MQR 53:2 | Spring 2014

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Linda Frazee Baker discovers Dwarka, Chris Kempf goes on the worst first date of his OkCupid career, Rav Grewal-Kök experiences a moment of truth in Vang Vieng, Michael Kobre wonders what’s happened to all the superheroes, Asraf Rushdy muses about writing a trilogy on lynching.

Fiction by Nan Byrne, S. P. Donohue, Janis Hubschman, Courtney Sender, Brian Short, Ruvanee Vilhauer.

Poetry by Susan Hutton, Jacques Rancourt, Corrina Schroeder, G. C. Waldrep.

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When the Ordinary Becomes Extraordinary

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* Kaveh Bassiri *

“The most disgusting film I ever made.”
Rainer Werner Fassbinder on Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?

When I was an undergrad at Santa Clara University, I took buses to San Francisco to see foreign movies. I remember rushing into a double-bill of Rainer Werner Fassbinder films. During the first movie, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970), I had to go to bathroom. I thought nothing important is going to happen, so I went.

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Dora García’s Instant Narrative

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* Mary Camille Beckman *

Before Dora García’s Instant Narrative was installed there, the apse of the local university art museum was the kind of space I’d cut through on my way somewhere else. The bathroom, the contemporary galleries upstairs, the auditorium in the basement. Nineteenth century American landscape paintings line the walls, visible between marble columns. The mood: quiet, cold. The mood: formal, save the rumpled students slouching through on their way, like me, elsewhere. Before Instant Narrative, I moved through the apse largely unnoticed and unnoticing.

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“Otherwise Known As: A Legend in Words & Pictures,” by Rachel May

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And the old ones, the ones who were afraid, looked at each other and sat down, and cried. They threw up their hands. They said, You’re going to do it, anyway, aren’t you? And the new ones said, Yes. And the old ones said, All our work? And the new ones said, We’re sorry. And they all knelt down, and began to pull back the grass.

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MQR 53:1 | Winter 2014

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Pearl Abraham on family, Yom Kippur, and the rites of forgiveness; Martha S. Jones on family, race, and identity; Michael A. Chaney on the slave craftsman Dave the Potter; Susan Kushner Resnick on the lingering emanations of a 1943 coal mine disaster; Amy Bernhard on her mother and the Amish; Natania Rosenfeld on shame; James Morrison on Edmund White.

Fiction by Gabriel Brownstein, James Brubaker, Margaret Eaton, Brady Hammes, and Rachel May.

Poetry by Stephen Cramer, John Hart, Shara Lessley, Travis Mossotti, Mary Peelen, Stephanie Pippin, Martha Serpas, and Ruth Williams.

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Come Spring

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* Claire Skinner *

If you’re a poet (or anyone with a sensitive personality prone to changeable moods), Spring can pose some emotional challenges. It can be grating–cruel, even–when the beauty of the outside world (daffodils! baby robins! teens in love!) seems at odds with whatever’s going on in the hidden cupboards of the self.

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Toward a Muppet Theory of Literature

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* Kevin Haworth *

The core problem with Muppets Most Wanted is that it contains no grief. In the new movie, the Muppets are back, with the world no longer needing to mourn their absence. Miss Piggy, too, has returned, filling that pork-shaped hole in Kermit’s chest. Yes, things are happening—shows are being staged and crimes are being solved—but it all just feels like objects in motion staying in motion. Kermit gets shipped off to a gulag, but, notably, he doesn’t seem all that sad about it.

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