Arts & Culture

Unsolved Histories: A U.F.O., a Crop Circle, and a Message Not Yet Received

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In the early morning hours of July 6, 1996, 19-year-old Dawn Sprunger was driving home from a friend’s house when she spotted an unidentified flying object hovering above her in the sky. “It looked like a vertical jet,” she later told reporters, “triangular in shape. At certain times you could see red and blue lights in it.” Sprunger remained calm and drove home, though once inside, peeked out the window to find that the aircraft had apparently followed her. She woke her parents, who upon witnessing the red and blue lights themselves, quickly called the authorities. By sighting’s end witnesses would include several police officers, the police chief, as well as the mayor of Berne, Indiana, who, fine public servant that he was, even managed to record a bit of video footage of the encounter.

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Majeed Cares: On Giving a Damn

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“It feels impossible to talk about race or other kinds of difference,” wrote Roxane Gay recently in the New York Times Sunday Review. “But if we don’t have difficult conversations, we will be able to reconcile neither this country’s racist past nor racist present.” This is a refrain we read and hear so often these days, and yet, the conversations remain hard in coming. Faheem Majeed, in his first solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago this year, is a notable example of conversation between artist, curator, and museum institution that seeks to expand that conversation with a wider viewing public.

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Dear Cora

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Dear Cora, I sat down to read this evening, but somehow my thoughts kept wandering to you, and I’ve put up my book to talk to you. I feel so queer tonight, as if something was going to happen. It’s been coming on all this afternoon. Now to make it perfect I spose that some calamity should occur. But you know I’m not very superstitious.

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Snapchats and Secrets

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When I was a kid, I used to trade secrets like baseball cards. We moved around a bit when I was younger, and I wasn’t good at making friends. I was better at observing the kids around me, and analyzing how they talked to each other, which explains why I’m a writer now. But back then, all I really knew was that friends told each other secrets. I told a secret, I got a secret. I got a secret, I told a secret. The exchange rate was a perfect 1:1. Who is your crush? Who is my crush? We walked away none richer, none poorer. Or that was the hope.

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From the Desk of a Librarian: Archives as a Resource

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We all know libraries are great resources for writing. What isn’t always considered, however, is the intense power of archives for creative writers. What separates archives from the rest of the materials kept in libraries is that the vast majority of archival materials are unpublished. We can only truly know them, the stories they contain, the bits of brilliant light, by spending some time with them. Though we know archives as essential to the fact-finding part of research, not everyone sees them as essential to the creative part. But there are stories in archives, stories waiting to be told, and wading through the records for these gems is the tragically beautiful part of archival research.

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Unsolved Histories: A Cave, A Poet, and Excavating the Truth

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In 1881, while wandering the woods near their Spring Valley, Wisconsin home, brothers William and George Vanasse spotted a small creature scurry into a hole. The boys gave chase, prodding the hole with a stick until the stick slipped, then listening as it clattered far below. Curious, the young adventurers returned to their hole the following day, and after securing a rope to a nearby tree, descended into darkness. Guided by lantern light, their shadows swelled along the cool limestone walls until at last their feet touched solid ground.

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Killing :: kogonada

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Not long after reading David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, still high on its rallying cry for emotion over narrative, concision over Great American Novel bloat, I came across :: kogonada’s work. In his visual essays I discovered the cinematic version of what Shields called “the folk tradition in action: finding new uses for things by selecting the parts that move you and discarding the rest.”

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An Egg Dipped In Ash

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Last week, I saw a film about the life of Julius Rosenwald, an early twentieth-century businessman and philanthropist who financed a series of rural black schools, built and run with the oversight of the Tuskegee Institute. Rosenwald otherwise had a life such as that from which the myth of the American dream is made. He started as a merchant on the streets of Chicago, worked his way up in the “rag trade” and eventually became chief of Sears and Roebuck. In the meantime, he made large matching donations to black YMCAs and attracted the attention of Booker T. Washington. Washington took him on a tour of Tuskegee, and soon the two formed a partnership, building what would be called the Rosenwald Schools, funded by Rosenwald and each school’s immediate community, staffed by Tuskegee-trained teachers, and erected by the black communities they served.

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