What is the nature of what is known to us? It’s difficult to remember, with any kind of clarity, what my trip was like. Most of my travels seem to happen to someone else: as soon as I leave my home my brain distances itself, a lack of object permanence applied to place. I…
Foreigners who live for any length of time in Japan soon discover that many of their experiences, both the delightful and demoralizing, prove to be not merely commonplace but identical to the experiences of most other foreigners. This may be equally true of ex-pats living in Ecuador or Senegal, and therefore a banality;…
On Federal Highway 200 Near Salina Cruz It was late in the afternoon, and a gentle wind was pushing heat off the country when we found the man. Our traveling bicycle gang had split in two by this point — Robbie and I were riding ahead, and hadn’t seen Jamie or Alejandra for…
When I write about my mother, my pen likes to compare her to birds without my permission. I write her voice like sparrows, high and tittering when she laughs. As an angst-ridden teen, my word of choice for her was ‘crow’, pecking away at me bit by bit. She became a character composed of…
A high-pitched clarion yelp rang out from under the hood, alarming the couple who had left the car in an alley for want of a parking space. Hastily cutting the ignition, they ran out to find from whence issued this half human, half animal voice of such impressive carrying power. The large pair of…
The family gave me objects to put under the blankets, to keep me warm. They gave me a wicker basket filled with hot coals. They gave me an orange cat. Their garden was barren except for yellow winter roses. When I walked toward the house, I would quicken my pace, trying to get out…
“The fate of the emigrant: a foreign country cannot become a homeland. Yet the homeland becomes a foreign country.” Born in Vienna in the latter part of the 19th century, the critic and essayist Alfred Polgar died in a Zurich hotel room in 1955. Exiled by Hitler’s rise to power, and only relatively recently returned…
He’s standing at the Montargis train station waiting for me when I arrive. It’s nearly empty at this hour on a Saturday morning, so I spot him immediately. His hair isn’t as bright blonde as I remember – rather a faded caramel – and he seems shorter from where I stand across the train…
The first time I leave, I’m nineteen and my mom is crying in the airport. I laugh instead of hugging her and make her stand in front of a sign that reads “Trauma Kit” while I take a picture, hoping it will diffuse the tension because I’m not sure I can parallel her sadness….
“Improbable History of the Mysterious Lady”: Domestication of Gothic in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Section I: The Gothic as Prototype All novels are, or should be, written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write…
If you fly over Jackson Heights on approach to LaGuardia airport, the neighborhood appears as a cluster of leafy blocks pierced by dozens of brick apartment buildings. And if you had happened to fly over on one particular summer afternoon, with binoculars and exceptional eyesight, you just might have witnessed what appeared to be me…
On January 28, 2018 my mom dies for fourteen minutes. My sister and I are first told it’s twenty, but the doctors will later correct themselves, pleased with that extra six minutes they spared her. We aren’t sure what difference that makes. But it seems important and so we catalogue it in our…
In his comparatively brief life, Christian Morgenstern, born 1871, was a writer of sketches and short pieces (feuilleton) for newspapers, an editor, among others, of Robert Walser, and a translator of Ibsen’s poems and lyric dramas. He also published a series of collections of lyric poems which formed the centrepiece of his serious literary…
When the family next door moved out 15 years ago, they left behind a potted ficus. For weeks, the tree stood by the trash, begging to be watered. I dragged it to our courtyard and flooded it. It came back. Green buds became leaves. Twigs grew into branches. A year later, that plant-abandoning neighbor—a…
“Do you know where you’re going?” Genuine concern edged the driver’s voice as he stood at the open bay of the Greyhound bus with hands on hips, sizing up the small, gray-haired woman. She was dressed in Army surplus pants and a plaid shirt, and she had asked to be let off at a…
You can make a flower arrangement out of anything. It helps to use at least a few flowers, especially if you want other people to call your creation a “flower arrangement.” It also helps to use some things that are not flowers. I generally use other parts of plants for this purpose. Some people…
When using poetry as a method of self-defence you need to start with the basics. It’s easier to disarm or incapacitate a potential assailant with form and structure than with content. Not that content can’t have devastating effects – it can. But generally only in expert hands. The simplest moves in poetic self-defence are…
It was in 1990 when T. J. G. Harris, my mentor of poetry and a regular contributor to P N Review at that time, kindly gave me The Irish for No and Belfast Confetti, saying ‘the poet might have something.’ Through these Bloodaxe paperbacks, I was initiated to Carson’s newly invented style of long lines….
