The Morning News
>I am not the only Frank Smith
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Frank Smith considers the complexities of having a common name @ The Morning News.
The first email came from a woman named Emma. Emma had been stalked before and no longer sent photos by email, she wrote.
She was an Australian with a slim build, small bones, a slender neck, and long brown hair. She first wrote to me over the Christmas holiday. Well, she was writing to me, but she thought she was writing to someone else.
I was born Francis Joseph Smith. My father is Francis Edward and my grandfather was Francis Marlo. Both men went by their middle names. The name Francis has long been a family name—going back at least as far as the Civil War, starting with my great-great-grandfather. He had a farm, which is named the Frank Smith Farm. There’s a farm named after me. It’s an old farm, old enough to give me a solid claim to Frank Smith. Still, there are a lot of us Frank Smiths out there. Who knows what they have named after them?
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Sometimes when I meet someone for the first time and tell them that my name is Frank Smith, they think I am joking. Hotel clerks have reassured me about their privacy policies when I’ve signed in at the front desk. For a long time I became so self-conscious of my name that whenever a new person misheard Craig, Greg, Clark, Fred, or even Jason when I said “Frank,” I let them think whatever they wanted to think. I spent an entire afternoon with a ski instructor who—for some reason—thought I’d said my name was Jeff. It made all of my fears of downhill skiing go away each time he called me that. Jeff cracked jokes about Sonny Bono that no one else found funny—and never once fell. For a few hours, I was able to live as someone who wasn’t named Frank Smith. It can be addictive.
>There were differences, if you looked closely
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Seth Sawyers recounts all the skinny parts of growing up in western Maryland @ The Morning News.
On a map, the state of Maryland, on the East Coast of the most powerful country in the world, looks like a pistol pointing west.
The barrel points at the giant hulking hugeness of America, first toward West Virginia and then Ohio and then all that farmland, and beyond that California, the Pacific, and, eventually, China. The fat part of Maryland is low and rich. It’s got money and restaurants and office buildings. But not the skinny part. That skinny part is where I’m from.
The skinny part is an outer province, an afterthought, a cartographic mistake. At one point, the skinny part is less than two miles wide. It’s an add-on, a hangnail, a swollen pinkie finger. It’s a place people see on maps but forget about unless they go deer hunting or have a second house there, where they go to get away. People from Baltimore or D.C. call it “out there” or “up there” or “the mountains.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )The skinny part is all hills, ancient mountains long worn down, once as tall as the Himalayas but now smoothed out like old molars. On topographical maps, it looks like a tablecloth pushed together from the ends, a worried forehead, or corduroy. Those hills make a horizon that rises and falls like the humps of a sea monster. Those hills hold you like endless warm blankets. They’re green in the summer but, when the leaves fall, they exhale a long breath and fade into their thousand browns and thousand grays. The hills wear clothes for half the year and wear nothing at all for the other half, but they’re always there.
>This stuff will ruin you
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Béibhinn Dunne on the addiction of giving @ The Morning News.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )It’s like a drug. It will take everything you have, will tear you and your family apart; it will strip you down to a person you never thought you could ever become. It will refuse you credit, break up your marriage, and eat your children. And it won’t stop there.
Sometimes, as one of the many people I pretend to be, I call strangers and ask them to give money to charity. People feel better when they do this. Better than what, I can’t say, but certainly better than before. They get the high. They’re all buzzed. Delirious, they thank me again and again for continuing to save the lives of starving children, animals, the Great Unvaccinated, although I have already told them that I have never done anything for these causes. I couldn’t tell a white rhino from a polar bear, and I couldn’t locate the Horn of Africa if I was standing in Sudan holding a map of Ethiopia. I just work for the call center.
The people I speak to are all different, in different circumstances, in different places, of different ages. As far as I can tell the only thing they all have in common is the fact that they all give to charity. Some of them are giving to more than 4,000, or so they claim. “Of course,” I say. “You have to manage your Giving the way that’s best for you.” But they all want to do more. All of them. That’s the drug. You start off nice and easy, saving lives £2 at a time, but once you really realize how easy it is to save lives (just £2 a life!), it becomes harder and harder to draw any kind of line. A life! you think. For the price of a coffee! Take it all. I won’t be happy till it’s all gone. Next thing you know, your wife has left you and your debts are being managed by a social worker.
