Arts & Culture

Despite the Digital, Things We Still Carry

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There is a particular magnetism in things. I feel the way they cling to me especially now, as I travel from one country to another by train, wanting nothing (I tell myself) but to travel lightly, and instead weighted down by what I cannot throw away. Even as I am having an “experience” (travel), I am tethered to my objects. There are the essentials, or what must come with—my dog, for instance, a toothbrush, underwear, and some clothes—but a lot more of the inessentials: three dog toys, a pair of yellowed goggles, a cigar box full of art supplies that includes two pairs of scissors plus an X-Acto knife, a curved sewing needle and bits of ribbon, thoroughly read copies of the London Review of Books, and a board game with instructions only in Spanish, a language I do not read. The last item I managed to offload onto a friend I met up with in Croatia. A best friend, to be sure (who else takes on the burden of your things?), who begrudgingly agreed to bring this and a heavy, hardcover exhibition catalogue back to the United States ahead of me.

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Trolling, Comedy, and Finding The Joke: Thoughts on “A Deadly Adoption”

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A month ago, a billboard advertising Lifetime’s latest cautionary tale-style movie, to join the ranks of such films as The Bride He Bought Online and I Killed My BFF­, appeared on Hollywood Boulevard. Although some past Lifetime movies have drawn some media attention prior to their release–The Pregnancy Pact, in particular, gaining a serious online following before it even aired in January of 2010–the attention this new film, A Deadly Adoption, received had nothing to do with its uncanny resemblance to real events (though both films claim to be inspired by true stories). Instead, it was the two heads hovering at the billboard, over a pregnant woman standing on a dock, which propelled the Internet into wild speculation. At the helm of this Lifetime movie, both looking a little resolute and a little alarmed in profile on the billboard, were comedians Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig. The tagline: “The birth of a plan gone wrong.”

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A Weekend and a Week: My Attempt at a Writing Retreat

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All of this is to say what so many writers have already said: it’s hard to write a novel and act like a human being. You can’t have a foot in both worlds, half in and half out of your mind. So some writers go on a solo retreat, some writers drink, and some writers wake up to write while polite society is still sleeping—in any case, they find a marker, something that signals that they are no longer in the old world.

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My Life Aquatic

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They’re curious, the Ballard Locks. Here, Seattle’s main freshwater lakes, Lake Washington and Lake Union, mix and mingle with the salty inland sea of Puget Sound. The Ballard Locks connect the bodies. They are intricately engineered to move hulking commercial ships, tugs, and barges—as well as smaller pleasure crafts and kayaks, up and down a 26-foot elevation. But this infrastructure was also designed to prevent damage to the freshwater ecosystem and salmon. The locks are an important part of the region’s maritime history since 1916, and with more than a hundred thousand boats, over a million tons of transported cargo, and more than one million people visiting annually, the Ballard Locks are also an intricate mix and mingle of human life.

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The Tel Aviv-Berlin Road

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The year 2015 marks a half-century of diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany. It is a complicated relationship, to say the least. On the one hand, ties between these two countries are incredibly strong; as a recent article in Ha’aretz details, Germany has made key contributions to Israel’s economy, security, and diplomacy nearly since the founding of the Israeli state in 1948. And present day relations have little of the hand-wringing and public back-and-forth that marks, say, Israeli comments about Jewish life in France, or the regular Israel-bashing that is a feature of discourse in many European countries. On the other hand, it’s Israel and Germany. There will always be a lot to say.

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A Brief History of Film Trailers, or: Turns Out This Post Is Not About Peter Orner

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In this way, trailers are wonderful Schrodinger’s Catnip: the trailer is a box, the film is the cat inside, and seeing the film opens the box to discover that cat dead or alive, a tanking 0% on RottenTomatoes or a Critic’s Pick in the New York Times. Just watching that good trailer again and again, though, the cat always lives, the movie is irrelevant, and the experience of the trailer is a repeatable, elusively changing experience. This, I think, is comparable to the feeling I get when writing early drafts: everything is borderline incoherent, but still raw, there are images that gnarl their way to the foreground, and scenes are skeletal with key moments of dialogue belted out by a character you don’t really know yet. Maybe that’s why, on particularly dry writing days, I wind up rewatching some of my favorite trailers, triggering a kind of a Pavlovian response: Okay, Brain, get off your ass and start figuring out how we get from that image to that sound bite.

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Unsolved Histories: A Haunted Inn, A Hallowed Ground, and the Ghost of Robert Frost

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Spring break of my seventh-grade year was not my wildest on record, though what it lacked in the usual spring break trappings it made up for in folk art and maple syrup. Years later, my mother admitted she’d planned our road trip to Bennington, Vermont on a lark, lured there by the prospects of a Grandma Moses exhibition. Though my younger brother and I didn’t share Mom’s enthusiasm for Grandma Moses, we shared her minivan nonetheless. 700 miles later, we arrived at our destination—or almost. As we drove in circles in search of Grandma’s art, we found instead a rare eyesore on the otherwise unblemished terrain.

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Spices and Sleep: A Look Inside “Kebra Nagast”

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For the next installment of my “Food and Sexuality” series, I’m going to remain on the African continent and travel over to Ethiopia so we can discuss Kebra Nagast, or “Glory of the Kings.” This literary text full of myth, history, allegory, and apocalyptic storytelling is thousands of years old and details the Solomonic line of Ethiopian kings from around 400 to 1200. The stories begin with Menelik, who was believed to be the son of King Solomon and Queen Makeda.

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I Look, I Become: The Seams of Persona

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Now seems an apt time to talk about persona. Remarkably, America has recently been talking about how we perform our selves: culturally, racially, gender-wise. How do you know you are a woman? What are the surface markers of race and culture, and how do they relate to the deep, lived experience of those things? These are questions many anthropology and gender-studies professors never thought they would see outside of their classrooms. For writers, they are also design questions: how might we enter another’s consciousness without stealing? Why do we feel moved to write in someone else’s voice?

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The Wilderness as Resource: On Residencies and Retreats

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Summer has come to “The Last Frontier” as well as the Lower 48. In Alaska, we’ve already begun the hurried rush of summer activities, sprinting against the onslaught of the coming winter, making the most of 24 hours of blessed daylight. The arriving summer solstice will be the longest span of daylight the whole year, and here it’s a cause for celebration. In the spirit of these wild things, I’d like to offer up a different idea of the word resource in terms of writing: mainly, the Wilderness as resource. It’s not a new concept. Thoreau went to the woods to live a very specific life. Bill Bryson took us on a walk in the green embrace of the Appalachians. It is ever more true across history. Even in a time of advancing technologies, we remain obsessed with our relationship to the natural world.

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