit to the Vancouver Art Gallery. We arrived at the museum shortly before closing and walked into the first gallery we saw, a small dark room where we found Fiona Tan’s 21-minute, two-channel video installation Rise and Fall (2009). I loved it.
Transcending Beauty: Fiona Tan’s “Rise and Fall” and Terrence Malick’s “To the Wonder” Read More »
* Gina Balibrera *
A wild idea occurred to me as I made my way through Chekhov’s plays this spring. If I asked nicely, would my friends agree to stage some modern tableaux vivants from Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard? I had been thinking about how silence and stillness work in these plays, and how humor and misunderstanding creep into moments of deliberate pause in these plays. I wanted to study these moments in the paused, familiar faces of my friends in the roles of Chekhov’s most familiar characters. This is the sort of idea that appears lucid in a dream, that most sensible people dismiss after waking.
Tableau Vivant, Part II: Leftovers Read More »
