excerpt from the ongoing Failures Diary
i go to pick up my kid
at his crèche
that’s a fancy european word
for daycare
When I flew from Johannesburg to Cape Town and drove to Misty Cliffs, which Google described as a little village that lies on the mountain and on the beach, divided only by Main Road, between Kommetjie and Scarborough, roughly an hour from Cape Town, I had no idea what lay ahead. I was insulated in pain from a break up. Ten days of the sea, walking, and writing healed me. This mountaintop lounge, where I wrote “Sad whale-speak at Misty Cliffs” to keep this dream of a place alive, has been my best writing room, so far.
1.
In an early episode of MAD MEN, Betty Draper and her friend Francine are gossiping in Betty’s kitchen about their new neighbor, the scandalous Helen Bishop, divorcee and single mother.
Francine: Have you seen her walking, up there on tree ridge? Where the hell is she walking to?
Betty: (shakes her head as she smears cream cheese onto a celery stick) I don’t know.
Later, when all the ladies have gathered in the same kitchen for Sally Draper’s birthday party, they go around and share their honeymoon stories. Helen tells them she went to Paris.
Artists
Curated by Elizabeth Hamby and Jessie Henson
443 Eye Street, NW, Washington, D.C., 2012. (Lely Constantinople)
“DC Arteries,” a collaboration between photographers Kate MacDonnell and Lely Constantinople, traces the subtle shifts of character and form that mark the landscape along the roads of Washington, DC. They capture the graffiti, the store signs, and the faded paint that make up the urban still-life passed along the way from one place to the next. These fragmented elements capture a fleeting sense of place in a dynamic city.
By CLAIRE KEYES
Some can write poetry
on glass windows like Sophia Hawthorne
at the Old Manse with her wedding ring.
I’m told this was common in the 19th century.
But, for me, reading it was like finding a note in a bottle
picked up on the beach. I felt a kind of awe.
I was raised Up South in the 1960s, and I heard grown folk talk about “country” as one of the worst things you could be:
Why you gotta act so country?
Girl, that is some sho ‘nuff Geechee backwoods mess.
Look at her country ass, thinking she cute in that mammy-made dress!
Book by ALICE MUNRO
Reviewed by
The fourteen stories in Alice Munro’s latest collection, Dear Life, are terser than her stories of a decade ago. Her 2001 collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, nearly identical in length, contained only nine. Many of the new stories trace characteristically oblique paths. Munro draws opening scenes with particular details that seem intended to alert the reader to crucial moments and relationships, and then, instead of continuing those relationships chronologically, she sidesteps to previous events, or heads off in directions not initially suggested. Some stories traverse so many years that their openings, while always fitting, no longer seem the only possible entry points. Often, sections slip into others by association rather than cause and effect or chronology; in “Gravel,” a dog, mentioned in passing, turns out to be central.
By CURTIS BAUER
There is a bend to everything.
Edges melt into curves like winter
and then spring, snow sways from
white to gray, powder to crust
and too many dialects make noise
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Celebrating 15 Years