By KURT CASWELL
South of Hugo, Colorado on Highway 287, the land is wiped clean, the prairie grasses and flowers of spring cut to the root by cattle, their shining white teeth. Dung, dark stains on the land running the fencelines, remnants of progress, the way we produce meat in this country. It cannot have rained in many days. These hard-pan flats, the leading edge of the Great Plains east off the Rockies, turn a dust devil against the horizon to the south.
Translated by CHRISTOPHER BAKKEN & JOANNA ELEFTHERIOU
SUICIDES
A wave of suicides has swept over our battalion. Those who attempt suicide are deceived if they think they may do with themselves as they please. From now on, I order company commanders to carry out preliminary inquiries, interrogating anyone who has attempted suicide. The results of such inquiries will be sent to me immediately and official indictments will be remanded to a Special Military Court.
–Daily orders of Captain Commander Vasilopoulos Antonios on March 6, 1948.
By LYNNE WEISS
There’s a big church conference in West Berlin and the streets are amazingly crowded, but many shops are closed. It’s the perfect day, we decide, to visit East Berlin, the land of Godless communism, as my husband Bob calls it. We hope to find bookstores selling cheap editions of classic books (Marx, Goethe). Also, because we are traveling on a tight budget, as always, we hope for some inexpensive but substantial meals. The Wall has been down for about seven months, but East and West are not yet unified, and they still have separate currencies.
David and I leave our children, thirteen and ten, watching television in our rented house in Barjac, a village in southern France, to go hiking. They often fight like scorpions in a jar, but are best friends right now. “Bye,” they wave, eyes screen-ward. We don’t expect to be long. But after ten days of family vacation, we crave time alone together.
That summer I was reading Henry Adams, the Gulf bled crude
That did not quite wash up in Louisiana bayous.
I tracked his mind forward and back in time. The gist of it
Did not rise. Adams thought the planet would survive
Fifty years ago the white-crested waves of the Aral Sea broke over the top of the bluff I am standing on. Today there is not a single drop of water here. This place is called the graveyard of ships, where skeletal vessels marooned on sand dunes wait for a sea that will never return. The rusting hulks of twelve ships covered in chalk graffiti are the remains of what was once a thriving maritime and fishing industry in the now-defunct port of Moynaq, which lies in the northwestern corner of Uzbekistan. I climb down from the bluff to examine the ship corpses. The air is heavy and stultified; I feel so light-headed that I lean against the sun-baked metal for support. Looking up at the wall several meters above me, I imagine the weight of the water-that-was pressing down upon me.
Join us at Brookline Booksmith for readings by three contributors — Daniel Tobin, Katia Kapovich, and Philip Nikolayev — conversations about the works, and a party to celebrate the release of Issue 02.
A panel discussion in Amherst College’s Frost Library with editors for The New York Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, and Vanity Fair, moderated by Jen Acker. The event takes place as part of Amherst College’s series, “The Future of the Humanities in the Age of Technics.”
We had no plans to visit Paris that winter. I was at the end of the second trimester of a difficult first pregnancy, when a few hours away from the comfort of home were all my hundred-pound body could afford. We were living in Salem, Virginia, five thousand miles from all our family in India.
3 things were called into the somehow of morning
two dissimilar metals + moisture = electricity
and me here dimmed, all yesterday I wrote
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