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Horse & Rider, Part 4

Eliza Frye — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:43:30 -0700

It’s time for a decision, but whose? The fourth installment of Eliza Frye’s graphic story turns a dark corner, but where does it lead? If you missed last week, Part Three is available here. Or if you are just joining in, start with Part One.

Cartoon Art Volume 6

Various Artists — Sun, 31 May 2009 19:25:02 -0700

White Space

Janet Burroway — Mon, 18 May 2009 10:14:19 -0700

Look there: a five-foot marijuana plant in a pot on the porch where any meandering patrol car could spot it from the street, creeping cop cops pot in pot, I do not want my mind to do this. My faculty tag will tag me; I should have parked farther up, but too late now, I will not be seen to turn chicken. Horizontal clapboards and the porch floor slats on the slant make your eyes go wonky. Op art-chitecture, there’s a notion. Tacky screen door, wrought-iron grille with iron bird perched on an iron tendril. Swings. Hello. Hello. The strains of Dock of the Bay. Why do they say the strains? Music is the sieve of stress, it strains the strain? Stop this. Watching the tide roll away. Taste of bourbon deep down my throat, in need of refill.

So blond. Taller than I remembered, even though I last saw him—what?—five hours ago, but sitting then, in the student perch beside my desk. Dead eyes. No: spaced-out, tuned-out, dropout hurt-eyes; he is a spaniel. With a gold stud in his ear. I am his advisor. I advise him to seek the barber. I advise myself to turn and go back to the car. He says, Hey, Teach.

That Ain’t Jazz

David Bradley — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:07:17 -0700

Ken Burns

Late winter, 2000. A posh co-op on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Too regal for a freelance writer, but I’m a guest worker, here to tape a talking-head interview for Ken Burns.

Yeah, that Ken Burns. Superproducer, who leaped the War Between the States with a single bound, bent baseball with his bare hands, and, disguised as a mild-mannered boyish, bowl-cut documentary filmmaker, fights a never-ending battle for truth, multiculturalism, and airtime on PBS.

New Year’s Weekend on the Hand Surgery Ward, Old Pilgrims’ Hospital, Naples, Italy

Adam Atlas — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:04:21 -0700

Outside, the neighbors were firing a pistol and setting off firecrackers in honor of the coming New Year. I decided to make a lasagna so I began chopping onions and I cut off the end of my thumb.

In Italy the emergency number is different for police and ambulances. I couldn’t remember which emergency number was which so I called a pediatrician to whom I had been giving English lessons and she called the ambulance.

The dispatcher started calling me, she kept asking me which building was mine and I kept telling her which one it was. I eventually realized the ambulance guys didn’t want to walk up all the stairs to my apartment, so I called my neighbor, Norma, to ask her to go down and meet them, but I accidentally called my ex-girlfriend on the speed dial. I don’t know if I hung up before it started to ring. The fourth time the dispatcher called, she said the ambulance guys were waiting at the bottom of the stairs. We began to argue. I told her I understood that they wanted me to go down but I was in one room and my thumb was in the kitchen. I kept saying, my thumb is on the cutting board! My thumb is on the cutting board with the onions in the kitchen!

Cartoon Art Volume 5

Various Artists — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 11:13:02 -0700

The Complaint

Michael Wolff — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:22:56 -0700

One afternoon, as he was about to leave work, Blake found a handwritten note in his mailbox. The note was from the school’s principal: “See me today.” It had been sitting under the day’s notices since morning.

Blake slung his workbag over his shoulder and left the English office. With the heavy bag his steps echoed unevenly down the corridor. Spring had come—the doors of the classrooms were open, and heat radiated from the walls, the desks, the students. He skipped the elevator and walked down the polished cement staircase, which was cool and pleasant when you were alone.

The principal’s office was insulated by a secretaries’ warren, with a waiting area. As he entered, the two secretaries glanced up at him with mild curiosity. One smiled. She was Payroll.

Made in Texas

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 09:34:21 -0700

Does any poet love his characters more than Dave Lee? As we read his trilogy, we sense that in the vast theater of his mind, Lee is watching and listening intently, with a grin on his face. Listening to the one-breasted cashier, Hooter Hagins, who keeps a running total in her head while discussing the weather; to Mr. Tittle, the algebra teacher, “whose breath wilted plastic flowers”; and to Bus Pennell, the one-eyed man who owns a “one-nutted dog.” Each of these people comes to full and lusty life.

Lee lived in Texas, and it’s in his blood. Within the first two lines of a poem, we are settling in on a porch in a small town, where the vet is the “veterananian” and the devil “the Debbil.” We share in gossip and get caught up in town intrigue. Lee makes us love his people, especially Hooter, the town celebrity, and the hero of these poems, a woman who can smile and wish a nasty, supercilious customer a real nice day.

