MQR Online

Unsolved Histories: A Reverend, A Theory, and the Garden of Eden Found

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Though the Bible offers no specific coordinates (hardly unexpected given that the entirety of the world’s creation was summed up in a few deft lines), it does offer a few clues for religious scholars to puzzle over. Such as the Bible’s mention of Eden’s location near the site of four rivers: the Pishon, the Gihon, the Tigris and the Euphrates. For many, these ancient waterways—two of which still flow throughout western Asia—would confirm Eden’s location in or around modern day Iraq, Syria and Kuwait. Yet Van Slyke had another theory, believing the four rivers referenced were, in fact, the Trempealeau, the Black, the La Crosse, and the Mississippi—thereby confirming Galesville, Wisconsin as Eden’s true locale.

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Eva Kot’átková: ERROR

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Early in the hour-long film, “The Judicial Murder of Jakub Mohr,” the central protagonist, a patient in a psychiatric ward, shouts in Czech, “My words are not my own!” [“Moje slova nejsou moje!”]. He is on Kafka-esque trial for saying out loud what is visibly true: a series of wires—“Threads!” rebukes the prosecutor—extend from his back and connect to an ominous box, which is held by a man who in turn dictates in whispers what the patient says. At one point, Mohr lists to the jury in indignation what he has become: a gramophone, a radio, an instrument. He is something between human self and machine, a cyborg, his agency mediated by the state and psychiatric institution.

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The Lost Footage of Pianist Sonny Clark

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Sonny Clark is the one who got away. He’s the face you see in still photos but can’t see in motion. A brilliant jazz pianist who was in demand during the 1950s and ’60s on both the West and East coasts, the only known footage of him playing came from a 1956 TV show called Stars of Jazz, but the film seems to have been destroyed when ABC recorded over many of its reels in order to save money.

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A Craft Review of Books: First Picks of 2016

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The use of foreign language in this book is worth mentioning—Greenwell includes Bulgarian not just as a cheap device to evoke place (although it does lend the story much realism and authority). The words are deployed with poetic precision: such as in the rhythm of chakai, chakai, chakai (wait, wait, wait); they are used to characterize people, such as Mitko’s love for the word podaruk (gift); and to reflect the narrator’s to make sense of his world (strahoten means awesome, a word “built from a root signifying dread”). Most importantly, it is used to cut deeper into the core of the narrator’s emotional question: priyatel means both friend and lover—which one is he really to Mitko?

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Maybe Novels Are Actually Really Good for Television

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Anne Carson writes that prose is a house and poetry is the man on fire running through it. I think we managed to convince ourselves that movies can be that house, when really it’s more of an Airbnb. Checking into an Airbnb for the weekend is not the same as living in a house. While you are physically inside of a home, it is temporary, it is free of obligation aside from the implicit agreement that you will effectively not be the man on fire running through it. But owning a home requires sustained and incremental effort: you need to pay the bills, you need to maintain your property. And with that dedication comes intimacy: it’s your house. It’s the place you return to again and again.

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Off Facebook: Listening to the Silence

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I’m not sure if I’ll go back on Facebook. I might. But for now, I’ll continue to be thankful for everything I’m experiencing. At this moment: the sound of the wind as its moves the pines, a street light illuminating snow, the movement inside of me that is present, always rolling, always available. I still believe silence is filled with noise, but I no longer think people who want it are wrong.

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Small Press Snapshot: Timeless, Infinite Light

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Timeless, Infinite Light is a small poetry publisher based in Oakland, but to put it that way is to sap the force out of their astonishing vigor. They are a press of the dark matter of consciousness as a nexus between heritage and the glitter of possibility, of otherness as a radical force of nature blowing tenderly but insistently against the contemporary structures of power. Their “books are spells for unraveling capitalism,” as they put it themselves, and they “believe in the radical potential of collaborative, hybrid, and embodied writing.”

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A Return to Presence

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Ernest Hemingway famously said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Openness, presence—that’s the secret. It’s understandable, then, why so many writers crave a set time and space to write with no distractions, no peripheral commitments, and sometimes no human interaction whatsoever to engage most fully in the solitary act of writing.

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The Year of the Goat

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I cut the string a few days after the Chinese New Year welcomed in the Year of the Monkey. I waited the extra days because I was tentative about cutting something that had been with me for an entire year, something so passive-aggressively attached. I didn’t think the cutting would hurt—the attachment didn’t go that far. But I did wonder what I would do with the string once it was no longer a part of me. I felt as though I couldn’t throw the string away, and yet to keep the ratty thing was also unappealing. The string was an accumulation of time, had gathered the experiences of that year more accurately, and certainly less ostentatiously than any journals I’d kept, any reflections I was attempting to write.

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