Olivia Zheng

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From the 17th Floor: All These Things So Arranged

November 9, 2012 Essays

Inside Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence and other Turkish wonders

Some places become museums because they’re ruins. Other museums are houses built to hold the relics.

In fifth century Constantinople, believers built a small Greek Orthodox chapel called The Church of the Holy Saviour in Chora. The Greek chora refers to the church’s place in the fields outside the city’s thick defensive walls. Rebuilt, restored, destroyed, and raised again over the centuries, the church became a truly glorified house of God in the fourteenth century under the stewardship of a powerful intellectual named Theodore Metochites, whose vision and funds decorated the interior with some of the finest mosaics and frescoes remaining from Byzantine times.

From the Stone House: Reading Stevie Smith in Milan

November 8, 2012 Essays

By MARTHA COOLEY

Beauty is overrated. Beauty is underrated.

Three months ago, shortly after moving to Italy for the year, I was walking along via Montenapoleone in Milan, gazing at lovely summer togs and shoes in the shops (beauty is overrated?), when I nearly stumbled into a bearded man wearing dirty shorts and old sneakers. He sat spread-legged on the sidewalk, an empty, leaning-Tower-of-Pisa paper cup between his knees. Not the right street for such begging, I found myself thinking—too upscale, everyone carrying credit cards rather than change. Nobody wanting to be bothered, what with the insufferable humidity and all the gorgeous distractions in the shop-windows.

Reading Place: Is Geography Destiny?

November 5, 2012 Essays, In House

By HANNAH GERSEN

Last week, as Hurricane Sandy bore down on my waterfront neighborhood, I found myself worrying about the future of coastal areas across the country. I live in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a low-lying area that has always been prone to flooding, but which saw new levels of damage with Sandy. For years, people have been predicting a rebirth of Red Hook, in part because of its spectacular ocean views, but perhaps those same views will spell its demise. Will neighborhoods like mine eventually be washed away? In short, is geography destiny?

Grocery Domestic Product: Inside the Park Slope Coop

November 1, 2012 Essays

Honeycrisp

The first Honeycrisp of the year carries more significance than any piece of fruit should. Its annual appearance in September’s produce aisle—a brindled globe of green, yellow, and red—is still a shock to me. Shelves on each side are stocked with plastic cartons of withering raspberries and the last crate of pluots, still summer-sweet but invariably mushy-bottomed. The lustre of summer is spent. The bin of Honeycrisp apples—peeking out from beneath the words, “NEW CROP” — announces that fall is on our doorstep.

Review: NW

October 30, 2012 Reviews

Book by ZADIE SMITH
Reviewed by SARAH MALONE

Asked in Granta to compare her writing process in her latest novel, NW, and in her previous novel, On Beauty, eight years before, Zadie Smith responded:

It’s my feeling that the process of being edited by American journals improved my sentences. It was like going back to school. And with a tighter sentence I was able to writer a tighter book.

A View from the Cheap Seats

October 29, 2012 Essays, In House

By ELIZABETH BYRNE

For me (and thousands of others), it’s not always easy being a Jets fan. Week in and week out, it’s virtually impossible to predict how they will perform. While this can make for exciting, come-from-behind wins, it can also be devastating. This unpredictability, plus the melancholy of being a Jets fan far from home probably explains why I’ve been thinking about Steve Almond’s quest for a sports bar in which to watch his beloved, and often unsuccessful, Oakland Raiders every Sunday. Now that I’m living in Massachusetts, I find myself doing the same thing: slouching on hard wooden stools, trying to keep my outbursts to a whisper because, for the most part, everyone around me hates—I mean, hates—the Jets. They may wonder why the one TV in the corner even has a game on that isn’t the Patriots. This is New England, after all.

Homesickness for “The Philadelphia Story” and Other Fictions

October 25, 2012 Essays

By OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

If it weren’t for its title, you’d be hard pressed to pin down the 1940 film The Philadelphia Story to a location. True to the traditions of theatre and the Hollywood Golden Age, the film’s sets are few and mainly interior. Socialite Tracy Lord teeters on the brink of remarriage, with a catty-charming ex-husband, populist tabloid reporter, and absentee father descending on her parents’ mansion for the occasion. The beloved characters, expertly played by Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Jimmy Stewart, hardly venture beyond their manicured lawns. They speak in their famous transatlantic voices, the fine-bred, trained accents of no town and no country. It sometimes seems that the film may as well have been set on the moon as in Pennsylvania—as long as there could still be fine drawing rooms and elegant patios, of course, for class conflicts play a much more vocal role in the film than regional color. The Philadelphia Story treats place much the way Tracy herself does: when Macaulay Connor asks, “Say, this is beautiful country around here. What is it all, anyway?” Tracy replies flippantly, “Oh, part of our place.” And on the story moves, as dismissive as Tracy herself.

Elsewhere, in Istanbul

October 22, 2012 Essays, In House

By JENNIFER ACKER

In 1453, when the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed II ordered some changes to the city’s eastern Orthodox cathedral, the Hagia Sophia: the altar was swapped out for a minbar, the platform from which the imam addresses the congregation; and four slender minarets were added, among other things. For nearly 500 years the Hagia Sophia was a mosque, becoming, in 1931, a secular museum that enchantingly reveals layers of religious history, art, and architecture. Today the purple porphyry marble from Egypt glows richly; the Byzantine golden dome displays Islamic geometric adornments; and mosaics of the Virgin Mary sparkle up high. To better show off its wonders, the museum’s upper gallery hosts a permanent exhibition of images by Turkish architectural photographer Ahmet Ertug. In these carefully lit photos, the tiny tiles of the Virgin’s face and robes can be easily discerned. A museum within the museum.

Even Here

October 18, 2012 Essays

By NAILA MOREIRA

The wrinkled Brazilian landscape passes below me, brownish green through the haze. Every so often the disordered mountain ridges grow crisp and straight, in parallel, like ribs.

Then the land flattens, consumed by endless trees to the horizon. As jungle overtakes the soil, no variety strikes the eye except for rivers: one, two, three, four, five veins of muddy brown lifeblood, traversing the sleeping green chest of the Amazon.

Beside me sits my traveling companion, my mother, who was born and raised in Brazil. For the first time in many years we’ve managed to match our schedules to travel here together from the U.S. She’s eager to show me parts of Brazil I’ve never known.

Above this seemingly interminable forest, who would believe the rate of Brazil’s growth – skyscrapers sprouting, small villages exploding into cities, cars crowding the highways – into the 6^th largest economy of the world?

Annals of Mobility: On Youth, Adventures, and the Territory of Adulthood

October 15, 2012 Essays, In House

By SONYA CHUNG

Click here to read more about “Annals of Mobility,” a monthly column here at The Common.

Of Wes Anderson and his latest film Moonrise Kingdom, Geoffrey O’Brien wrote in the New York Review of Books:

To make a world where everything looks newly made is part of the great adventurousness of his work […] It is perhaps the only setting in which Sam and Suzy could begin to articulate their goal: ‘to go on adventures and not get stuck in one place.’