Essays | Page 28 | The Common

Mapping the Belly of the Whale

June 6, 2014 Essays

When I arrived at Woodbourne prison for that first intake procedure I was surprised to find a certain level of relaxation. Maybe what I mean is not relaxation, but a kind of small town banter that was easy to slip into with the guard who checked me through the metal detector as I set it off again and again. He reassured me he was not going to make me take my shirt off, though the fact that it was fastened with snaps instead of buttons was causing the problem. I told him that I was wearing a T-shirt underneath if it was necessary to remove the outer garment. Harmless flirtation, or maybe just everyday humanity. Whatever you call it, I was not expecting to find it at Woodbourne.

The Word and Its Afterlife

May 27, 2014 Essays

By AMYE DAY ONG

I spend an hour opening envelopes every day in the basement of the American Library Association. Past the freight elevator and the official mailroom with its mechanized sorting machines is a room that looks like a cage because of the metal fencing that covers its entrance from floor to ceiling. A door is built into the fencing and a paper sign reading “Do Not Close” has been affixed, tape looped through the wires so that it adheres to the back of the paper. This long narrow room is divided lengthwise down the middle by metal shelving containing what appears to be every archived publication the Association has ever produced. I do my work in the back corner at two tables covered in razor marks.

Various Horizons: Western Expanses and a Sum of Parts

May 26, 2014 Essays, In House

By ELIZABETH WITTE

The $14 manhattans were terrible. We drank them anyway. Las Vegas, Lost Wages, whatever you call it, it was the gateway to our West(ern vacation—three canyons, eight days). The next morning, we ate gigantic omelets beneath a mirrored ceiling, amid fake trees lush in fake pink bloom, pulled out the map and headed through the wide open landscape: straight road, big sky, dry scrub, tumbleweeds.

When Not in Rome: Tips for Touring Middle Italy

May 19, 2014 Essays

By KATIE CORTESE

Getting Around:

When your cousin offers to meet you at the airport and drive you to Abruzzo, don’t even pretend to defer. As you will learn from the passenger seat, to say “driving” in Italy is to say “a lot of close calls.” A tunnel on a two-lane road may admit just one car. Passing’s no fun senza risk. In small towns, main roads are closed on Sundays so neighbors can chat in the street. Memorize multiple routes.

Touring History

May 13, 2014 Essays

By MARIAN CROTTY

lights and palm trees

Disposable ponchos and white tennis shoes, cotton beach dresses worn without bras, sunglasses dangling from nylon cords, and a way of walking that is, in spite of the gray sky and the drizzling rain, ponderous. On a whole, they are younger than I expected, larger, and much more interested in cover bands. Almost all of them are couples.

Why I Love the MFA

May 12, 2014 Essays

BY JAMES FRANCO

I love MFA programs, because they are a purified space where the love of art is nourished.

This is an essayistic love poem written to MFA programs. It is a form that I learned from my mentor, Frank Bidart. Frank is a poet, but he is also a lover of film, acting, theater, music, pop-culture, Hollywood history, food, and sex.

Frank is old and doesn’t have sex anymore. At least I don’t think he does. But his poems are full of deep life, and sexual connotations.

Searching the In-Between: Flight MH370 and the Emotional Landscape of the Missing

April 21, 2014 Essays, In House

By MELODY NIXON

clouds

Charlie Kaufman imagines a plane crash at the beginning of his semi-autobiographical film Adaptation; he envisions himself nonplussed while the passengers around him scream and fight each other for oxygen masks. I always imagine frantically writing an invariably optimistic goodbye note to my family as my plane descends – reassuring them, falsely or not, depending on the day, that I enjoyed what life I had. Almost anyone who’s flown in an aircraft has played a similar “What if we all die?” scenario in their minds, even if just half-consciously while watching the safety demonstration.

The Embarrassment of Riches

April 11, 2014 Essays, In House

By SAHIBA GILL

Girls poster

In the third season of Girls on HBO, whose season finale aired at the end of March, Hannah Horvath, age twenty-five, is at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York with seven friends. A renaissance-revival design concept by artist Julian Schnabel, the $929 suite is Hannah’s to review for her advertorial job at GQ, and she has decided to throw a party. Her boyfriend is making his Broadway debut. Her best friend Marnie has a chance at being a folk songstress, and Hannah herself is secretly applying to the Iowa Writers Workshop. Packed into a deluxe hotel room, these twenty-somethings entertain visions of success larger than their own lives.

Nostalgia, History, Memory: Patrick Leigh Fermor Reaches the End of His Road

April 10, 2014 Essays, In House

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

The Broken Road cover

The beloved British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor’s long-awaited last book made it into print in March, three years after his death and seventy-nine after the adventure that inspired it. The Broken Road is the third and last volume of Leigh Fermor’s winsome, nostalgic, and poetic memoir of his two-year walk across Europe to Constantinople, as the philhellene Leigh Fermor called Istanbul to the end.The first volume, A Time of Gifts (1977), begins in 1933—he was eighteen—at the Hook of Holland and ends on a Danube bridge linking Hungary and Slovakia. Between the Woods and the River (1986), picks up there and ends at the narrow defile called The Iron Gates (since drowned by a man-made lake) where the Danube enters Bulgaria. This last volume meanders through Bulgaria and Romania, crosses the Bosphorus, and ends in January, 1935, with a contemplative sojourn in the monasteries of Mount Athos in Greece, the country Leigh Fermor ultimately called home.

Rwandan Genocide: Two Days, Three Memorials

April 6, 2014 Essays

By MASHA HAMILTON

April 6, 2014, marks the 20^th anniversary of the horrific genocide in the African country of Rwanda, when an average of 8,000 people were killed per day over a period of 100 days.

Victims of the 1994 genocide are engraved in a wall in the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center in the capital of Rwanda.

In 1994, I followed the news out of Rwanda as we learned that over a period of 100 days, those identified as Hutus killed some 800,000 others identified as Tutsis, mostly with machetes. Recently returned from a decade working as a foreign correspondent, I considered returning overseas to cover the immediate aftermath, but only briefly: I was pregnant with my third baby, and I knew from experience a pregnant me could not manage the extended stretches without sleep and food which would be required to report on this story, at once complex and horrifyingly simple.