>There is always going to be a book that saves you
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Alexander Chee on finding your way in the dark with digital books @ The Morning News.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )When I recently moved to New York to live with my partner, Dustin, I introduced 22 boxes of books to the one-bedroom railroad apartment in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, where he’s lived for 19 years. Dustin built over 70 feet of bookshelves for me and in just one day I filled them, feeling, afterward, mixed pride and shame at the size of my collection. Which still didn’t quite fit on the shelves.
Dustin built one more shelf. And another. I filled these also. Now all of the books are off the floor and out of boxes, and the shelves he built fit beautifully into the room. The books do not overwhelm, but this is because they are all on shelves. There’s really no extra space, which is to say, any new books mean that soon the books may overwhelm us. Three, or perhaps 10 new books, much less the 30 I can easily acquire per season, could take us into crisis.
My books have moved with me from Maine to Connecticut to San Francisco to New York, to Iowa to New York to Los Angeles to Rochester to Amherst and now to New York once again. I’m a writer, also the child of two people who were each the ones in their family to leave and move far away, and the result is a life where I’ve moved regularly, and paid to ship most of my books so often I’m sure I’ve essentially repurchased them several times over. Each time I move, my books have grown in number. Collectively, they’re the autobiography of my reading life. Each time I pack and unpack them, I see The Phoenicians, a picture history book my father gave me as a child, and will never sell; the collection of Gordon Merrick paperbacks I shoplifted when I was a closeted teenager, stealing books no one would ever let me buy. The pages still retain the heat of that need, as does my copy of Joy Williams’s Breaking and Entering, bought when I was a star-struck college student at the Bennington Summer Writers’ Workshop 20 years ago. Each time they were all necessary, all differently necessary.
>Appropriating your dead mother’s taste in men
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Ainsley Drew recounts her affairs with the big men her mother would have loved @ The Morning News.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )My mother had a crush on her oncologist when she was dying. He was a tall, solidly built sixty-something, with a gray moustache and expensive spectacles. I thought he looked like Walt Disney with an advanced medical degree, and so I trusted him with my mother’s metastasized liver and pancreas. To her, he was a strapping Italian playboy around her age, so she trusted him with her body over hours of sporadic companionship while tethered to a chemotherapy drip.
“He seems kind,” she said, weakly smiling after their first meeting, “And he’s big.”
This was my mom’s type: tall men with muscles who made her feel protected. She was four feet 11 inches, and a diminutive 80 pounds; one would think just about any average-sized man with enough strength to open a mayonnaise jar would have sufficed—but no. She rhapsodized about the merits of “big men” as she opened yet another bottle of Chardonnay to wash down dinner. Never mind that she’d never dated after the five feet, six inches of my father faded out of her marriage and into the arms of a leggy, 28-year-old blonde. Never mind that her last serious crush was on the moving man who’d hoisted her furniture into her new house a decade before the diagnosis.
>Cinematic ruin in the rearview mirror
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At The Morning News, Elizabeth Kiem writes about her travels among Haiti’s beautiful and violent ruins–present and past.
I traveled to Haiti last month. Everyone assumed it was a business trip, since I work for an aid agency. It wasn’t. Aid is the biggest business in town these days, and every other guest in my hotel came with a laptop and a “project.” But I had a different agenda.
After several days in Port-au-Prince, I had a fairly clear picture of Haiti as disaster zone: It had the face of a tent camp, the body of the beat-up road from Carrefour to Leogane, and a rear end that blew air-conditioned cool along a commandeered stretch of airport tarmac where the U.N. works on reconstruction from portable container offices.
