News & Events | Page 303 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Doleo Ergo Sum

October 1, 2012 Fiction, Issue 04, Issue 04 Fiction

After Dostoevsky died and interest in The Brothers Karamazov  waned, my loquacious Uncle Boris kept the tale going for a few years. After all, he was Dostoevsky’s source in the first place. Then Boris passed away and left me his properties in the boring provincial town of Skotoprigonyevsk, which he loved so much in his conservative, snoopy way, and that is how I became involved in the Karamazov saga. I call it a saga, for that’s what it is: a spiral of stories, including this one, about Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtsev’s embrace  of suffering in her effort to save Ivan Karamazov; about Ivan’s suffering; and, to a certain extent, about my own, because I came to love them both at the expense of a life of my own devices.

A Place in the Sun

October 1, 2012 Fiction, Issue 04, Issue 04 Fiction

By JENNIFER HAIGH

They drove east through the desert towns: Hesperia to Victorville to Barstow to Yermo, past the dusty bed of Soda Lake, dry now, a ghostly crater waiting for rain. The route was familiar, a memory stored in his bones. The return trip, Sandy had driven in every condition—exhausted, panicked, blind drunk, sick with shame. But the eastbound journey occurred, always, under controlled conditions. They’d left L.A. at three in the afternoon. You’re crazy, said Myron Gold, whose car he’d borrowed this time. It’s the hottest part of the day. But the timing was no accident; it was part of the protocol: rolling into Vegas at first dark, slipping away (this was the hope) before dawn. Vegas at noon would look stripped and diminished, like a Christmas tree  in daylight. It was no place he wanted to see.

Portraits of Land and Sea

October 1, 2012 Issue 04 Art

By AMY SANDE-FRIEDMAN

There is a long history of artists going out into the natural  world to portray its beauty and learn its secrets. Among the most well known are artists like Claude Monet, who painted from his Giverny garden in France, depicting the shifting light and seasonal changes, and naturalists like James Audubon, who created detailed illustrations of American birds that are valued both as works of art and as scientific documents. Today, there is a revived en plein air trend among artists who make novel use of natural elements. Three artists working in this mode are Peter Matthews and the collaborative team formed by Paul Bartow and Richard Metzgar. By utilizing ocean water and the movement of trees, respectively, these artists relinquish control of their compositions to environmental processes, allowing nature to become not only the subject of their work but also the agent of its production.

The Poet in Rome: Richard Wilbur in Postwar Italy

October 1, 2012 Essays, Issue 04, Issue 04 Essays

By ROBERT BAGG

I.
Richard Wilbur first visited Rome with the American Fifth  Army that liberated the city, just behind the fleeing Germans, on 5 June 1944.  By 10:00 p.m., his division, the 36th Texans, in trucks, in jeeps, and on mobile artillery, followed the tanks of the First Armored Division into the southern outskirts of Rome, where it paused, expecting to camp and rest within Cinecittà—then, as now, the sprawling center of Italy’s movie industry. Ever the explorer, Wilbur wandered into an abandoned viewing room and found, already loaded into an editing machine, a costume drama set in the Roman Empire. He turned the hand crank and watched a Fascist version of ancient history until his disgust overcame his curiosity. Around midnight, the 36th received an order to cross the city, mount the Gianicolo (Rome’s westernmost hill), and be ready to chase the Germans into Tuscany. But Wilbur’s signal company interpreted the order loosely, slept in, and didn’t cross Rome until the next day, setting up their Message Center inside the Vatican gardens.

Time Shadows

September 27, 2012 Essays

By HANNAH GERSEN

A few months ago, while walking home from the subway in my Brooklyn neighborhood, I noticed a change in the sidewalk — four of the white cement paving stones had been replaced with darker, bluish-gray stones.There had been a lot of construction in the area, and at first I thought they were simply new stones, not yet faded to match the surrounding sidewalk. But when I got closer, I saw they formed an artwork, engraved with the silhouette of a young, leafless sapling. The etching was meant to approximate the shadow of a nearby street tree, although that tree, now in full leaf and several feet taller, was throwing its noticeably longer shadow in the opposite direction.

Tatiana Garmendia

September 27, 2012 Studio

Artist: TATIANA GARMENDIA
Curated by AMY SANDE-FRIEDMAN

Tatiana Garmendia was inspired to create this series of work, which includes both embroideries stitched into military netting and drawings on paper, by a conversation she had with a veteran who had recently returned from serving in Iraq. Marrying poses from Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment, the altar fresco in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican, with portraits of soldiers in contemporary military uniforms, she created scenes that refer both to the landscape of present day war and an artistic interpretation of heaven.

Poetry in the New Prison

September 26, 2012 Dispatches

By KOBUS MOOLMAN

The guard at the gate smiles a toothless smile, and lightly taps the security boom open for me. We recognize each other; him with his brown uniform and heavy automatic tucked into a pocket on the front of his bullet-proof jacket, me with my rusted car and naive wave.

Review: This Is How You Lose Her

September 25, 2012 Reviews

Book by JUNOT DIAZ
Reviewed by MELINDA MISENER

This is How You Lose Her is the title of Junot Diaz’s new short story collection, though it feels most accurate to call it an exposition: this is how you lose her. And this is how you lose her. And her.

You get the picture.

As a whole, the book serves as a highly specific, painfully obvious example of how to wind up entering middle age not only single but feeling very alone, the last few decades of your life littered with romances that failed because of you. Because you couldn’t stop cheating.

Elsewhere, in Jordan

September 24, 2012 Essays, In House

By JENNIFER ACKER

“In House” is a weekly column featuring trawlings and reflections from our editors.

Two hundred years and one month ago, Swiss adventurer-scholar Johann Ludwig Burckhardt rediscovered the ancient Nabatean city of Petra, forgotten about by Westerners since the Crusades. Described in an 1845 poem by Brit John William Burgon as the “rose-red city half as old as time,” Petra was a gloriously wealthy city with an ingenious water system whose 1,000-year history and acres of archeological treasures are being excavated by a crack team at Brown University. A profile of the city in Smithsonian magazine convinces that Petra deserves its place as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, alongside Machu Picchu and the Great Wall of China.

Journey to the Center of the Earth

September 20, 2012 Essays

By V. HANSMANN

“Push it ahead of you.”

With my fingertips, I shove my hardhat in front of me, while I thrust my body forward with my toes. A hundred yards of solid planet hang above me. Though dank anxiety brews in my core, my extremities are working flawlessly, independent of my consciousness. Be still, monkey mind. Now would be a supremely impractical time to have an out-of-body experience.