This month we welcome new contributors Sria Chatterjee, Marc Vincenz, and Laurie Rosenblatt, and we’re happy to publish new work by Ned Balbo once more.
By KIRK MICHAEL
This is the second part of a two-part Dispatch. The first part is available here.
I navigate by haphazard emotion, glancing over the wonderful cards that describe the provenance of the art, the investments of the rich across centuries. Willem Claesz Heda’s “Still Life with Oysters, a Silver Tazza, and Glassware” has what the title says it has and also a stamped checkerboard knife fitted for Old Dutch clutches, Schermerhorns buying up property on the docks of New York, New Amsterdam, monochrome banquet pieces slapped onto walls like flatscreens, overturned chalices and cutlery, tarnish and husk, the bitter translucent lemon dripping gold leaf citrus, succulent on the table, the pip as acidic as the pupils in my eyes.
By KIRK MICHAEL
This is the first part of a two-part Dispatch. The second part is available here.
“Beginnings are always delightful; the threshold is the place to pause.
My luggage trips over the pavement and the brownstone bella vista is dappled by trees I will soon learn are called Callery Pears, the ones that smell of semen, vulgar but pleasing, high on the listicle of “Disgusting Smelling New York Trees, Ranked,” a sign that I have finally arrived in Brooklyn in proper spring, the jizzy crush of it.
In this episode of The Common’s Contributors in Conversation podcast, Issue 08 contributors Daniel Tobin and R. A. Villanueva discuss their poems “The Origamist” and “Pareidolia.”
Book by FISTON MWANZA MUJILA
Reviewed by
After I finished reading Tram 83, the debut novel by Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila, a quote from journalist Adam Hochschild’s book, King Leopold’s Ghost, haunted me, and I went in search of it. With just a few lines, he laid bare the long-term effects of colonization on Congo:
From the colonial era, the major legacy left to Africa was not democracy as it is practiced today in countries like England, France and Belgium; it was authoritarian rule and plunder. On the whole continent, perhaps no nation has had a harder time than Congo in emerging from the shadow of its past.
Politics and history crackle through the plotlines of our recommended books this month, as we travel the world experiencing struggle and mourning in a many-layered collage of contexts. Here are four varied works of “healing imagination,” as books both simple and unconventional examine trauma unflinching and then look to what happens next.
Recommended:
Nora Webster by Colm Toibin, Book of Ruth by Robert Seydel, The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan, Jam on the Vine by LaShonda Katrice Barnett
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.
On Wednesday, April 13, at 7 PM, the Forbes Library will host a panel discussion and Q&A with The Common, featuring novelist Edie Meidav, podcast editor Steven Tagle, and Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Acker. Each will read briefly from recent work, discuss balancing the writing and teach life, and talk about The Common‘s role in the literary landscape here in the Valley and around the world.
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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