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birthday cake, Heat

A Painting for Late Summer: Florine Stettheimer’s Heat

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* Mary Camille Beckman *

Just like my first summer in the Midwest, this year it’s been relentlessly hot, surprisingly humid, and in my apartment, ever un-air conditioned. In July, I stripped my bed of its quilt and sheets, placed a fan in front of every window, almost cracked a tooth chewing ice. My cat has been nibbling on her Tender Vittles only infrequently, yawning often, and shedding continuously. She stretches out day and night on the cool tiles between the toilet and the shower. I’ve been eating mango popsicles for dinner. This kind of heat—the kind that makes most movement absurd or impossible, robs you of your appetite, colors everything bright, wilts people and plants alike—is the subject of Florine Stettheimer’s 1919 painting titled, you guessed it, Heat.

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John Riley

Do You Like It?: Headroom and Jazz Drumming

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* Eric McDowell *
Listening to Sonny Clark’s “Cool Struttin’” not long ago, I asked my musician friend how to know if Jackie McClean’s solo (or any saxophone solo) was good or not. He drew a slow breath—deciding how far back toward the basics of theory he’d have to meet me?—and said, “Well, do you like it?” He didn’t elaborate. When I tried to answer his question, I realized I couldn’t. Yes, I’d wanted to like jazz, wanted to be “into it” and to know how to talk about it even. But for some reason I’d passed over that simplest, most obvious and essential approach: I hadn’t been listening, not really. What I mean is, I had put the cart before the horse, wanting to know what I should like without considering what I did like.

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Inconsistent Voices

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* 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.”

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Postcards from the Desert

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* 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.

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A Poetics of Forgetting

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* 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.

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Tracking Pants and Soul

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* 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.

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Tableau Vivant, Part III: Dear Old Bookcase

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* 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.)”

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The Marriage Plot

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* 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?

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What Do People Do All Day? Palestinian Version

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* 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.

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