Celebrating 15 YearsBest of Essays
December 27, 2012
Essays
The Year in Dispatches, Poetry
December 26, 2012
Dispatches
This week, as we look back on the year, I’d like to highlight the work of some of the poets featured in Dispatches. It’s sometimes hard to pin a location to a poem, and at the same time, a poem can often take readers more accurately to the heart of a place than a reported dispatch. This year’s poems took readers all over the world, from sleepy American towns to European cities to remote forests and islands. Here are a few of my favorites, all worth a second look:
Yvette Christiansë’s haunting “Uneasy Sleep”, which takes readers to a tiny island in the depths of the South Atlantic;
Cralan Kelder’s spare painting of Bali, “Bring ‘Em Home”;
Krista Leahy’s late night in a small town, “Redressed”;
Brian Simoneau’s view of the Pacific, “Poem With Snowy Plovers”;
and finally, poet Kobus Moolman’s moving essay about teaching poetry in prison.
Photo from Flickr Creative Commons
Best of In House
Check out Sonya Chung’s piece “Annals of Mobility: On Youth, Adventures, and the Territories of Adulthood” and Melody Nixon’s “Finding Common Ground: Aurora, Nebraska”.
Photograph by Raphael Matto
My Spanish Shawl
December 20, 2012
Essays
By MARIA TERRONE
In which authors write about their objects and the places they’ve been
Magic the shawl that kept slipping down my bare, 20-year-old shoulders—a garment possessed but impossible to hold.
Abu Dhabi Reads Life of Pi
December 19, 2012
Essays
It began with an innocent question from a student intern: “Why don’t we do one of those community reads things?” The other student writers for Electra Street, the arts and humanities journal at NYU Abu Dhabi, thought it sounded like a great idea. I, as the faculty editor, was filled with grown-up skepticism about staging a literary conversation in a city as diverse and seemingly unbookish as Abu Dhabi, which does not even have a library that is open to the public with any regularity. But somewhere between student optimism and faculty skepticism, “Abu Dhabi Reads” took root, and one warm night in early November, more fifty people from all over this desert city gathered in a garden at NYU to talk about Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi.
Modern Athena
December 19, 2012
Dispatches
Greece’s fortunes were down, but ours were up, so between the May 6 and June 17 elections, my husband and I made our way to the remote Mani Peninsula in the Southern Peloponnese. If the Peloponnese is a lowered hand, joined to the Greek mainland at the slender wrist of Corinth, then the Mani, south of Sparta and famous for its blood feuds—the only region never conquered by the Turks—is certainly its proud middle finger. The Greek struggle for independence began there, in Areopolis, a town named for the God of War.
Anna Karenina: The Movie. If the Book Is So Great, Why Do We Need Adaptations?
“The Book Is Always Better” read a sign perched on top of a stack of Harry Potters and Twilights in the Harvard Coop bookstore last spring. I remembered the sign waiting in line to see director Joe Wright’s new Anna Karenina, adapted by Tom Stoppard and starring Keira Knightley, Jude Law, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
IMDB lists twenty-seven movie and TV versions of Anna K, going back to 1907. The 700-page book has also been made into at least four ballets and ten operas.
I’m not a screenwriter, but I imagine the elevator pitch goes something like: “Whaddya think, boss? Beautiful high-society woman married to a stiff finds passionate love with a handsome officer, and her husband and society treat her so bad she throws herself in front of a train. Not bad, eh?”
Felt Identities
December 14, 2012
Studio
Artist: TANYA AGUIÑIGA
Curated by ELIZABETH ESSNER
Everyone has sat on a gray, metal folding chair: waiting at the DMV, as an extra guest at a dinner table, working in a makeshift office. Tanya Aguiñiga, a Los Angeles-based designer, transforms this ubiquitous piece of furniture in her series, Felt Chairs. Aguiñiga spends up to twenty laborious hours lovingly hand-felting each simple folding chair, covering it in vibrant color. Metal becomes a skeleton for bright and singular textured felt, akin to skin. What was cold is now warm, what was common is now individual. How we place ourselves in this chair has changed entirely.
Art Attack
December 12, 2012
Essays
The town of Alvo, Nebraska, is like a lot of other small Midwestern towns whose best days are behind it; and those days weren’t exactly eventful to begin with. After decades of population loss there remain four structures in Alvo that a visitor can enter without trespassing: the grain co-op, a Methodist church, a post office, and Mel’s Mini-mart — a converted room in a small house selling canned soup, Hostess snack cakes, and other items with long shelf lives. Across from the post office is a tidy but barren park. If prosaic comforts and tight-knit community are the calling cards of small town life, they aren’t obvious here. With few places to gather and nothing but the cornfields of agribusiness on the horizon, Alvo has only quiet anonymity and rock bottom real estate to offer.
One Version of the Road
December 11, 2012
Dispatches
And the sun was behind his head
And it was much later than he thought
And he thought that he had nothing more to say
