Book by ZADIE SMITH
Reviewed by
Asked in Granta to compare her writing process in her latest novel, NW, and in her previous novel, On Beauty, eight years before, Zadie Smith responded:
It’s my feeling that the process of being edited by American journals improved my sentences. It was like going back to school. And with a tighter sentence I was able to writer a tighter book.
For me (and thousands of others), it’s not always easy being a Jets fan. Week in and week out, it’s virtually impossible to predict how they will perform. While this can make for exciting, come-from-behind wins, it can also be devastating. This unpredictability, plus the melancholy of being a Jets fan far from home probably explains why I’ve been thinking about Steve Almond’s quest for a sports bar in which to watch his beloved, and often unsuccessful, Oakland Raiders every Sunday. Now that I’m living in Massachusetts, I find myself doing the same thing: slouching on hard wooden stools, trying to keep my outbursts to a whisper because, for the most part, everyone around me hates—I mean, hates—the Jets. They may wonder why the one TV in the corner even has a game on that isn’t the Patriots. This is New England, after all.
Poems by BRUCE BOND and Paintings by ARON WIESENFELD
Scenic View
The woman alone atop the precipice,
what does she fear more, falling or jumping,
If it weren’t for its title, you’d be hard pressed to pin down the 1940 film The Philadelphia Story to a location. True to the traditions of theatre and the Hollywood Golden Age, the film’s sets are few and mainly interior. Socialite Tracy Lord teeters on the brink of remarriage, with a catty-charming ex-husband, populist tabloid reporter, and absentee father descending on her parents’ mansion for the occasion. The beloved characters, expertly played by Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Jimmy Stewart, hardly venture beyond their manicured lawns. They speak in their famous transatlantic voices, the fine-bred, trained accents of no town and no country. It sometimes seems that the film may as well have been set on the moon as in Pennsylvania—as long as there could still be fine drawing rooms and elegant patios, of course, for class conflicts play a much more vocal role in the film than regional color. The Philadelphia Story treats place much the way Tracy herself does: when Macaulay Connor asks, “Say, this is beautiful country around here. What is it all, anyway?” Tracy replies flippantly, “Oh, part of our place.” And on the story moves, as dismissive as Tracy herself.
This is the first part of a two-part Dispatch. Pt. 2 will be published online in November.
*
She slept for the first two hours of the trip, and when she woke up, the first thing she said was, “When we get back I want a divorce.” We were headed north with the hopes of going to Canada for no other reason than to say that we’d left the country. We’d decided on Thunder Bay, Ontario, because it was the closest destination across the border from our home in southern Illinois. And now, it seemed, the trip was doomed before we’d covered half the length of our own state.
Above all else, as a writer, I need a view. And it doesn’t have to be a view of anything particularly striking. If I think back to all the rooms I have worked in as a writer, and all the different views that each of those rooms looked out on, then certainly there have been no rolling hills or mist-swept vistas. Quite the opposite.
In 1453, when the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed II ordered some changes to the city’s eastern Orthodox cathedral, the Hagia Sophia: the altar was swapped out for a minbar, the platform from which the imam addresses the congregation; and four slender minarets were added, among other things. For nearly 500 years the Hagia Sophia was a mosque, becoming, in 1931, a secular museum that enchantingly reveals layers of religious history, art, and architecture. Today the purple porphyry marble from Egypt glows richly; the Byzantine golden dome displays Islamic geometric adornments; and mosaics of the Virgin Mary sparkle up high. To better show off its wonders, the museum’s upper gallery hosts a permanent exhibition of images by Turkish architectural photographer Ahmet Ertug. In these carefully lit photos, the tiny tiles of the Virgin’s face and robes can be easily discerned. A museum within the museum.
Artist: ELIZA STAMPS
Curated by AMY SANDE-FRIEDMAN
Last month at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Eliza Stamps, with her collaborator Amy Linsenmayer, unveiled the first edition of The Kiosk—a micro, mobile exhibition space that can be adapted to house a variety of art projects in different locations. Rent-a-Grandma, the premier Kiosk installation, on view through November 25, is a cozy interior where visitors can interact with actual grandmothers.
The wrinkled Brazilian landscape passes below me, brownish green through the haze. Every so often the disordered mountain ridges grow crisp and straight, in parallel, like ribs.
Then the land flattens, consumed by endless trees to the horizon. As jungle overtakes the soil, no variety strikes the eye except for rivers: one, two, three, four, five veins of muddy brown lifeblood, traversing the sleeping green chest of the Amazon.
Beside me sits my traveling companion, my mother, who was born and raised in Brazil. For the first time in many years we’ve managed to match our schedules to travel here together from the U.S. She’s eager to show me parts of Brazil I’ve never known.
Above this seemingly interminable forest, who would believe the rate of Brazil’s growth – skyscrapers sprouting, small villages exploding into cities, cars crowding the highways – into the 6th largest economy of the world?
By KRISTA LEAHY
Cold beer, slippery hands, cigarettes no one (everyone) wanted,
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.