In “A View from the Cheap Seats”, Elizabeth Byrne talks sports; in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Hannah Gersen reflects on the transience of place, asking, “Is Geography Destiny?”
Photo from The Library of Congress
All posts tagged: Essays
Best of Essays
December 27, 2012
Essays
Best of In House
Check out Sonya Chung’s piece “Annals of Mobility: On Youth, Adventures, and the Territories of Adulthood” and Melody Nixon’s “Finding Common Ground: Aurora, Nebraska”.
Photograph by Raphael Matto
Abu Dhabi Reads Life of Pi
December 19, 2012
Essays
It began with an innocent question from a student intern: “Why don’t we do one of those community reads things?” The other student writers for Electra Street, the arts and humanities journal at NYU Abu Dhabi, thought it sounded like a great idea. I, as the faculty editor, was filled with grown-up skepticism about staging a literary conversation in a city as diverse and seemingly unbookish as Abu Dhabi, which does not even have a library that is open to the public with any regularity. But somewhere between student optimism and faculty skepticism, “Abu Dhabi Reads” took root, and one warm night in early November, more fifty people from all over this desert city gathered in a garden at NYU to talk about Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi.
Anna Karenina: The Movie. If the Book Is So Great, Why Do We Need Adaptations?
“The Book Is Always Better” read a sign perched on top of a stack of Harry Potters and Twilights in the Harvard Coop bookstore last spring. I remembered the sign waiting in line to see director Joe Wright’s new Anna Karenina, adapted by Tom Stoppard and starring Keira Knightley, Jude Law, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
IMDB lists twenty-seven movie and TV versions of Anna K, going back to 1907. The 700-page book has also been made into at least four ballets and ten operas.
I’m not a screenwriter, but I imagine the elevator pitch goes something like: “Whaddya think, boss? Beautiful high-society woman married to a stiff finds passionate love with a handsome officer, and her husband and society treat her so bad she throws herself in front of a train. Not bad, eh?”
Art Attack
December 12, 2012
Essays
The town of Alvo, Nebraska, is like a lot of other small Midwestern towns whose best days are behind it; and those days weren’t exactly eventful to begin with. After decades of population loss there remain four structures in Alvo that a visitor can enter without trespassing: the grain co-op, a Methodist church, a post office, and Mel’s Mini-mart — a converted room in a small house selling canned soup, Hostess snack cakes, and other items with long shelf lives. Across from the post office is a tidy but barren park. If prosaic comforts and tight-knit community are the calling cards of small town life, they aren’t obvious here. With few places to gather and nothing but the cornfields of agribusiness on the horizon, Alvo has only quiet anonymity and rock bottom real estate to offer.
Annals of Mobility: On Stories of Return, Not Exactly
It all started with Googlemaps. I was researching a neighborhood in NW Washington, DC, where I wanted to set a story. The area had to meet certain requirements: no more than x number of Metro stops from a town in Maryland; a mostly African-American neighborhood in the early 1970s, which would later gentrify. The house I envisioned was a brick row-house just above street level, with a porch, and a wrought-iron gate, next door to a somewhat unkempt house that had a chain-link fence and a concrete slab in place of grass. It had to be within walking distance from a park. My research brought me to Pleasant Plains, and I clicked the “street view” icon—that little orange man you can click-and-drag around the map in order to see actual images of a street.
From the 17th Floor: A Shelter and a Point of View
December 7, 2012
Essays
1.
“That’s the best date I ever had,” I said. I was speaking to the young women with the latte skin and uncovered, long dark hair, but also to the serious-looking Emirati man who had wandered over because I was the only thing happening. Mid-week, midafternoon, the date festival was nearly deserted, save a few clusters of Indian men, single Western men in suits with briefcases, and a grumpy woman with big glasses. I suppose I was expecting this man, this representative of Al Foah, one of the largest date producers in the UAE, to be impressed somehow, or at least gratified, by my enthusiasm. I wasn’t exaggerating. The fruit had a thin, melting skin and a pillowy interior, the flavor rich, heady with sweetness and spice. (Hints of cardamom and apricot?) The serious man asked where I was from, and I proceeded to disappoint him with my ignorance about the production and sale of dates in the United States. Yes, I did think that dates had become more visible in grocery stores over the past five years, though I couldn’t say what varieties. Medjool? I did know that California was a hub, but, by then, I’d lost him.
From the Stone House: Among the Olives
December 6, 2012
Essays
I have a friend who says he simply cannot trust somebody who doesn’t like garlic. Though I wouldn’t go that far, I’m taken aback when someone spurns an olive.
To me, olives are the most sublime of all things pluckable from a tree—and what a tree it is, l’ulivo, with those feathery silver-green leaves that shimmer in sunlight, glint in brisk winds, glimmer after rain… The slender branches are extremely strong yet flexible; they don’t mind a good stiff shake. The bark of an olive tree is gorgeous, too, with a patina of silver that softens its rough grey-brown wrinkles. Then there are the tree’s roots—admirable contortionists, able to twist around big rocks and support trees canted at odd angles on steeply terraced hills.
Reading Place: Storytelling
This literary map of the United States, which pins American writers to their places of birth, got me wondering if certain stories exist apart from writers, and the trick (no small trick) is in discovering them in the landscape. Huck Finn seems more bound to the Mississippi River than to Mark Twain’s imagination. And if Tennessee Williams had never been born, I wouldn’t be surprised if some other writer bumped into Blanche Dubois.
Every once in a while you encounter one of these inevitable-seeming stories, a yarn so intimately linked to its place of origin that you automatically pull up a chair. For me that happened most recently when I read the first line of Frank Bill’s Op-Ed in The New York Times:
“Used to be, every year around deer season, there was a story that got told in my family…”
