2012 | Page 16 | The Common

Review: The Cat’s Table

June 5, 2012 Reviews

Book by MICHAEL ONDAATJE
Reviewed by SHASTRI AKELLA

The Cat’s Table Welcome Aboard

My childhood years were marked by the roar of sea waves. I would wake up early on Sunday mornings to the sound of the waves rushing forth and striking the shore before withdrawing. The growth of coconut trees outside my window meant that I could not, from my room, watch the Bay of Bengal—for that I would have to climb up the staircase, a task that, to a ten-year-old, is not even conceivable on Sunday. So I would lie there, blinking in the leaf-filtered sunlight, listening to the waves. I fancied they had a dialogue: saying I am there, when striking the shore, and then I am not there, when withdrawing.

So years later, it was a windfall when I bought Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The Cat’s Table—that is about a sea journey—and on the same day, a little ship that had been put together by a Turkish artist from scraps found along the sea: driftwood, sail, and mooring hooks.

Margot Livesey

June 4, 2012 News and Events

Event Date:

Thursday, June 14, 2012 – 5:30pm – 7:30pm

Location:

Emily Dickinson Museum Gardens

The Common joins the Emily Dickinson Museum for a garden party to celebrate “writers, their homes, and their legacies.” Margot Livesey will read from her latest novel, The Flight of Gemma Hardy. There will be light refreshments, tours, an open house, and a visit from A.N. Devers, the founder of Writers’ Houses:

http://writershouses.com/
More event info here: http://bit.ly/KLzmFP

Port Arthur Girl

May 30, 2012 Dispatches

By CAROL ALEXANDER

Down around Port Arthur the tumbleweed, that mobile diaspore,
flings its seeds in a race with time, dying in a pool of rain or oil.
And what they have is a lot of sky and oil tanks coddling crude
and girls in much more underwear than they wear way up North.
Mining land is deeply scarred and raw, the gravel pits alien,
like lunar landscapes or the bank where Charon plies his trade.
The young ones necking in their cars, the ugly bars, showed you
the rocking road away from that stripped coastal town.

Reunion

May 23, 2012 Dispatches

By MAURA CANDELA

The dogs were the first to greet us. Two came trotting into the parking lot of the Masseria. A farm manor on a mountaintop, the Masseria was built into the cliff of tufa, the sandstone of the mountains that ring the Valley of the Jato. Like one of Michelangelo’s Captives struggling to be free of marble encasement, the house—with all its many additions—seemed caught in the act of struggling to free itself of the mountain.

First Apartment Near St. Mary’s T Stop

May 16, 2012 Dispatches

By BRETT FOSTER

I recollect at last those first few weeks
on Beacon Street: broke newlyweds, we hid
our finite riches in a little room,
a basement studio whose cost seemed gruesome.
Fresh from Corpus Christi, you learned to speak
a northern language, talk of “quarters” wide-
mouthed like a Chowdahead’s wicked idiom.

The Blue Pearl

May 9, 2012 Dispatches

By NOREEN MCAULIFFE

On the stern of the Sharp, Mendee and I process fish diets. She slings a camouflage-green burbot over her thigh and slices its belly from tail to gills so the intestines spill out. Finding the stomach, she chops it off and splits it open, then hands it to me. It is rubbery and limp, like a popped balloon. I hold it over a petri dish and squirt water into the pink ridges so that the burbot’s last meal pours into the dish. This one had a few snails. The last one had three plump silver grayling stretching it taut, which we gutted in turn to see what they had eaten. This is how ecologists reconstruct a food web: unlocking who’s inside whom, like opening a Russian nesting doll.

Five Things About Mexico City (for Cinco de Mayo)

May 2, 2012 Dispatches

By LYNNE WEISS

1) Five Names: Before it was destroyed by Cortez, the Aztec city that stood where Mexico City is today was called 1) Tenochtitlan. In the late 18th century the city was known as the 2) City of Palaces because of the grand mansions built by wealthy nobles and merchants. Today it is 3) Ciudad de Mexico or, as the capital of the nation, the 4) Distrito Federal, or 5) Mexico, D.F. (like Washington, DC).

Review: Townie

May 1, 2012 Reviews

Book by ANDRE DUBUS III
Reviewed by MELINDA MISENER

Townie is a book about fighting and writing. But it’s mostly about fighting: wanting to fight, learning to fight, training to fight, getting in fights. In the end, it’s about learning not to fight. (I’m not giving much away: a whole lot happens in the middle, and the final scene in which Dubus peels himself away from the urge to fight is lovely and stirring.)

Andre Dubus III spends his boyhood getting beat up a lot. Still scrawny at fourteen, he tells himself:

“I don’t care if you get your face beat in, I don’t care if you get kicked in the head or stabbed or even shot, I will never allow you not to fight back ever again. You hear me?”

Poetry on the Train

April 25, 2012 Dispatches

By KOBUS MOOLMAN

When the compartment door was drawn back, and I saw my room for the nearly twelve-hour trip home, I had to conceal my disappointment. The room was already occupied. Well, no problem. I thought to myself. Coming up to Johannesburg on the train I had been faced with the same problem. Then I had simply asked the conductor if I could change and he had found me a cabin where I could be on my own: to think my own thoughts, laugh out loud at my pettiness and, most importantly, write without distraction – all night if I so chose. Of course, things had been considerably easier on that occasion: my proposed companion had been an elderly white man who smoked like a steam engine and had the watery eyes and puffy nose of a heavy drinker. This time, however, I would have to make excuses for not wanting to share a cabin with a quiet middle-aged black man.

Dream Tracks

April 18, 2012 Dispatches

By PA TRICIA O’HARA

The New York-New Haven train (three or four cars, caboose, and an engine) leaves my hometown for Grand Central Station by day, by night, by day again, clack, clack, clacking through my backyard. Behind the storage tanks of B.J. Dolan’s Home Fuel Oil Company, the train pushes across the swamp meadows. Not so fast that I can’t see the passengers, though Margaret and Muriel and I hide in the tall grass because our mothers have forbidden, very forbidden, playing on the tracks. But fast enough so that the sticky milkweed and Queen Anne’s Lace bend backward, shocked, in the train’s wind wake. And then it’s safe to come out and look for the pennies we’ve laid on the tracks, thinned now, their presidential faces and patriotic mottos erased. These are the dog days of August, and we are the Lost Girls in ponytails, and though we have made a pact—together forever—I keep one eye always on the caboose as I listen for the fire siren that calls us to our five-o’clock suppers in our mothers’ kitchens.

All posts tagged: 2012

Review: The Cat’s Table

Margot Livesey

Port Arthur Girl

Reunion

First Apartment Near St. Mary’s T Stop

The Blue Pearl

Five Things About Mexico City (for Cinco de Mayo)

Review: Townie

Poetry on the Train

Dream Tracks

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