The forecast was wrong.
The bald guy smiling
but wrong. The blonde
with swinging hair
wrong. Their software,
their reading of currents. Rain,
they said, rain for days.
Stare…
—Walker Evans’ advice to young artists
So here’s a board-and-batten house—
a wall of planks with ragged ends
behind the windows’ splitting sills—
By MAX FREEMAN
Virgil got his tattoo in Megara
Around the time he knew that his great poem
Must be destroyed. A reckless decision.
The luxe door had cost them everything. Oak, with wooden lace. It gave the impression there was more behind it than:
By RICO GATSON
Introduction by David E. Little
What was required was a new story, a new history told through the lens of our struggle.
—Ta-Nehisi Coates
They say there’s nothing harder than hitting a fastball. In America, clichés on the difficulty of sports abound. But how to describe the challenges of art?
By SUSAN STRAIGHT
When my youngest daughter began her freshman year of high school, I said casually to her, “Do you ever see Christian?”
She gave me an incredulous and dismissive look. She replied, “Why would I see him? He doesn’t go here. He’s probably not in school at all. He probably fried his brain dying his hair all those colors.”
And then she was done. She talked about something else. But I kept picturing him. Forever to me he will be the boy who called my child a nigger and spat on her when she was ten.
Translated by ALICE GUTHRIE
We awoke one morning to news of a death. The person we had lost was the one we used to call the Village Idiot—that buffoon who used to make us laugh and cry at the same time, that leaping, dancing ball of energy who would hurl himself around, wild with enthusiasm, stomping on our toes and crashing into us as he went gesticulating by.
A compilation of the Visual Art from Issue 11.
All What Will Remain. Photography. Bahaa Souki.
Toy Men—Plastic Women. Mixed media on wood, 84 x 69 cm, 2012. Bahaa Souki.
Decision Keeper. Mixed media on canvas, 100 x 100 cm, 2014. Bahaa Souki.
One Arm Man With His Dog. Oil on cotton paper, 95 x 68 cm, 2015. Bahaa Souki.
Home, Part 1. Photography, 105 x 70 cm, 2013. Ons Ghimagi.
Home, Part 2. Photography, 105 x 70 cm, 2013. Ons Ghimagi.
In the Mood for Love. Photography, 105 x 70 cm, 2013. Ons Ghimagi.
010. Oil on canvas, 100 x 120 cm, 2004. Bader Mahasneh.
017. Archival print of 3 editions, 90 x 90 cm, 2010. Bader Mahasneh.
Untitled. Acrylic on canvas, 175 x 95 cm, 2015.
Untitled. Acrylic on canvas, 80 x 80 cm, 2015.
Untitled. Acrylic on canvas, 80 x 80 cm, 2015.
Child’s Message (1). Mixed media on canvas, 100 x 100 cm, 2014.
Cold Breezes. Mixed media on canvas, 100 x 100 cm, 2012.
Dialogue. Mixed media on canvas, 200 x 100 cm, 2015.
The Original Fall. Photography. Bahaa Souki.
Scholars of Arabic literature were, for a time, obsessed with naming a “first” Arabic novel to stand at the head of an apparently new literary tradition. Was it M. H. Haykal’s 1914 Zaynab? Was it one of the many novels that were serialized in popular magazines that sprouted up in Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon in the late 1800s and early 1900s? Or perhaps Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq’s peripatetic, language-glorifying Leg Over Leg (1855)? Never mind that al-Shidyaq mocked the obsessions of European writing.
On the very first night, one thousand years ago, or… wait, why do we always begin our stories with the first night? There is absolutely no difference between what happened in that distant time and what is happening now. The same columns of men march beneath the sun’s rays in the afternoon’s scorching heat, the same tear-soaked supplications and hymns: “O God, make his grave a green pasture in the gardens of Paradise—don’t cast him into a burning pit of hell.” “O God, grant him a better spouse than the one he has, a better home, and better children.” “O God, forgive his sins and those of your faithful worshippers.”
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