Essays | Page 31 | The Common

Big Not-So-Bad Wolves

November 1, 2013 Essays, Issue 06, Issue 06 Essays

I grew up in Alaska, where one thing after another was constantly threatening my young life. Floatplanes stalled. Grizzlies ate our camping  supplies. A moose wandering through our backyard got angrier than expected when a kid from school threw a rock at its knees. I wouldn’t say I was cavalier or brave about these experiences, but I didn’t need much time to recover from them. I was a child. My conclusion was almost always the same: I was still alive, and so was the rest of my family. We could all eat a granola bar and keep on fishing.

Geology Primer (Fogo, Cape Verde)

November 1, 2013 Essays, Issue 06, Issue 06 Essays

By ELEANOR STANFORD

aa (pronounced “ah-ah”)

ORIGIN: <Hawaiian, ‘a’, “to burn.”

1. Lava that has a rough, jagged, spiny, and generally clinkery surface.

2. How to gloss this sharp language, its reflective surfaces, its chinks?

Peaks and Valleys: Klaksvik City Center, Faroe Islands

November 1, 2013 Essays, Issue 06, Issue 06 Essays

By LUIS CALLEJAS

In collaboration with Lateral Office

Introduction by Scott Geiger

The Faroe Islands are not the rural, subarctic archipelago you imagine. Like their distant peers on the Danish mainland, the Faroese are thoughtful, progressive city-builders. To connect their dispersed communities, their highway system tunnels through basaltic mountains and under North Atlantic waters. Fast ferries and helicopter taxis run between remote points. With such transit infrastructure, this might seem like a maritime metropolis, if only they had the population. But more people live in Portland, Maine, than on the eighteen Faroe Islands.

In a City of Cars

November 1, 2013 Essays

By MARIAN CROTTY

Before I moved to the United Arab Emirates, I sold the one car I’d ever owned—a four-door Honda, emerald green, white scratches webbed along the doors from the previous owners. I would be gone for just ten months, but the car had an old engine and a dashboard of permanently lit warnings lights, and, every month or so it seemed, a different part broke and needed repairs.

Look At All the Pretty Pictures

October 31, 2013 Essays, In House

By ELIZABETH WITTE

Wallpaper

I’m no horticulturalist. I don’t have a garden. It’s renderings of flowers and plants that make me stop short and stare: a page full of small bits of white and domed yellow, the spindly green branching almost like a seaweed. A field of lines and colors on paper becomes a beautiful, vivid thing that recalls the plant I could see and touch and know, if I dared. But illustration owns its subject; as a deliberate man-made composition, it translates the natural world through mind and body, through a series of human choices and means, into an utterly new form. Nature moves from its vast, fascinating world of complex systems to another, smaller one of confinement and relocation. The illustration isolates and resituates its subject in the rectangular page, the book’s binding.

Nightwalk

October 22, 2013 Essays

By KAREN LATUCHIE

NYC at night

I no longer have a home in New York City; I will always be at home in New York City. I will always love New York City; I no longer like New York City. I am no longer a New Yorker; I will always be a New Yorker.

I write out those sentences (with apologies to Samuel Beckett) like a contorting pledge of allegiance: disillusioned and desirous. Or, as if the clarifying middle-ground will miraculously appear to me if I just keep repeating the polar opposites. Or because there is no middle ground but repetition could lead to a more complex form of understanding than mere acceptance.

Where I Don’t Write

October 17, 2013 Essays, In House

By MELODY NIXON

In his autobiographical novel on D.H. Lawrence Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer laments his inability to write the book he wanted because he couldn’t figure out where to live. “One of the reasons, in fact, that it was impossible to get started on [the Lawrence book] was because I was so preoccupied with where to live. I could live anywhere, all I had to do was choose—but it was impossible to choose because I could live anywhere.”

House in black and white

I have the same problem. I’m a migrant and a wanderer, and I’m never really sure where my home is located – in the environment, or inside me? I’ve come to an unsteady way of dealing with this uncertainty, mostly by rolling with it. I’ve also learned that direct, personal experience in the world is essential to my writing. Last summer I wrote my way through a Trans-Siberian train ride from Moscow to Novosibirsk while hanging on to the side of a swaying second-class bunk bed, trying to explain to my babushka compartment-mates that I was working on an historical novel. Last fall I finished off several stories and articles for publication amid showers of asbestos at Art Farm, Nebraska, a cooperative, self-sustaining artists’ colony that is about as close to nature and rusticity as one can get without actually becoming a wild animal. Every day from my desktop I was obliged to sweep away the powder of synthetic insulation and possibly cancerous substances that had rained from the homemade ceiling during the night. As winter approached, we practically burned floorboards for warmth. We wrote and wrote as we huddled around the fireplace.

Who’s Writing Real Brooklyn Stories?

October 7, 2013 Essays, In House

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

Apple-crisp air, periwinkle sky. A world-class day in the Borough of Storytellers. As it does each third Sunday in September, on September 22, the Brooklyn Book Festival took over the esplanade in front of Borough Hall and adjacent buildings in Brooklyn Heights.

Writers are the latest Brooklyn demographic to become a national punch line. Like Jackie Gleason, only skinny. Last year, the festival claimed 40,000 visitors. —They haven’t released this year’s figures, but the joint was packed.

The list of presenters was a mix of Bold-Face Names (Colum McCann, Lois Lowry, Jules Feiffer) and serious up-and-comers. The panels covered a judicious mix of topics, weighted toward the international and multicultural.

Boys with a Synth

October 1, 2013 Essays, Issue 06, Issue 06 Essays

By BENJAMIN ANASTAS

I went to buy the Roland Juno-6 with my best friend Michael the summer I was sixteen, before either one of us had a driver’s license. Other boys saved their house-painting money and bought an electric guitar with a starter amp. Or a five-piece drum kit, if they had the kind of parents who tolerated an unholy racket in the basement. Michael and I had earned eight dollars an hour for two weeks to stain a cottage on the Cape, a mythic payday that had sent us whooping and hollering into the waves, and I wanted to buy a synthesizer with my share of the windfall.

Lab of Literary Architecture

September 27, 2013 Essays, Studio

By SCOTT GEIGER

Last month I enjoyed following media coverage of an unusual writing workshop and design studio held at Columbia University. Italian architect and writer Matteo Pericoli originated his “Laboratory of Literary Architecture” course in Turin, and brought it to New York this spring as a joint course for students of the School of Writing and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.