Issue 120 | May 2012
I have seen an infinitely large number of murders in my life. I have seen an infinite number of bombed houses, bleeding and weeping victims. I have seen massacres. I have seen the results of famine, car accidents, big train disasters, and plane crashes. I have seen terrorist attacks. I have seen them on film, as fiction, and I have seen them as pictures of reality, on TV and computer screens and in newspapers. We all have. It is part of everyday living and we see it so often we are immune to it. We have to be. We can't absorb all the suffering that lies behind every one of the pictures; that's not possible. And these pictures are fiction for us. They are not connected with our own reality. The first pictures of the bomb attack in Oslo, where all the government offices have been blown to smithereens, are like all the other pictures of bombed buildings shown on our TV screens over previous decades, and our familiarity with the alien-ness, which all these pictures have created, completely overshadowed the familiar: Oslo, the government block, the newspaper offices, Verdens Gang. That was perhaps why all the initial comments pointed to al-Qaeda and a Muslim terrorist action, in other words, alien-ness.
by
Karl Ove Knausgård
We were talking about that feeling that you’ll never do your work again, that it’s just gone, and how real that feels, how you believe it completely every time, and how unreal it feels when the brick in your chest dissolves and you start to work again. Also how knowing that somebody made something doesn’t make it less real. I’ve fallen in love with imaginary characters. If it happens with one created or manifested by a novelist, it blurs with your own life and the people you know in your own life, the way toxic particles from bad groundwater or bad air (or from the dog?) can get inside your own breasts or brain and give you cancer. If it happens with a character you’re writing, well, then your life becomes very difficult, although, isn’t life very difficult anyway?
by
Elizabeth Bachner
"I thought about the photos that are regularly released by the FBI to the news media of alleged terrorists. They all have this expression on their faces. The reason for this is, of course, that these photos are all mug shots or passport and visa photos, in which you are not supposed to smile. This made me realize how important it is to those prosecuting GWOT to make sure we feel that there is some reason to be fearful. The War on Terror is not just a war on terrorist organizations; it's a war against those who have the audacity to make us (Americans) feel fearful for our safety. The citizens of empire should not have to feel that way."
by
bookslut
"Maybe I found so much meaning on this journey because I wanted so deeply to believe in what's possible. I didn't want to focus on what was destroyed but on what can be created. I wanted to pay attention to the small moments, gestures, details from the paling petals to the intricate tiles to the curves of Arabesque monuments. But I also had many doubts. I still do. But those doubts don't come from my experience of traveling but in my awareness of our shortcomings. To me, travel is about an all-encompassing understanding. It's about seeing, which eliminates misconceptions and fear. It's also about connecting. Growing up, I felt I belonged nowhere. And that was traumatic -- sometimes those feelings come back, like they're hanging in the darkness with all your frights."
by
Jesse Tangen-Mills
Susan Sontag is the writer who first taught me that a critical essay could be every bit as valuable as a work of fiction. I admire her judgment; but I admire the way she expresses her views, her writing, even more. Some of that is her adept use of aphorism, her ability to compress an entire point of view into one clean, memorable phrase -- "All writing is a species of remembering," "Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment," "Disenchantment is the characteristic posture of contemporary American intellectuals, but disenchantment is often the product of laziness," and so on. But, more importantly, Sontag uses her critical essays as a way of exploring her own personal sensibility.
by
Guy Cunningham
Williams's was a vision of poetry that encompassed the entire New World. As Octavio Paz wrote, “whether he speaks Spanish, English, Portuguese, or French, American man speaks a language different from the European original.” Williams realized this more than any of the other great American modernists. He didn’t want American poets to disown English poetry and certainly not to swear off European influences, but rather to shape their poems in a way that corresponded to the American reality. A European language transplanted to a different land -- with a different climate and topography, different flora and fauna, different social relationships -- could never remain quite the same language that set off from Cadiz or Lisbon or Portsmouth.
by
Greer Mansfield
"People always talk about how cunning Mao was, but what about that Jiang Qing? She was an actress early on, and you can never trust them. They lie. Like Mao, Jiang changed names and traded up with partners and spouses when it was expedient. I wondered what life has been like for Li Na, the daughter of Mao and Jiang, who spent her early life hidden away with distant relatives. (She is seventy-one or -two now.) She has lived a quiet life, and only a handful of old photographs exist, which is a little strange for the sole offspring of two of the most infamous people in modern Chinese history. I'll bet that Li wanted to get away from it all at some point."
by
Terry Hong
"Geography -- both the geographies of the past and the present -- is part of an individual. In order for me to understand my characters, I need to understand the place, the social issues, and dominant ethical values surrounding them. As much as we'd like to think of ourselves as unique, no one operates in a vacuum. If my characters react to the dominant values of society, they are also shaped by that society. Like life, you can say."
by
Micah McCrary
"I was in a self-destructive spiral when I decided to hike the PCT. It was more dangerous for me to stay in the life I was living than it was to go, even though going took me into the wilderness alone. I was okay out there. Yes, it's true I took some risks and I found myself in situations at times that were not entirely what you'd call safe, and yet the profound realization for me is that I was -- as I say in the book -- 'safe in this world.' I didn't feel safe in this world before my hike. Testing my strength, being daring, and taking risks in healthy ways -- those things allowed me to inhabit the world in ways I'd never previously imagined."
by
Gina Frangello
