2012 | Page 15 | The Common

Sahara Syndrome

July 18, 2012 Dispatches

Entering the Sahara, the rock and hard-packed sand is so flat and immense you can see the Earth’s curve. It’s an optical illusion, really, the mind providing an explanation in the face of such an expanse, the way it interprets the glassy reflections in the near distance as water. On very hot days, the sun bleaches the sky and sand, whiting out all points of reference. It can be literally mind-blowing, inducing Sahara Syndrome, a temporary anxiety disorder that can push you to the fringes of insanity.

Blue Haven

July 11, 2012 Dispatches

By JAMES A. GILL

We left the upper reaches of the Mississippi River, our last connection with what we knew, and ventured onto the plains of Minnesota and into North Dakota, 80 miles an hour through fields of sunflowers. Outside Minot, the two-lane highway was under construction, but there were no rows of orange barrels striped with reflective tape; instead, both lanes of pavement were ripped up, and I drove the dirt roadbed between earthmovers, graders, and dump trucks while my wife slept in the passenger’s seat and my seven-month-old son made faces at me in the rearview mirror from his car seat. Finally the roadwork ended, and we drove on through a valley where each hill held white rocks stacked to form the year of a high school’s graduating class. Almost twenty years were covered in as many miles, and I wondered what would happen when they ran out of hills. We crossed into Canada at a small town called Portal, then made our way across the plains, trying to remember to read our speed in kilometers. The city of Regina appeared on the horizon like a skyline drawn in elementary school art class: the sky and ground meeting on a ruler-straight line, while boxes and rectangles extended upward from it. Past that, the highway skirted the Arm River Valley, the only variation in the tabletop prairie, where each town was marked with a wooden grain elevator rising in the distance.

Jim’s Way

July 4, 2012 Dispatches

By MELINDA MISENER

We — my uncles Jim and Larry, my cousin Lindsay, and I — went to Scotland on the sort of family business that is not business at all but is, rather, an excuse for a vacation. We are Scottish by an unremarkable fraction, but because that branch of family history is well documented, because we have things like a plaid and a crest, our unremarkable fraction can feel an awful lot like half.

Interview with Norman Lock

July 2, 2012 Interviews

LINDSAY STERN interviews NORMAN LOCK

1. You are a self-described fabulist. In your opinion, what can a fable do that other literary forms cannot?

The fable can be said to be a metaphor or figure so ambitious that it has annexed unto itself the entire fictional space. Like all symbolic language, it possesses extraordinary power to render a particular notion of reality – an idea – with absolute simplicity and efficiency. By simplicity and efficiency, I mean the reduction of complex thought into a unifying field of imagery in order to understand and convey unseen connections between objects or phenomena. The abstraction needn’t be stark. On the contrary, it can be as highly colored and intricately wrought as a Persian miniature or a poem by Wallace Stevens. But however rich in complications and implications, the metaphoric reality (can I call it a “truth”?) is vastly less vexed than what surrounds and oppresses us – by day and by night: our conscious and unconscious, public and private lives.

By fabling, I can explore ideas – treat them playfully – while satisfying my need to make things and to produce beautiful surfaces created entirely of sentences and their syntactical relationship. And I will confess this much: that for a writer like me, no other literature is possible than that whose source is his own imagination and his art. As Stevens wrote, “Poetry is the subject of the poem.”

Painting Chairs

June 27, 2012 Dispatches

By REBECCA CHACE

I have been painting chairs this summer. It is my second summer visiting my boyfriend at his country house in the Catskills, though it’s not only my boyfriend’s house. The house belongs to him and his wife. I am here because his wife is dead. She passed away two and a half years ago, and her death sometimes feels as blunt and brutal as the undeniable fact that the phrase “passed away” is trying to soften. I didn’t know her, but she was a powerful woman who died too young and left behind an adolescent son and a husband of twenty years.

Between Two Places

June 20, 2012 Dispatches

By CRALAN KELDER

Driving with LLL Louise Landes Levi from Amsterdam up to Riva San Vitale in the Alps to visit Franco’s place at the Franco Beltrametti foundation:

Moonstone

June 13, 2012 Dispatches

By ROLF ALBERT YNGVE

Three days of dirty weather and everyone saw it on their way home from work. It was dumped onto the Silver Strand State Beach parking lot— the keel naked and scabbed with barnacles, the mast canted. Someone said the park maintenance people must have hauled it up out of the surf. It looked like a forklift had punched two holes in the hull.