By his own admission, these are Lee’s first narrative poems in eight years—the number not a coincidence, by my count. We have come out of a dark time, a cynical time bereft of humor and compassion. We can almost hear the poet breathe a sigh of relief at the thought that real people matter again, the ones who work as cashiers, the ones who hand cashiers their food stamps. Dave Lee has once again found his stories—luckily for us. We want more!

—Mimi Kusch

This Is Only a Test

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:47:33 -0700

Every Tuesday at noon, San Francisco sounds a citywide siren. A voice enters my office: “This is a test of the outdoor warning system, this is only a test.” The sixty-five loudspeakers were installed during World War II to warn the residents about Japanese air raids and were recently upgraded by Mayor Gavin Newsom. Every time I hear the wailing, I automatically close the lid of my computer and prepare to run. It’s the war, I think. The Germans are coming. This is understandable if you know that I grew up in Russia, where each subway station is an air raid shelter and everyone over the age of sixty keeps their home radios on at all times. Now and then the blaring noise is a reminder that a war is a part of our lives. For a loud moment, we are aware of the fragile state of our world, and maybe that’s a good thing.

In Lynn Freed’s excerpt from The Servants’ Quarters, the Germans are also coming. It is South Africa of the 1950s, and the war plays a prominent role in the nightmares of nine-year-old Cressida. Like most of us today, Cressida was born after the war, but it doesn’t make the nightmares any easier to deal with. Cressida is constantly on edge, looking for enemies even among potential friends. Her mother’s friend, Mr. Harding, his face half-burned in the war, must be an enemy. A boy who comes to live in Mr. Harding’s house cries inexplicably over a piece of cake: Does that make him an enemy as well? Cressida’s powerlessness in the face of change that threatens to disrupt the shaky balance of her existence finds expression in her nightmares of war. The nightmares serve as powerful warning sirens of change to come. And it’s not merely a test.

—Olga Zilberbourg

Am I My Brother’s Keeper?

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:35:21 -0700

Cain and Abel are the quintessential brothers of the Western world. As such, we see them reflected regularly in literature. Think East of Eden. Think A River Runs Through It. These are brothers loving and hating each other, brothers warring over a common desire, brothers who might kill each other if pushed beyond their limits.

In the astonishing “Blood,” Max and Walker are sons of a dead, alcoholic father and a mother who will not give up on life, though her body fights against her.

What is so quietly, astonishingly beautiful about this story is the tenderness Walker embodies in his forbidden love; at first his desire is infantlike—infallible, wrinkle free, blameless—so much about recapturing the lost father, the lost mother. But such an overwhelming obsession almost always has consequences, or so the Bible tells us. In Walker, as it was in Max as it was in their father, that desire is his undoing.

—Myfanwy Collins

Simple Lives

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:23:26 -0700

There are memoirs you read for the protagonist’s sheer distance from your life: the celebrity, the survivor, the sinner. You read them hungrily, voyeuristically, scrambling for experiences and sensations that you will likely never know. Then there are memoirs that take an unextraordinary life—one made up of moments that you too have known—and depict it with revelations and beauty in the telling.

How does a writer take her average life and make it interesting enough to read about? How does she tell a personal story that transcends herself? In “One-on-One,” Bridget Quinn shows us a girl longing for greatness and adventure, an ornery mother who takes these longings seriously, having given up her own dreams long ago, and a clear afternoon shared between them. In the afternoon, and in the telling of the story, dreams are fulfilled.

—Scott Cohen and Caitlin McKenna

Winged Metaphor

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 10:59:33 -0700

In this age of Internet, reality TV, and blockbuster movies, we have plenty of access to modern eccentric family life; indeed, we are saturated with it, which may explain why we’ve become hardened to its humor and pathos. An author must tread carefully to make us laugh at and to feel for yet another wacky group of people. Maud Newton approaches this dilemma by removing the weight of representation from her human characters. In “When the Flock Changed” we get to know a singular mother and daughter through birds, both literal and figurative. Always interested in accumulating a “large following,” Lula’s mother replaces her churchy “flock” with actual birds, obsessing over these multiplying animals “like a new mother.” But as she feeds the chicks who “rasp for food,” her own daughter is left to wander alone from Pizza Hut to McDonald’s. Like her mother’s “fucking parrot rainbow,” Lula is meant to be “free and flying,” but instead she sits “alone in a cage, crying out for companionship, subject to brutal whims.” Newton melds birds with family until the reader has trouble telling where metaphor starts and where it ends. But Newton avoids creating only a quirky family portrait by using an original one about a child’s bruised love.

