News & Events | Page 276 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Before the Storm

March 27, 2013 Dispatches

The police commander of Quinindé showed up dead in the province of Manabí yesterday, pounds of cocaine and money littering his car. He died, slumped over the steering wheel, his body blistered with bullets. There is the menace of drugs, poverty, and gangs that looms over this city where the two rivers meet. Lately, anonymous flyers have appeared threatening vigilante justice—threatening to take back the town. “We know who you are thieves, murders, gang members,” it says. “And we will bring you a taste of your own poison.”

Collecting Time

March 26, 2013 Essays

By NAILA MOREIRA

Today, I am setting boots to snow. In my hands I hold a pair of shiny new binoculars. They’re my first new pair since the very first I bought, at age 12, with my $100 of babysitting money. For twenty years I carried those, and the trusty little things never failed me. These new ones cost a little more, yet even with their bright lenses, I’m thwarted by a golden-crowned kinglet. The tiny bird nips from one branch to the next, too quick to view for more than an instant as it seeks some minuscule source of nourishment among the needles.

March 2013 Poetry Feature

March 23, 2013 Poetry

This month’s poetry feature showcases work from new books by our contributors.

Instead of Flowers

March 20, 2013 Dispatches

By MICHAEL CAYLO-BARADI

Usually 4 p.m. glares on my windshield as I head to the Hollywood Hills Forest Lawn Memorial Park. I am 75 miles per hour on the 134, maybe more. Others fly by me, impatient. The temptation to catch up to them is strong, as always. But I stay below the eighties, as though the seventies are the right glide, on Lenny Kravitz tunes. At the exit, flower vendors on foot wave roses and chrysanthemums. Their nearest competition is the flower shop at the gate, less than a mile away. You’d think they’d sell for bargain. But I buy a bunch or two anyway. It beats walking to the shop, and ringing for someone to come out when you’re ready to pay.

Masks, Memory, and Memoir from the Ivory Coast

March 18, 2013 Essays, In House

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

“Salt,” I said to my brother, pointing to the white crystals sprinkled on the bookcase in our late father’s home office. “At least, I think it’s salt. If it were sugar, there’d be ants everywhere, right?”

Marc swiped his finger across a shelf and gamely stuck his finger in his mouth. “Yep, salt,” he said.

After moving my mother to an assisted living, I was packing up the remaining possessions in her apartment, including my parents’ African art collection.

I’d first noticed the salt in a closet where the overflow of masks, statues, carved wooden utensils, and other objects were kept. They had bought them in Côte d’Ivoire and surrounding countries in the late 1960s, when we lived in Abidjan, then the capital. My father, a Foreign Service officer, was posted there. It wasn’t hard to guess who had done the sprinkling. The ladies who looked after my mother were all from West and Central Africa. To someone, these objects, which my parents collected for their beauty or cultural interest, must have had a spiritual significance.

Social Fabric

March 15, 2013 Studio

Artist: TRAVIS MEINOLF
Curated by ELIZABETH ESSNER

Travis Meinolf, Fabric panels made for with Kai Althoff, Whitney Biennial, 2012

If you need a blanket, Travis Meinolf, the self-appointed Action Weaver, will give you one. For free. And it won’t be a common fleece or wool number. It will look like folk art. It could be made by the artist or by many hands, and perhaps strung together from woven cloths of varying stripes, colors, and sizes. These free hand-woven blankets are a component of the artist’s ongoing project Blanket Offer, part of the artist’s grand mission to bring weaving to the masses.

Headstone Stories

March 13, 2013 Dispatches

By JAYNE MORGAN

I grew up in graveyards. We had one at the bottom of our farm drive and on weekdays I would walk through it to catch the bus to school and then back again on the way home. On Saturdays I would be sent on a mission to rake through the piles of recently discarded wreaths to retrieve the plastic ribbons. Anyone receiving a wrapped gift from our family could, if they looked carefully, have spotted the faint marks from the rusted wires and the creases from previously tied bows.

Jennifer Cody Epstein On Asia, WWII, and Her New Novel

March 12, 2013 Interviews

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

Jennifer Epstein’s new novel The Gods of Heavenly Punishment (See Review) follows her acclaimed 2008 debut, The Painter From Shanghai. Epstein, a former journalist, is also adjunct professor of writing at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn. We met when our children were in kindergarten together at PS 29. We began this conversation over borscht and pelmeni in a neighborhood restaurant February 21 and continued via email.

A Museum in the Mind of Someone Contemplating the Sky

March 12, 2013 Essays

By DALE MEGAN HEALEY

My sister remembers wondering, when she was a kindergartner, if the sky really looked like her classmates’ drawings of it: a blue stripe on the tops of their papers with white space separating it from the stick figures below. She remembers having a significant childhood realization when she looked out the window and saw that the sky was not only above her, but all around her. From then on, she colored her entire paper blue.

Doing a Dérive; Or, Walking 2.0

March 8, 2013 Essays

By JENNIFER ACKER

Late afternoon, late January. I need air, exercise, but my regular walk around Al Manhal Palace is too long; the construction en route to the Corniche too hazardous to navigate. I try to take comfort in the company of my own mind, but today I am a terrible person to be with. Wandering, uninspired, brain-stuck, I find myself in the middle of ten lanes of traffic on a median barely wider than a balance beam. Grumpy as all get out as hot exhaust blasts me by. I need to move, but I have nowhere to go.