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My Viennese Cousin

August 31, 2011 Dispatches

My friend Alison and I have had a running joke that we’re cousins. When we met several years ago, she said, “I bet we’re related. My great-grandmother’s maiden name was Lichtblau.” Her father, like mine, left Vienna in 1938, but she didn’t know much more. Still, we called each other “chère cousine” for fun. Her father, like mine, left Vienna in 1938, and her great-grandmother had the same last name as I do, Lichtblau. Now I’m very fond of Alison, but never seriously believed we were related. The name’s not as rare in Austria as it is here, and I have a family tree going back to my great-great-grandfather—which gets us to 1811, amazingly. (My grandfather, born in 1877, was forty-three when my father came along in 1920, which partly accounts for the long generational leaps.) Alison didn’t know her great-grandmother’s given name, but her married name wasn’t on my tree and had never come up in family reminiscences. Reminiscence is to us Lichtblaus what watching sports on TV is to other families. It’s what we do when we get together. We sit in my aunt and uncle’s Upper West Side apartment on furniture that somehow made it over in 1938 despite looming disaster, and within five minutes, we’re talking about Grandma’s lover. So, I was pretty confident that I’d have heard of Alisons’s great-grandmother if she was one of us.

Hurricane Alex, 2004

August 27, 2011 Dispatches

By JAMES A. GILL

We sat side by side on the shore, staring into the sky above the sea, as if we could see the hurricane approaching. The same as standing on the porch back home, scanning the horizon for a tornado, wondering where it would hit. But this was no tornado. There was no escaping it.

This Was in Odessa

August 24, 2011 Dispatches, Translation

By ANNA PIWKOWSKA

Dogs lay on sidewalks
escaping the heat. The wind blew sand
in our eyes. Pupils burned. Garbage whirled.
Fruit piled up on street corners,
melon juice staining our skin

Review: The Pale King

August 23, 2011 Reviews

Book by DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Reviewed by ADAM COGBILL

The Pale King

I saw David Foster Wallace read at Franklin and Marshall College in 2006. He was nervous and funny and an excellent reader. But, as with any writer whose writing I’ve loved, it was strange to hear the way Wallace’s reading of his work differed from my reading of his work. I was made aware that my relationship was primarily with his prose, not with him. More specifically, with prose that he’s done with, that’s been sent out into the world to have a life of its own. So, I will admit that I initially didn’t want to read The Pale King. I assumed it was being released only because publishers figured someone would buy it, not because it was a potentially important piece of literature. (And regardless of what I’m about to say in a few paragraphs about changing my mind, it’s worth noting that at the top of the inside front flap of The Pale King, above the summary blurb, is printed, “David Foster Wallace’s last and most ambitious undertaking,” a claim which, at the very least, should make fans of Infinite Jest clear their throats pointedly.)

Two Lighthouses

August 17, 2011 Dispatches

By JAMES A. GILL

Cape Hatteras Light

We visited the lighthouse on our honeymoon. Tallest in the U.S. It stood right on the sand, backdropped by surfers riding between wooden jetties built to keep the thin strip of beach from disappearing into the sea.

Travels in Spain: A Meat Journal

August 10, 2011 Dispatches

By ALEX GILVARRY

June 17, Barcelona
Burgers Recollected

After the sad burger I had on our layover in Brussels, I vow never to eat so poorly again, at least not while in the European Union. As my girlfriend Ashley and I touchdown in Catalonian country, a craving comes over me that only meat of the reddest proportions, fish of the freshest means, and cuisine of the finest and oldest preparation can fill. Waiting at baggage claim can be so torturous after a long journey, but there I recall that most excellent bite of food from my last trip to Barcelona. The stand out. The thing that made me come back. The McFoie. It was at Carles Abellan’s restaurant, Tapas 24. A “foie gras burger” of veal sirloin and foie gras constructed to look like a McDonald’s hamburger, a touch of home for any American who grew up on the flat beef patty, two pickles, and dallop of ketchup. The McFoie came rare and juicy, and with an artisan’s touch, too rich to be eaten too often, but with flavor so profound that I found myself dreaming of it as my baggage arrived and my girlfriend’s did not.

The Woods Behind the Palace Park

August 3, 2011 Dispatches

By IZA WOJCIECHOWSKA

There is a palace in a tiny rural village two hours west of Warsaw, with an orange mansard roof, two spired towers, and a park stretching beyond it. It is strange to think that in the 1940s, when war was grinding Poland into the ground, the palace still belonged to the prominent Radziwiłł family, who shared it with Nazis while members of the underground Home Army, villagers, hid in the woods behind the palace park. Here, planes dropped packages into a clearing among alders, cherries, and pines. They’d drop food or weapons, which the villagers distributed or took to Warsaw, and sometimes they’d drop men.

Finding Faulkner

July 27, 2011 Dispatches

By GREGORY CURTIS

Today’s dispatch from Gregory Curtis was originally posted on The Mailer Fellowship Blog, which features essays from students and teachers at the Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Curtis is a mentor to the Colony’s non-fiction fellows.

I like visiting writers’ houses. You see the spaces that enveloped their imagination day by day. You see the furniture they sat in and the paintings and photographs on the walls. You see the dishes in the kitchen. You see the books on their shelves and the bed they slept in. It’s possible to assume too much from all this, but what’s the point of going at all if you don’t make some conclusions from what you see?

Review: So Good in Black

July 19, 2011 Reviews

Book by SUNETRA GUPTA
Reviewed by JENN MAR

So Good in Black

In Sunetra Gupta’s So Good in Black, the devil is a fashionable industrialist with a seaside villa in Bengal, and he’s guilty not of any overtly malicious crime, but of donating milk to children. Incredible as it may seem, evil in this novel is not made of sulfur and coals, but of institutionalized power driving the market of ethics. It’s this market of ethics, or ethical imperialism, that Gupta explores in her fifth novel, a novel that unfolds with heated conversations, and dialogue resembling philosophical debates.

The premise guiding these debates is just as sinuous as the devil himself. American travel writer Max Gate returns to Calcutta to attend a woman’s funeral, and like all travelers returning to a destination after so many years of misery, Gate experiences a heightened sense of wonder, and chill, towards the landscape so inextricably tied to his memories. As he surveys the beach, following a shadowy figure along the seashore, the daughter of a woman from his formative years, Gate delivers an incantation to the past: “Child on the seashore, I loved your mother once.

Birds of Iowa City

July 15, 2011 Dispatches

By ANNA NORTH

I killed a bird in Iowa City. It was lying, dying, on the concrete steps that led to my apartment, a basement lair whose drains sometimes backed up and belched black ooze everywhere. The bird was gasping and twitching and its eyes were shut very tight. It was a titmouse. I stepped over it and went inside.

I tried to work, but I kept thinking about the bird. I decided to call my mom, who lived far away, and ask for her advice.