—Amy Peters

Horse & Rider, Part 3

Eliza Frye — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 06:24:18 -0700

Will Filly stay free? Will Beau possess her? The heart seeks its way in Part Three of Eliza Frye’s edgy five-part graphic romance. Part One is available here. Part Two is available here.

Memoir of the Bookie’s Son

Sidney Offit — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:49:03 -0700

(Nonfiction; Saint Martin’s Press, 2003)

When asked as a child how his father made his living, Sidney Offit always gave the same answer: “Parlay the winner.” If pressed further he had to use his mother’s preferred response—“the shirt business”—or admit total ignorance. But he knew that the phrase had something to do with the rolls of money his parents banked in shoeboxes on top of ceiling boards and with why the favorite household game was imaginary betting, using scraps of paper his father abandoned on the living room floor.

Catching Up

Rebecca Kaden — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 13:41:31 -0700

Even Peter Pan in Neverland can’t escape the haunting of time. As the Pirates, Indians, and Lost Boys fight their never-ending battles, it is the ticking crocodile clock that provides the real terror—the possibility, or inevitability, that at some point, even in Neverland, time will catch them all.

For Ahrens, time is kept not by crocodile but by technology—the strange sounds of the recording monster that she found on her family’s kitchen table; the satisfying clicks of the typewriter keys; the switchboard that she sat in front of as she worked her way through college. The machines are doorways leading her into stories and into the moving hands of her clock, which will, and do, outpace her. Solving the puzzle of each technological mystery becomes intertwined with navigating her course—the fear of unknown buttons and windows, the glitches discovered that seem insurmountable. “Type A” presents us with the same inevitable fate that Wendy learns too, suddenly grown-up and back from Neverland: that despite any effort to keep up, we are always outpaced, and the best we can hope for is to capture the past—through ancient reels of tape-recorded dinner-table conversations, through stories, through essays—if we can’t keep up with the future.

—Rebecca Kaden

Letters to a Young Writer

Ann Beattie — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:26:58 -0700

In a reversal to our usual Letters to a Young Writer format, in which a featured Narrative author responds to comments and questions from a young writer, here Ann Beattie poses a question about a writer’s responsibility, and two young writers, Jackie Thomas-Kennedy and Reese Kwon, respond.

Spelunk

Charlie Haas — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:31:00 -0700

In all my years of working at magazines, I never got two hundred dollars ahead. You could chart my lack of progress by the cars I drove: a Sidekick, an Escort, a Protégé, a Kadett, and for six awful months a Flurry, one of the most suspiciously affordable cars ever made by a Big Three manufacturer.

The TV commercials for the Flurry had shown college-age kids, braless and Fugee-haired, silently laughing it up as they drove down a mercury vapor–lit expressway with Scottish techno on the soundtrack. In real life “Flurry” was a perfect name for the car, because it weighed nothing, and a gust of wind could move it over a lane and a half. The car was recalled twice after I bought it, once for its gossamer steering linkage and once for its Molotov gas tank. My Flurry was stolen twice but viciously turned up a few blocks away each time.

Six Poems

Dan Gerber — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Now

As I grow older, more sodden, and wedded by time
to the earth,
I spend so much more of it dreaming
of spreading out these arms
and letting all the nothing I’ve lived through lift away
the nothing I’ve spent my breath becoming.

Type A

Lynn Ahrens — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Dominic’s breath is soft in my ear, his accent a lilting roller coaster. He guides my hand, telling me exactly what he wants me to do. I’m moist with sweat, exhausted, but he’s patient, knowing it’s my first time. We’ve been at it for hours—his voice is coming from a million miles away.

“Now, please type in C as in California, O as in Oregon, N as in New York, and F as in Fronk-en-shty-een.”

“Excuse me?”

“F as in Fronk-en-shty-een.”

“Frankenstein?”

“That is correct.”

I do as he says. A pause.

“Yes! Yes! Yes!” I’m shrieking in ecstasy.

Darling Dominic, or whatever your real name is, in Calcutta or New Delhi—thank you, thank you, my sweet love. After five grueling hours with you, I’m back online.

Lovestruck

Jake Keyes — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 11:08:25 -0700

In Eliza Frye’s latest graphic story, we’re confronted by three bodies. Man, woman, and horse constitute the images of the story, with the curves of shoulder, haunch, and sloping nose appearing almost as if without frame or containing panel. The bodies provide the visual structure. The story is of lovers, and in the heroine’s averted face we see the first bite of lovesickness. In the curl of her body and in his languid arm across her, we feel the peacefulness of the lovers at rest. In the sinewed shadow of the horse, whose energy threatens to disrupt the structure, there’s the drive of passion.

Frye lets the images do most of the work. We don’t hear the courtship dialogue or grow used to the cowboyish stranger. Lightly touching our literary senses, Frye all the more arouses pleasure in all our other senses.

—Jake Keyes