Certainly, my week-old mental portrait of the country was a profile only, seen in silhouette and under specific lighting. I observed collapse from the passenger seat of a car; I tested the rubble with well-shod feet; and for every minute I spent among the displaced, I passed an hour on the verandah of a comfortable hotel debating security zones, agricultural investments, and the relative evils of U.S. trade policy and Wyclef for president.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )But on Thursday nights, this same verandah hosted a weekly dance party, drawing a crowd of 200; locals outnumbered the foreigners—the journalists, the humanitarians, and the observers like me, by about five to one. I hold those nights, full of rhythm and drums and rum, as my internalized landscape of post-quake Port-au-Prince.
>Culture Animals
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At Spike Magazine, Tim Black reviews Helen Guldberg’s Just Another Ape
At Quarterly Conversation, George Prochnik considers the complicated escapes of Stefan Zweig: “What makes the “good exile”? Is there a calculable equation of inner fortitude, openness of mind and external support networks that determines a refugee’s odds of survival? Why did Thomas Mann, Zuckmeyer and Zweig’s friend the conductor Bruno Walter flourish in the United States, while Zweig, Brecht and the dramatist Ernst Toller recoil from almost every aspect of their New World experience”
Stefan Auer at Eurozine considers the ways that narratives of European unity have been used and abused for political purposes: “The juxtaposition of uplifting narratives produced by the European Commission, with the many, messy histories of participating nations points towards the limits of the usage of history for political aims, however worthy those aims might be. Yet, there are also some positive lessons that can be drawn from the dissonance caused by the EU attempts to appropriate the legacy of 1989.”
Barrie Jean Borich explores the limits of redemptive narratives in women’s memories and fiction at Women in Literary Arts: “Which leads me back to resisting redemption, or resisting a reliance on only redemption, or complicating the meaning of redemption. Book editors so often use the word redemption when describing what they are looking for in women’s literary nonfiction—which even some independent presses want to squeeze into the classic conversion narrative arc dating back to St. Augustine, an admittedly lovely story form replicated in every AA meeting in which the teller is asked to tell what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now, but which assumes that a sexual past is something to recover from.”
At Artslant Joyce Cronin returns to the F-word and rediscovers some feminist artists in two London galleries. “I wonder about the phenomenon of thinking about something or learning a new word and then seeing it everywhere – what is that called? Is there a name for it? If not, there should be.”
Anwyn Crawford at Overland considers the relationships between feminism, anorexia, and capitalism: “Feminism, as I have discovered rather painfully over the years, is not a prophylactic against patriarchy or against capitalism. It is possible to know, intellectually, that starvation is a viciously self-destructive tactic while still actually starving; the self-destruction is in part an inability to inhabit a self – a body – that capitalism has constructed.”
Johanna Gohmann writes about the pleasures and disappointments of shopping at American Apparel at The Morning News. “I craned my neck around the store to look at the other merchandise—at the pastel jumpsuits, the reflective bikinis. I was about to scowl an emphatic “No” when suddenly I spotted it, sitting in the display case right before me. So oddly out of place. And yet so eye-catching. A Hitachi Magic Wand. The mother of all back massagers. The fabled sexual machinery I’d heard about for years, but had never attempted to seek out.”
Also at The Morning News Ester Bloom reflects on her adolescent transformations and the hidden story behind her name: “It was my friend Deb who made me see the light. Deb was a well-dressed, sophisticated pixie who lived in Manhattan, went to Hunter College High School, and knew infinitely more about the world than I did. “You’re a loser,” she explained to me one day on the phone. “In the eyes of society, you’re a loser.” This was a ploy to make me invest in contacts and hair gel, and it worked”
The photos with this week’s collage come from the beautiful photo essay by Serge J-F. Levy at the recent issue of Drunken Boat.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )>Some Facts about Uncertainty
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| “Uncertain Harmonies, Series No. 8” by Kevin Laycock |
The other day, I was walking down the street in East London having a deep debate (“erudite” is how my companion Greg described it) about the nature of human nature that led to a discussion about the definition of “natural” and “reality” and whether perhaps these two words mean the same thing. Our debate went in circles as we walked from east to west, encountering the hum of accents and foreign words. It began to rain lightly. In London in August the rain was a certainty.
