ISSUES | summer 1992

15.2 Cover

15.2 (Summer 1992): "Exotic Places"

Featuring work by Talvikki Ansel, Philip F. Deaver, William DeCosta, Carol de Saint Victor, Joseph M. Ditta, Gary Fincke, Henry Green, G.W. Hawkes, Norman Lavers, Emily Newland, Ann Packer, Sam Pickering, Jr., and an interview with Jamaica Kincaid.

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CONTENT FROM THIS ISSUE

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Nonfiction

Mar 01 1992

Fall

For two weeks Vicki weeded the attic and raked closets, stuffing toys into boxes in the front hall and building a compost of clothes in the basement. Then for four days she washed and folded. Finally, though, fall and tag sale arrived. On October 5, I got up early and lined one side of the driveway with bookshelves. On them Vicki stacked clothes: children’s shirts and sweaters priced fifty and seventy-five cents apiece and trousers from fifty cents to two dollars. Down the other side of the driveway were the furnishings of two rooms: lamps, chairs, tables, even two playpens. Against the garage door were toys: a one-cent box, a five, a ten, and finally a twenty-five-cent box.

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Fiction

Mar 01 1992

With Don and Phil at the End of the World

Standing up straight is getting to be more and more difficult these days; always I am leaning into the gray south wind, the land and the sea are leaning, creaking like Greeland ice teetering, everything pale and on tiptoe and leaning downhill all the time. I wouldn’t be surprised if I were to wake up tomorrow morning and find the whole thing tilting a bit too steeply and myself sent tumbling head over heels through Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, straight past the copper mines of Chile. What would happen if I were to just keep right on going, tumbling like a drunkard down the stairway of the world, all the way down to the bottom?

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Nonfiction

Mar 01 1992

Go Slowly and You Arrive

My first morning in India. I wake up at dawn and take a motor rickshaw to Old Delhi: just any street in Old Delhi, I tell the driver. It is as if I walk through familiar photographs and movies: men wash themselves at pumps, brush their teeth with sticks, sleep on rope beds; women prepare tea on open fires, sweeping a little space in front of doors; children run about; the continuous movement of people around carts past cows between rickshaws, seemingly without beginning and without end, contained only by two- and three-storey buildings of ground-level shops, upper-level living quarters and storage areas.

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Foreword

Mar 01 1992

Foreword

In the Peter Weir film Dead Poets’ Society Robin Williams plays prep-school teacher John Keating, whose theatrical talents and fresh attitude inspire his students to think for themselves. During their first class discussion of poetry, Keating tears out the introduction to the “J. Evans Prichard” textbook. Later, he stands on his desk and encourages each of his students to do likewise to “get a different perspective.” Keating’s popularity inspires a small group from his class to look through an old yearbook, where they discover their teacher’s affiliation with the “Dead Poets’ Society” when he was a student, and they proceed to recreate the society, gathering to read poetry in a cave not far from the school. While physically not distant, the cave is an exotic place for these teenagers, where they are carried out of their world into the eternal time of poetry.

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Fiction

Mar 01 1992

Tillman and I

“Name the quad cities,” said Tillman.

It was the middle of the morning and we’d just crossed the Mississippi and entered Iowa. I tried to remember the highway signs we’d passed. “Moline,” I said. “East Moline.” I was stuck. “North Moline and South Moline?”

“I’m sorry,” said Tillman. “You do not win the walnut dinette set. The correct answer is: Moline, Rock Island, Bettendorft, and Davenport.”

“Rock Island sounds pretty.”

“It’s the armpit of the Mississippi. How about a sandwich?”

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Fiction

Mar 01 1992

Always Cold

Even though the flatness of Kansas is sometimes exaggerated, I’ll admit that it’s level in places. It’s particularly level around Oracle, so flat that the sunlight for a week at the equinoxes skips across town like a thrown rock. Women have to hold their skirts down to keep that light from jumping up. A wariness steals into their eyes, like when the man from the bank drives out, and they grip their handbags more tightly, and the men push their hands down into their trouser pockets in fists.