January 17, 2013 First Person Yellow Sky By Brandon Hobson Black Crow Road A week before the tornado outbreak in May of 1999, I attended my first Native American sweat with my friend A. J., a security guard and blackjack dealer at a Cheyenne-Arapaho casino located in the town of Concho. I’d known A. J. since eighth grade, when we used to smoke cigarettes and catch crawdads in the creek behind his grandfather’s house. His grandfather sat in a recliner and smoked a pipe and spent whole afternoons staring out the window. He talked to us about luck. Good luck, bad luck. He once told us to pay attention to wind and smoke. If wind drifted the smoke east, that meant good luck. But only east. Crows are good luck, he told us, because they fly high and carry prayers to the spirits, whereas owls are considered bad luck. Rain is good luck, but only when the sun is shining. Strong winds are good luck because they are personified as divine spiritual messengers. Even ridiculously high winds that bring down power lines and trees are still considered good luck, regardless of their destruction: the overall speed of wind is unimportant because many tribes look at the path of winds as the soul of a spirit sweeping across the land. I’ve never been much into superstitions, but listening to A. J.’s grandfather talk about all this when I was a kid made me realize this was some serious shit. Read More
January 17, 2013 On the Shelf Didactic Seuss, and Other News By Sadie Stein If Dr. Seuss books were titled according to their subtexts, they would be harder to read. Conversely, can you ID these books from their phantom covers? It’s nearly impossible! A cache of Robert Burns manuscripts and letters has been discovered—a major find. The 2013 Yale Writers’ Conference is now accepting applications. Je Banach will lead a seminar on literary discourse; visiting faculty includes Tom Perrotta, Susan Orlean, and ZZ Packer. “By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment.” Sebald’s writing tips, compiled by his students.
January 16, 2013 The Poem Stuck in My Head Sir George Douglas’s “The Strange Visitor” By Sadie Stein When my brother and I were small, our parents would read to us each evening. When it was my mother’s turn, she generally read poetry. I don’t know from which children’s collection she read, but it was terrifying: in particularly heavy rotation (at my request) were “Don’t Care,” in which the insouciant protagonist is made to care by being “put in a pot / and boiled til he was done,” “Ozymandias” (I found the idea of the head lying in the sand frightening), and my favorite, “Strange Visitor.” When I decided to find the poem online, I came across several variations; in the original, compiled by the folklorist Sir George Douglas, the dialect is Scottish; in other adaptations (including that anthologized by George Jacobs) more modern English. The plot is always the same: a woman, sitting at her spinning wheel, wishes for company. A series of mismatched, disembodied parts come in—knees, shoulders, neck, hands—and the figure gives a series of gnomic answers to her questions. “What have you come for?” she asks at last. “FOR YOU!” the reader shouts, leaving any listening children in a state of blissful petrification. The following is Douglas’s transcription, and his stage directions. Read More
January 16, 2013 Look For Reference By Sadie Stein As any of our interns, currently fact-checking our Spring issue, will tell you, research is glamorous work. But in case you needed proof:
January 16, 2013 At Work Tender Spirits: A Conversation with Marie-Helene Bertino By Jessica Gross In October, Marie-Helene Bertino published her debut collection of short stories, Safe as Houses. Her writing often involves fantastical elements—an embodied idea of an ex-boyfriend, an alien who faxes observations about human beings to her home planet, a woman who brings Bob Dylan home for Thanksgiving dinner—that advance painful story lines. Her language is spare, direct, and hilarious, which makes the characters’ losses that much more deeply felt. Bertino is now at work on a novel centering on a jazz club in Philadelphia called the Cat’s Pajamas. We spoke for two hours in a Brooklyn coffee shop, which was flooded with girls on their lunch break from school. Reading Safe as Houses, I was struck by the number of characters who aren’t really seen by others. By the last few stories, the characters start to become more visible. Does that theme ring true to you? I would totally agree with that, though I was not conscious of it. I was aware that a lot of characters were on the outskirts of something—of their towns, their groups of friends, their families, their societies. And at the risk of sounding cliché, I think that’s a metaphor for being a writer. I mean literally and figuratively—you have to stand on the outside to watch a group of people and then be able to write about them, but in practice, it’s also a solitary art, as they say. And I think that those characters definitely are a reflection of that kind of observer quality in me. Read More
January 16, 2013 On the Shelf Writing in Jewish, and Other News By Sadie Stein The literature of Washington, D. C.? Ah, the old “I let an author stay in my house and he published ridiculous things about me” conundrum. Children, it seems, like real books. Philip Roth: “I don’t write in Jewish, I write in American.” Here is a house constructed around an enormous bookshelf.