Judith Kitchen meditates on the nature of uncertainty in all its complicated fragments at the TriQuarterly Review: “Who knew words could fly in the face of their origins? Could confuse and obfuscate merely by using their science against you? I read and I read and still I cannot fathom what “oxidation” means that I should so want to resist it. I read and I read and fact becomes my enemy. Fact: I have always loved fact. Fact: I want to embrace fact. Fact: I want my own sense of reality here, and this is not learning to live with uncertainty, though it may be one step along the way.”
On the line between facts and imagination, Robert Birnbaum interviews novelist and journalist Jessica Egan at The Morning News: “Well, as a journalist I think it’s incredibly important, certainly for me, and I actually think for everyone, to be clear about whether you are actually trying to represent real things and real people, or whether you are making it up for story. To me, blurring those lines is a disservice to journalism—certainly research pieces. I don’t buy the idea that, “Well, I sort of created a compilation.” Or, “I kind of combined two scenes.” I don’t feel comfortable with that.”
The BBC has recently made available online its archive of author interviews from the past decades. I’ve never heard novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf’s voice before. Here she speaks about the “mysterious demands and duplicity of words.”
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| “Uncertain Harmonies, Series No. 10” by Kevin Laycock |
Tim Elhajj explores the heavy certainty of the phrase, “I am a homosexual” at Guernica where he recounts his discharge from the Navy: “The agent at the desk tugged out a sheaf of handwritten paper on a yellow legal pad and passed it over to me. When I asked what it was, he told me that Fear had written a statement. I saw the big loops of Fear’s penmanship, neat and precise. I knew the agents were watching me. I shuffled through the pages, but I didn’t bother to read the words. I wondered what I would tell the people back home. I felt a sort of sick awareness growing in my gut.”
Daniel Akst at The Wilson Quarterly reflects on the ethos of loneliness in U.S. culture: “The number of household pets has exploded throughout the Western world, suggesting that not just dogs but cats, rats, and parakeets are often people’s best friends. John Cacioppo, a University of Chicago psychologist who studies loneliness, says he’s convinced that more Americans are lonely—not because we have fewer social contacts, but because the ones we have are more harried and less meaningful.”
And, at The Millions, writer Dylan Hicks muses on the pleasures and perils of connecting with other readers and writers at the online network Goodreads: “I don’t have many writer friends, or many non-writer friends, my Facebook account notwithstanding, but I have a few, and the next time one of them publishes a book, I’d be inclined to give that book the maximum rating on Goodreads, even though none of my friends—I can just tell—are capable of writing a five-star book (which by my lights is a good thing), and no doubt some of them will write two-star books.”
>Elusive Words
>Tony Judt, suffering from a neurological disorder and is “fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them,” writes in The New York Review of Books on his love of words and longs for the lost art of articulate, crafted writing: “Today “natural” expression—in language as in art—is preferred to artifice. We unreflectively suppose that truth no less than beauty is conveyed more effectively thereby. Alexander Pope knew better. (“True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, / What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest.” —Essay on Criticism, 1711) For many centuries in the Western tradition, how well you expressed a position corresponded closely to the credibility of your argument. Rhetorical styles might vary from the spartan to the baroque, but style itself was never a matter of indifference.”
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| “Apollo and the Artist” by Cy Twomby |
At The Millions, Deanna Fei details the haunting voice of her grandmother in her struggles to write fiction: “I was aware that Chinese censorship is real and crushing. But I’d never expected it to manifest itself in the voice of my own grandmother—who, if she chose, could certainly tell her own negative tales about China.”
And when is writing a crime? At The Morning News, Micheal Erard returns to confront a former student who plagiarized and essay and rethinks the ways writing is policed. “Then it was my turn: I told Haley a bit about how her plagiarism had affected me. How I took it personally, and trusted students a little less; I made sure that assignments were plagiarism-proof. But what she couldn’t know was how I became more confident in spotting an opportunity to instruct, and less interested in policing boundaries—which were, after all, mine to teach.”
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