News & Events | Page 245 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Whole Cloth: A Weaver’s Daughter Looks at the Met’s Interwoven Globe Exhibit

November 25, 2013 Essays, In House

When I see handmade cloth, with its uneven selvedges and irregularities, I feel a kinship. My mother was a weaver. I would come home from school and find my mother weaving, warping, or winding yarn. She wove on traditional four- or eight-harness looms, wooden frames the size of a grand piano. I grew up with the household sounds (and vocabulary) of the 1700s—the whizz of a shuttle, the thump of the beater, the rattle of heddles, and the shunk of harnesses.

My mother made suitings, dress fabrics, coverlets, upholstery, shawls, tablecloths—hundreds of yards. Now eighty-nine, she wove into her late seventies when the physical labor became too strenuous. But her creations will last forever, as handwoven cloth does. The oldest known textile fibers, twisted flaxen cords from the Caucasus, are 34,000 years old. I am pretty sure that 34,000 years from now archaeologists will be baffled by evidence of a mid-twentieth century handweaving culture in the Washington, D.C. suburbs.

November 2013 Poetry Feature

November 23, 2013 Poetry

For this month’s poetry feature, we are publishing a collection of seven new poems by four The Common contributors.

Across Gymnasium Bridge

November 22, 2013 Essays, Studio

By SCOTT GEIGER

“We have the mind, body, and the mind/body all organizing this building,” offers architect Chris McVoy, metaphorically describing the Campbell Sports Center that opened this fall at Columbia University. The building is the outward expression of an athlete’s inner journey. In a short film, McVoy and his partner and mentor, Steven Holl, discuss their design intentions and the character of experience they’ve created.

Nomenclature: Sundays

November 20, 2013 Dispatches

By MARGOT SCHLIPP

Sundays, my parents would pin

their names to dress clothes.

The labelmaker’s impressions formed

letters unevenly, and at the end

of service, the tags were stuck

Sawt al-Watan (2013)

November 20, 2013 News and Events

Sawt al-Watan, a major Palestinian news website, shares The Common‘s vision and work with Hisham Bustani’s writings.

Believe It

November 19, 2013 Issue 06, Issue 06 Poetry, Poetry

By JOSHUA MEHIGAN

Hard to believe that, after all of it,

in bed for good now, knowing you haven’t done

one thing of any lasting benefit

or grasped how to be happy, or had fun,

They Called It Shooting Then

November 19, 2013 Fiction, Issue 06, Issue 06 Fiction

By TYLER SAGE

He wakes from dreams of killing. Heavy timber. Shaggy forms moving through the rocks, the alpine flowers. A plane passing overhead in his sleep, in his dreams, a silver spot against the sky. He raises the rifle. He wakes and is in the night. The animals fade, the air thickens. He is alone and paralyzed, and he wakes, and she is sleeping next to him.

Cosmopolis, Now

November 19, 2013 Essays

By SAHIBA GILL

There was a short time, just before I stopped carrying a backpack to school, when I coveted a t-shirt with the words “citizen of the world” on the front. I signed letters for Amnesty International that year, but I never bought the shirt. A few years later, when we tired of the war in Iraq, many pointed out that six of ten young Americans could not locate the country on a map, although half couldn’t find the Empire State either.The war was remote, elsewhere. As far away (farther, even) than Abu Dhabi, where cartoon cat Garfield tries to ship his nemesis—a place galactically distant. When I moved here, I had to look at a map to find out where I was.

Review: Kicking the Sky

November 18, 2013 Reviews

Book by ANTHONY DE SA
Reviewed by ESMERALDA CABRAL

Kicking the Sky

Being Portuguese and Canadian, I’m always looking for literature about the Portuguese immigrant experience in North America. So I eagerly anticipated the acclaimed Canadian writer Anthony de Sa’s new novel, Kicking the Sky, which weaves the fictional lives of several families in the Portuguese immigrant community in Toronto with a particularly gruesome true crime story.

De Sa has emerged as one of the important literary voices of the Portuguese Diaspora. His first book, Barnacle Love, a series of related stories about Portuguese immigrant history, was short-listed for Canada’s prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2008.

The Big Mac Buddha

November 13, 2013 Dispatches

By IRA SUKRUNGRUANG

What I notice immediately—after the stifling heat, the humidity that fogs glass, the stray dogs—are the temples. They are part of the Thai landscape, like the rubber trees, the wild green jungles, the red mountains of the north. Each temple is unlike the other, constructed by the community’s money and faith and devotion. According to a count done in 2004, there are well over 40,000 Buddhist temples in Thailand, 40,000 temples in a country that can fit into Texas.