Olivia Zheng

My old man taught me to drive on Sundays, usually when he was drunk. I was fifteen and he was a big shot on the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, the head engineer of combat systems on nuclear submarines and surface ships. During the work week he was a sober, respectable member of the community, but on weekends he lived an entirely different life, which included bouts of sullen, angry drunkenness and unpredictable fights with my mother. He often gave me a driving lesson after one of their battles, when he was still brooding and slugging off a bottle of Wild Turkey. He’d insist we drive over to a small strip of land just off Honolulu, a place the locals called Rabbit Island, even though there wasn’t a wild rabbit anywhere in the Hawaiian Islands that I knew of.

Swimming, In Two Parts

July 8, 2013 Essays, In House

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

Pools

1.

Washington, D.C., summers have been hot since forever, so a place to swim is a necessity, not a luxury. In the 1950s and 1960s, no one had air conditioning at home, and the Potomac River was so polluted that a tetanus shot was advised if you fell in. We lived in Southeast when I was little, and my parents would drive across town to Georgetown, the rich part of the city, to the public pool. My mother says I would throw myself in if she took her hand off me; she was constantly thanking people for rescuing the baby.

Review: The Son

July 1, 2013 Reviews

Book by PHILIPP MEYER
Reviewed by MELINDA MISENER

21st Century Oregon Trail

June 24, 2013 Essays, In House

By JAMES ALAN GILL

There are countless books written on what to do after an extra-marital affair, advice custom built for the betrayed and the betrayer. I’m not sure if any of them suggest quitting jobs, selling the house, and moving 2500 miles west to Oregon. But that’s what we did. A friend who lived there said, “There’s something to be said about traveling across the entire continent, coming to the point where there is no more land, and throwing all of your problems into the Pacific Ocean. There’s no choice but to start over.”

Neither of our families were supportive. We did all the packing ourselves and hired a truck to drive our things across country. When the unmarked semi pulled onto our narrow street, three Hispanic men jumped out ready to load everything inside. Our neighbor, an old woman whose husband—a crusty old fellow named Peck—had died a few months previous, came over and said, “I guess you all are moving then?”

Jordan Rift Valley

June 22, 2013 Essays, In House

By MARIAN CROTTY

We came to the Dead Sea as an afterthought, five of us wedged into one taxi on our way to the airport. So far we had spent our Jordanian daylight inside a conference room, listening to other Fulbright scholars present research about the Middle East and North Africa, and our evenings in large group dinners comparing notes. Within hours, my new friends would scatter back to Morocco, Oman, and Israel, and I would return to my temporary home in the city of Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates. The conference had been delicious and heady claustrophobia, like interval training for academics. We acquired and processed new information, alternating between externalized and internalized thought, acquisition and analysis, as if variety could substitute for rest. What I’m saying is that we were a certain kind of tired. When we unhooked ourselves from the backseat of the taxi, language was beginning to hurt.

Review: Stop Here

June 15, 2013 Reviews

Book by BEVERLY GOLOGORSKY
Reviewed by JUNE GERVAIS

My family eats a Long Island diner breakfast every Saturday morning. We say hi to our neighbor, Lucille, who waits tables; our toddler jabs at the jukebox as my husband orders the Hungry Man; we try to ignore the flat-screen on the wall, which is unfailingly tuned to Fox News. Luckily, there’s good eavesdropping to be done. What we overhear from nearby tables usually beats Sarah Palin stumping for the flat tax.

Beverly Gologorsky knew what she was about when she chose a diner as the center of her new novel, Stop Here. I’d wager there’s a diner at every exit on the Long Island Expressway, and they’re rich with fictional possibility. More than other restaurants, somehow, diners feel like places to talk politics, hash out family conflicts, make business plans, cement friendships—and Gologorsky serves up all of these in her novel Stop Here.

3 Movies: In Conversation

June 10, 2013 Essays, In House

By ELIZABETH WITTE

These were not snapshots, but motion pictures – hence, “movies.” Or rather, they were “talkies” – sound happened too. And through editing there were unions and disunions of movement and sound, the building of story, of character. In the span of seven weeks I watched three.

Things we experience in close proximity in time come to bear on each other, bridge the gaps between them. Persons in close proximity attempt a similar bridging.

The first movie was a drama, imagined from the ground up. The other two were documentaries crafted from ongoing lives. Each brought a unique document of a couple-at-home to the screen in my home.

Vanishing Chinatown

June 9, 2013 Essays

By ALLEN GEE

I know the Chinatown, New York, of long ago from my parents. My grandfather, like a grand impresario, hosted their wedding reception there. They were married on September 19, 1959, and he personally invited everyone to the reception, stopping by at the Gee, Lai, and Gong family association buildings, which was where men gathered to consolidate finances and dictate business decisions, and where women met to socialize. Once invited to the reception, you could bring any number of family, but it was a matter of honor not to overstep the generosity of the invitation. I should add that the reception lasted for three consecutive nights.

Review: The Great Gatsby (Film)

June 3, 2013 Reviews

Movie directed by BAZ LUHRMANN
Reviewed by LISA ALEXANDER

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 The Great Gatsby is a simple story at heart: poor boy meets rich girl and, by dint of superhuman perseverance, transcends his origins only to find out it doesn’t matter because her kind will never accept him anyway. This slender novel has become shorthand for the Zeitgeist of the Twenties. Its language is flowery, even hothouse, Fitzgerald’s voice lush. Yet, using a detached character as narrator, Fitzgerald knits atmosphere, recurring objects, patterns, and themes into an iconic drama about the ringing failure of the American dream and a contender for The Great American Novel. Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s new adaptation of Gatsby is the third major film version and, though this Gatsby is a fun ride, its emphasis on spectacle muddies Fitzgerald’s masterpiece.

On Limits and Liberation: Oulipo, the New Wave, and My Summer in Paris

May 28, 2013 Essays

By SONYA CHUNG

1.

In the fall of 1960, an exclusive group of writers and thinkers gathered in Paris to officially launch a new way of approaching both the study and creation of literature. This gathering—which would become “a kind of literary supper club . . . a hallowed echo chamber for investigations of poetic form and narrative constraint and the mathematics of wordplay,” as Daniel Levin Becker describes it in his book Many Subtle Channels—called itself Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature), or Oulipo. According to co-founder Raymond Queneau, the workshop would explore “new forms and structures that may be used by writers in any way they see fit.” Becker, who is currently one of 20 living members of the still-active workshop (there are 38 total members, living and dead), was elected to the Oulipo in 2008 and describes the workshop a bit more specifically:

Olivia Zheng

ozheng20

Driving Lessons

Swimming, In Two Parts

Review: The Son

21st Century Oregon Trail

Jordan Rift Valley

Review: Stop Here

3 Movies: In Conversation

Vanishing Chinatown

Review: The Great Gatsby (Film)

On Limits and Liberation: Oulipo, the New Wave, and My Summer in Paris

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