The odor of cheap perfume invades my breathing space. It clings to me. I consider moving to another booth and calculate the trouble. I measure it against the smothering stench thinking, Why should I have to move? The smell reminds me of a decaying cocktail lounge where the smoke from a million cigarettes has…
The Home’s western boundary were the tracks of the Liberty Bell Line, a trolley that had operated between Allentown and Philadelphia in the nineteen-forties. It was a single track on a ballast of rubble-filled earth that arched over our creek, a shallow meandering stream which had been re-channelled through a concrete tunnel. By 1956,…
Fading Horizons: Regarding the Decline of American Mall Culture For those of us who grew up during the 1980s, the indoor mall—first etched into the landscape by architect Victor Gruen three decades earlier—was a hub of life and teenage social activity. At the mall, we enjoyed a shared destination, a space…
Three Years in Benghazi: Libya 1982-4 “Societies in which the existence and unity of the family are threatened, in any circumstances, are similar to fields whose plants are in danger of being swept away or threatened by drought or fire, or of withering away.” “All that is beyond the satisfaction of needs…
The Most Bitchin’ Brontë: Unleashed Animus in Wuthering Heights Feminist readings of 19th Century British literature are complicated by the fact that the rising awareness of certain issues like cruelty to animals and the mistreatment of children—issues that have always cleaved to feminist theory—challenge social and legal realities at their ideological foundations. The fact…
In November, after the Kroger next to my apartment installed a system of security cameras and monitors, assumedly to cut down on shoplifting by making it clear that SOMEONE WAS ALWAYS WATCHING, even if that someone was you, I began visiting the store regularly, for no real reason other than to watch myself walk…
Summer vacation was almost here, but my photography professor, Jeff Weiss, said going on vacation was no reason to stop shooting pictures, that making pictures every day of your life was how real photographers lived. I wanted to be a real photographer. That summer after my freshman year of college, I stayed with Mom…
AGAINST THE GRAIN OF MOTHERHOOD: POST-PARTUM PSYCHOSIS AND THE NARRATIVE WE DON’T WANT TO TELL Worst Night I stand by the crib. My son, just fifteen days old, sleeps inside. It’s three-something in the morning, and I alternate between pacing the room, sitting on the nearby rocking chair, and standing by the crib….
Forty-six steps from her door to the elevator. Three-hundred-and-seventy-nine to the Starbucks on Astor Place—where she did not work. Five-hundred-and-seventeen more to the Starbucks at Barnes & Noble—where she also did not work. One foot in front of the other: left right left right left right left, six-hundred-and-twenty-three paces to the Starbucks at Broadway…
Forty years ago I spent a year in Madrid, in a rented studio apartment on the sixth floor of a narrow brick apartment building on bustling Calle de la Princesa. One room that came fully-furnished with two single beds which we lashed together with twine—thin, tick mattresses on metal frames, like the institutional beds…
It’s not enough to see Belle de Jour as an erotic classic. Such an appellation might be justified of a film preoccupied with a conventional cinematic rendering of soft focus bodies breathing heavily over a melodious soundtrack. Not so Belle de Jour. Certainly it is an erotic picture, but not for the reasons one might…
In the early 1950s, the American poet James Wright, wandered by mistake into the wrong classroom while studying at the University of Vienna and joined a seminar on the poet Georg Trakl. He describes how the professor leading the seminar read Trakl’s poems slowly, with enormous patience, in the twilit room. The only other…
The Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa has led an exemplary career, completing buildings such as the sober and sensual Finnish Cultural Centre in Paris (1991) and the vast Kamppi bus terminal in Helsinki (2003). A gregarious, generous figure, full of energy at the age of 73, he has influenced generations of architects through his teaching around…
The Home often careened into a panic-stricken, twelfth-century German village. Sister Superintendent Alfreda believed that all dogs were rabid and vicious, hence dog and “wolf” sightings were especial cause for pitchforks and torches, or so it seemed. Sisters Petra and Hademunda would herd us into a barn for a round of Hail Marys. Mr….
