News & Events | Page 257 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

The Cave

July 24, 2013 Dispatches

On my final day in Malaysia I visited the Great Cave near the town of Niah, site of the oldest human remains in all of Southeast Asia. To get there, I took a bus from Miri, a city not far from the Brunei border, which brought me close to the main entrance of an unceremonious national park. At the museum, I glanced through photos of Englishmen joylessly separating ceramic from bone, and I studied brochures on the local economy, which runs on bird’s nests and guano. Then I walked through a rainforest thick with cicadas until I reached the mouth of the cave, which looked like a secret airport hangar or a decommissioned gateway to hell. Armed with a flashlight and an outdated map, I followed a mossy path through the darkness and breathed in the prehistoric funk. By sunset, I found myself back at the entrance, where swiftlets and bats converged on each other in a giant black cloud above my head.

Driving Lessons

July 23, 2013 Essays

My old man taught me to drive on Sundays, usually when he was drunk. I was fifteen and he was a big shot on the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, the head engineer of combat systems on nuclear submarines and surface ships. During the work week he was a sober, respectable member of the community, but on weekends he lived an entirely different life, which included bouts of sullen, angry drunkenness and unpredictable fights with my mother. He often gave me a driving lesson after one of their battles, when he was still brooding and slugging off a bottle of Wild Turkey. He’d insist we drive over to a small strip of land just off Honolulu, a place the locals called Rabbit Island, even though there wasn’t a wild rabbit anywhere in the Hawaiian Islands that I knew of.

July 2013 Poetry Feature

July 23, 2013 Poetry

Our July poetry feature celebrates the distinguished career of The Common contributor John Matthias with a selection of several of his poems from the last five decades. This year Shearsman Books completes the publication of the collected poems of John Matthias in three volumes: Collected Shorter Poems, Vol. 2 (1995-2011), Collected Longer Poems, and Collected Shorter Poems, Vol. 1 (1961-1994).

Conversations & Connections Writers’ Conference in Philadelphia

July 22, 2013 News and Events

Event Date:

Saturday, September 28, 2013 (All day)

Location:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Boston Book Festival

July 19, 2013 News and Events

Event Date:

Saturday, October 19, 2013 (All day)

Location:

Copley Square, Boston, MA

The Common will be attending the Boston Book Festival in October! Come see us there.

The Boston Book Festival is New England’s largest annual literary event. 2012’s Boston Book Festival featured more than 125 presenters and dozens of sessions for kids and adults,. The BBF also boasted a bustling street fair, workshops for aspiring authors, an outdoor music stage, and more! For more info on this year’s event, see www.bostonbookfest.org

Image of the cast of The Wire, from “The Art of the Wire,” the opening event of last year’s Boston Book Festival. Courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons user bradalmanac.

Brooklyn Book Festival: Book Fair

July 19, 2013 News and Events

Event Date:

Sunday, September 22, 2013 (All day)

Location:

Brooklyn Borough Hall and Plaza, 209 Joralemon Street, Brooklyn NY 11201

Provincetown

July 17, 2013 Dispatches

By KATHERINE HILL

I can only assume that Stellwagen Bank is a financial institution. Perhaps a progressive Norwegian firm with a board of directors that is, by law, at least fifty percent women. The kind of bank that would sponsor a football club in Trondheim and a chain of internet cafés in Toronto, as well as a tour of the National Marine Sanctuary from Provincetown’s MacMillan Wharf. A global thought leader. A benevolent presence at Davos.

Interpreted for Viewing

July 12, 2013 Studio

Artist: JEREMIAH DINE

Curated by Jeff Bergman

Jeremiah Dine records moments of brisk movement, still unreflective silence, and unstinting labor with equanimity. The images that sit obligingly still now are the distillation of activity by the artist and the subject. Dine uses his lens to interpret the field of view and render the whole image from minute elements linked by chance and purpose. Each fragment flattens, and what is left becomes the single instance worthy of illumination. Each image is now interpreted for viewing as RAW file. In the past, the practice of printing an image signaled a work’s finality. With Dine and many other contemporary photographers, an image’s final state can be digital—it need not be printed and exhibited. Of thousands of images and the wide range of themes that Jeremiah Dine records, certainly not all could be reviewed in one exhibition. These images were chosen because they exemplify a single moment of candid street photography.

I Bring My Father News of the Road

July 10, 2013 Dispatches

By AMY KNOX BROWN

Four days a week, I drive the fifty miles between Omaha and Lincoln on Interstate 80, a line of pavement that stretches across the entire country, from Teaneck, New Jersey, to San Francisco. In Nebraska, the interstate follows the old Oregon Trail the early settlers bumped along in their horse-drawn wagons filled with household goods that shifted and creaked as wheels churned over the uneven ground.

Swimming, In Two Parts

July 8, 2013 Essays, In House

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

Pools

Washington, D.C., summers have been hot since forever, so a place to swim is a necessity, not a luxury. In the 1950s and 1960s, no one had air conditioning at home, and the Potomac River was so polluted that a tetanus shot was advised if you fell in. We lived in Southeast when I was little, and my parents would drive across town to Georgetown, the rich part of the city, to the public pool. My mother says I would throw myself in if she took her hand off me; she was constantly thanking people for rescuing the baby.