Celebrating 15 Years
Towards Algiers
The desert scatters
on our feet. It’s the only
surrender that counts,
vast, unobstructed.
2 Poems
February 19, 2014
Dispatches
Death Trip
February 14, 2014
Essays
By SAHIBA GILL
There was no after-the-rain smell when I was in Varanasi, not even along the river Ganges where waters are wide in January; the white fog curtain erases the farthest bank so that just sky, boats, and water make up the shore. In the city’s brown streets, trash runs steadily through silt-carved gullies. Waste sandcastles build in its empty lots.
Málaga
February 12, 2014
Dispatches, Translation
By JUAN ANTONIO GONZÁLEZ IGLESIAS
Translated by CURTIS BAUER
Todas y cada una de las cosas
del mundo tienen hoy exactitud
matinal. Esta dulce luz de Málaga
declara una vez más la equivalencia
entre la realidad y el paraíso.
Confederate Jasmine
February 11, 2014
Essays
By BILL PITTS
Jim’s garden, like all gardens, was a work of deception.
I had a view of it from my side yard where the bamboo hedge had been reluctant to fill in, framing what it was supposed to hide: a sort of jungle fantasy some two hundred miles north of the tropics, shaded by laurel oaks.
Sidney Waugh, Monuments Man
February 7, 2014
Studio
Curated by PAMELA RUSSELL and SHEILA FLAHERTY-JONES
Sidney Waugh was a twentieth-century sculptor best known for architectural and large-scale works on the one hand, and for smaller designs for glass and medallions on the other. As lead creative artist at Steuben Glass in New York, he elevated glass to a fine art medium, while also designing many public and private monuments on the East Coast of the United States.
Destinados al Olvido? (Destined for Oblivion?)
February 5, 2014
Dispatches, Translation
By JUAN ANTONIO GONZÁLEZ IGLESIA
Translated by CURTIS BAUER
Álvaro Mutis habla lentamente.
Una entrevista en un canal hispano.
Me interesa el desgaste de las cosas.
On Balancing the Visual and the Sonic: An Interview with Joshua Mehigan
February 4, 2014
Interviews
S. TREMAINE NELSON interviews JOSHUA MEHIGAN
Joshua Mehigan, whose poems “How Strange, How Sweet” and “Believe It” appear in Issue 06 of The Common, was born and raised in upstate New York. His poems have been published in a variety of journals and magazines, including Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, The New Republic, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and The New York Times. His most recent book, The Optimist, was published in 2004 by the Ohio University Press and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prive. His second book, Accepting the Disaster, is forthcoming in July 2014 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. The exchange below took place over email while Winter Storm Janus snarled the streets of New York City.
Ancestor Worship: Help, I’m Becoming an Internet Genealogy Addict
Hello, everybody. My name is Julia, and I am becoming an Internet genealogy addict. I don’t believe in higher powers, except, like, the NSA and the IRS. So I must rely on my failing willpower. Unless you find a rich uncle, Internet genealogy is hard to justify as useful. Why should I care that four hundred years ago, some remote ancestor was a rabbi in Moravia? Geni.com, where I listed my family tree, says it has 74,346,170 people on its site. I’m already up to 1,820 blood relatives.
Mezzogiorno
January 29, 2014
Dispatches
There was a pile of old vines and twigs in the vineyard. We lit a bonfire and the flames licked daylight into the night sky. Next morning there was a gray and black patch of coldashes, perfectly round. It looked hard, like crushed marbles, so I stepped on it. My boot sank deep into tiny feathers. A gray boot and a brow none told me I should have known better.
A Pilgrimage to 5 Pointz
January 28, 2014
Studio
From the elevated train in Queens, I’d glimpse the phantasmagoria that was 5 Pointz. A riot of color and occasional faces covering every inch of the old, block-long factory, it felt hallucinatory. In a minute—not enough time for the eye or brain to take it all in—the images vanished and the train rumbled underground, heading to Manhattan.
