Recent Fiction
"All the Summers Ahead" | Five Chapters
"Barnegat Bay" | The Good Men Project
"Light at New Latitude" | PANK
"Social Utility" | Keyhole
"Where the Dust Went" | Atticus Review
by Adrienne Rich
[…]
I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.
I reviewed Catherine Chung’s Forgotten Country for The Common:
Janie, born Jeehyun in South Korea and re-christened by the principal of her first American school when her parents relocate to Michigan for fear of political oppression, is a mathematics PhD student when the novel begins—or rather, at the time which she, relating the story from an unspecified point in the future, chooses to open it. That distinction is central to Forgotten Country’s energy. Where is Janie leading us? Toward actual, physical crisis, yes; but toward what inner crisis or resolution?
Janie is Forgotten Country’s Ancient Mariner, fixing the wedding guest (us) with her uncanny eye. She is Ishmael, who alone escaped to tell, and Nick Carraway, who wanted the whole world at a kind of moral attention when he came back from the events of The Great Gatsby.
One World Trade, looking fine this afternoon.
It’s awfully good to see downtown anchored to the sky again.
487 Broadway (The Silk Exchange Building)
Yesterday, and October 7,1936 by Bernice Abbott [NYPL]
I’d love to see the interiors behind those half-circle windows. Traffic noise must be incessant (best to be a supervillain or gargoyle and untroubled by such trifles) but $13.9 million still seems really low for the entire building.
Sniffen Court [photo: Jim Henderson | Wikipedia Commons]
In this scoop neck, flutter skirt, Saint Etienne weather—well, not today, but yesterday and tomorrow—even so unnervingly early in the year, I have a deliciously erroneous sense that all of us in the northern hemisphere have been spinning back in the dark months to not to warmer temperatures but to a place that’s been there all along. We were there on Fridays when class let out early, and when we didn’t make it back from lunch until four and our boss had left for the weekend. Outside, air was no boundary to skin but an extension. We got ahead of ourselves, around a corner to ice cubes, April, taxi honks, the accumulated babble of conversations, each making its own sense…
My first job interviews in New York were this time of year, in colder weather. I had already not been called back three or four times when, on the first really warm day, I walked east on Thirty-eighth or Thirty-ninth Street to an educational publisher. I don’t remember their name. The woman interviewing me was concerned I wouldn’t be content doing what they needed. I assured her I would. They had me do a sample of whatever it was that I’d be doing. A guy in the cubicle to my left was on the phone. I remember his tone, not his words; the way he let them drip. He may have been making lunch plans, or figuring to stay in the job a few months before quitting. I think I may not have thought until then in so many words that a job could be in New York and be terrible.
Read on →
![New Yorker ads [hi-res] accompanying Pauline Kael’s 1969 review of Ken Russell’s Women in Love, in the last years of the pre-area code New York telephone exchanges.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m117pfMDWb1qa0rqvo1_500.jpg)
New Yorker ads [hi-res] accompanying Pauline Kael’s 1969 review of Ken Russell’s Women in Love, in the last years of the pre-area code New York telephone exchanges.
Town Hall | Amherst, MA
1.between 1900-1910 [Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress]
2. tonight
There’s been money in this town for a long time. My glance fastens, in the old picture, on how the stone crops out of the dirt (so much dirt!). I’ve never been in a building of such scale and obviously long-term intent that wasn’t surrounded by some kind of pavement. Barns and ruins, yes, but not a going concern in the center of daily phone calls, mail, and stamped and filed forms, where many-pocketed animals conduct their business. I think the sensation of places as distinct from the land they were built on, and the unarticulated awareness of moving through a public (human) space or natural (private) one, must have altered profoundly when asphalt or concrete were poured, especially in small towns where buildings were suddenly no longer the most massive human things but alveolar sacs appended to the respiratory system joining them.
Whenever I wait to cross at this intersection—it’s interminable—I feel sure I’m going to get clipped by a careening Massachusetts (or worse: out of state) driver. I based a story around it.
The town hall is as nice inside as out. Wood paneling lends the most annoying errands—invariably what takes me there—a kind of civic grace.
