November 7, 2018 Senses of Dawn The Smell of Dawn By Nina MacLaughlin This is the third installment of a five-part series on the senses of dawn. Each piece (touch, sound, smell, taste, sight) will run at daybreak (EST) this week. Original illustration by Jackson Joyce Charlie Stackhouse: early bird. Andrew Cinnamon: night owl. The two men, founders of the creative agency Cinnamon Projects, spent a year collecting images—drawings and photographs from books and online—and assigned each image a set of tags according to composition, emotional response, and time. When they filtered the results according to time of day, they found the patterns and themes that presented themselves were particularly compelling. So they designed a series of scents, perfumes and incense, that are “chaptered by the hour.” The perfumes are based on the hours of 8 A.M., 10 A.M., 2 P.M., 9 P.M., and 11 P.M. What does 11 P.M. smell like? Like white, thick-petaled flowers growing on vines, blooming at night. They climb up the gutter of a stone house that you pass on a night walk and the flowers glow like the moon glows and give off a moist smell, something like fur coats, an adult smell from the mind of a child. According to their description, it’s “deep, sophisticated, mystifying” with “amber, clove, carnation, patchouli.” Read More
November 6, 2018 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Kamala Markandaya By Emma Garman Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. In 1956, the then-famous Indian novelist Kamala Markandaya was asked if she might set a book in England, where she lived with her British husband. “No,” she responded, “I don’t know England well enough, and don’t think a static society—that is to say a society which has solved its problems in a mild and satisfactory way—can prod me into writing about it. I regret to say I have to be infuriated about something before I write.” A decade and a half later Markandaya’s greater familiarity with English society, and its increasing volatility, resulted in her seventh novel, The Nowhere Man. Her favorite of her own works, it belongs alongside such classics of diaspora disenchantment fiction as Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, Andrea Levy’s Small Island, and Linda Grant’s The Clothes on Their Backs. Yet The Nowhere Man was all but ignored on its publication and, despite being reissued by Penguin India in 2012, remains little known today. Read More
November 6, 2018 Senses of Dawn The Sound of Dawn By Nina MacLaughlin This is the second installment of a five-part series on the senses of dawn. Each piece (touch, sound, smell, taste, sight) will run at daybreak (EST) this week. Original illustration by Jackson Joyce May 28, 2018, Ghent, NY. 4:17 A.M. The silence is total. Pencil across graph paper. Like the sound of a small bird making a nest in the rafters above the ceiling. Thatchy, gentle. Straw noise. Wheat noise. It’s too dark to see the letters. Just the scratching in the dim. Leg against sheets under blanket, friction of cotton and flesh. Breath paused. Heart thud. Whoom whoom whoom of blood. Don’t like to hear it. Don’t want it to stop. Whoom whoom whoom, the blood-rush pulse of the body at work. Read More
November 5, 2018 Senses of Dawn The Touch of Dawn By Nina MacLaughlin This is the first installment of a five-part series on the senses of dawn. Each piece (touch, sound, smell, taste, sight) will run at daybreak (EST) this week. Original illustration by Jackson Joyce. What first? The touch. Dawn arrives not rosy-breathed, not rosy-voiced. She arrives with rosy fingers. She arrives in touch. Homer told us so, over and over, as new days took shape during Odysseus’s long, wandering journey home. Here are light’s first moments as described in Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Odyssey: “When early Dawn shown forth with rosy fingers” “Soon Dawn appeared and touched the sky with roses” “When rose-fingered Dawn came bright and early” “Early the Dawn appeared, pink fingers blooming” “When newborn Dawn appeared with hands of flowers” “Then Dawn was born again; her fingers bloomed” Dawn is born again, just as we are. We emerge from the warm womb of sleep and it registers first in the body. Soften your eyes and feel it. Dawn runs her fingers along the softness of your flank, over your shoulder, in the hollow behind your knee. She touches your clavicle and your neck. Fingertips petal-soft. She brushes your breast, the inside of your thigh, moves up your spine and against your scalp, your jaw, your brow. Awareness accumulates. You feel, These are the boundaries of my body. Here’s where I start and the pillow stops. This is the blanket, this is my skin. This is the mattress, this is my chest. All that touches me isn’t me. I am separate again. Read More
November 1, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: You Could Make This Place Beautiful By Sarah Kay In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Sarah Kay is on the line. © Elis Rosen Dear Poets, After a long separation, I spontaneously invited an ex-fling to join me on a trip across Europe. Given our delightfully sordid past, I assumed the trip would be full of flirting and playful sex. Not the case. He showed up entirely disinterested in me, was boorish about my plans and ideas, and spent every spare moment texting other women back home. It was supposed to be a steamy jaunt with my favorite bad boy—but it was more like babysitting a sullen teenager for two weeks. Prior to this trip, I had some long-lingering feelings and hopes about us as a pair. Suffice it to say, I’m over it. So while I’m not exactly heartbroken—this is no breakup—I still feel like I’m mourning the end of a long fantasy and confronting the reality of his indifference. Do you have a poem for this type of finality: when you at last see the truth of a situation, swallow it uncomfortably, and move on at last? Sincerely, Wrong Girl Read More
October 31, 2018 Hue's Hue Blaze Orange, the Color of Fear, Warnings, and the Artificial By Katy Kelleher It started with a gunshot. I had just moved into my new house in the woods of Maine, a log-sided cabin surrounded by miles of “public access” forest that were owned by logging companies and managed, as far as I could tell, by no one. It was October, and I was working in my bedroom, with my dog lying heavy on my feet. Suddenly, a shot rang out. It was close. Then another, and another. It was the echoey boom of a shotgun, a sound I’m familiar with, thanks to hours spent skeet shooting under the tutelage of an L2L. Bean instructor in the woods of Freeport. As I listened to the sound of gunfire, I slowly became aware of the stench of urine. My elderly dog, a sweet husky-hound mix named Deja, had pissed all over the floorboards. She was shaking from fear, trembling like an autumn leaf. I didn’t have the heart to discipline her. This has become an annual occurrence. People trek out into the lumber-land to shoot their guns. I become tense and resentful. Deja pees. And repeat. I no longer walk outside in the fall without carrying my fear with me. I’m always a little wary of hunters, but I’m more afraid of the drink-and-shoot types. Every year, people die in the woods, hit by stray bullets or mistaken for deer. And so I wear a blaze-orange Carhartt hat. And so my dogs wear orange bandannas around their necks. And so we nail signs to the trees, glowing, neon-orange signs that tell shooters to stay away, keep off our property. I have no way of knowing whether any of this works. Read More