ISSUES | fall 2007

Kabul, Afghanistan, November 2001

From my bed I hear Bro and our other translators laughing downstairs.

Eight A.M.

I slip on my clothes without bathing. We have little power, and the water never warms. I have decided to hold out against the frigid shower for days if necessary, until I can no longer stand my funky self. I run downstairs and warm water for coffee on the kitchen hotplate.

Featuring reviews of The Emperor’s Children (Claire Messud), A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (Ken Kalfus), Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie), Delirium (Laura Restrepo), and Last Evenings on Earth (Roberto Bolaño). This full review is not currently…    read more

The house is small, square, and white. The roof’s flat. The door, centered on the eastern side, is just a curtain with red and yellow flowers. The other sides have one square window, also centered. There’s no glass in the windows, just yellowing, loosely woven cotten rags nailed to the wood like mosquito netting. The house sits on a slight rise in the middle of the plain, and anyone looking out the windows could see a long way.

“I can hardly believe it myself.”

Anne, my girlfriend, is talking to a neighbor on the phone while I open a bottle of wine in the next room.

“You can hardly believe what?” I ask when she’s off the phone. “Sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing.”

Her hesitation. The look of being caught off guard. “Not that I’m getting cold feet or anything. But what if I move in with you and it turns out that we liked each other better before? It’s not like we can go back to living separately again and everything will be the same — you said so yourself.”

Berlin artist George Grosz dressed with an air of art-school irony in a variety of costumes — a cowboy hat and spurs, a powdered face, rouged cheeks and lips and a padded, checkered jacket, or a rakish-looking Fedora and an American gangster-styled suit. But the role the young artist played most often was that of the dandified idler, with spats and walking stick, as he joined fellow artists at Café des Westerns to gossip, debate, play chess and drink coffee and spiked lemonade.

Featuring the poems: In Plain Sight Lures Good Friday, 1989 Remembering Rexroth’s Li Ch’ing Chao in Cordova, Alaska The Harriman Expedition, 1899

It was my father who was the oarsman, and the last there ever was.

Featuring the poems: Great Northern Divers in Ballinskelligs Bay [This poem was featured as the Poem of the Week September 1, 2007] On teh Bus Red Window Poems The Valley

You don’t expect to know murderers when their stories make the newspapers. Not if you’re normal. Not if you own a house surrounded by other well-kept houses.

On the flight to India, Ashwin spoke to baby Ravi as though the baby would understand… but he wasn’t really a storyteller, never remembering the orders of events. And anyway, he didn’t enjoy all the truth-bending in children’s literature: the personification of animals and suspensions of disbelief. Not that he was anti-imagination, but he preferred to find the wonder in things that were real and concrete, things he could see for himself.

Along with a surprising number of other artists, George Grosz thrived in the unlikely world of the Weimar Republic. His cartoons and watercolors pierce the facades of society, government, the military and the church. They exemplify the fervid bohemian moment between the wars in Germany and Austria, also remembered in such work as Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, which was later to be the source of the play Cabaret.

[On the genesis of his novel Arthur & George] You think someone’s guilty, you believe they’re guilty, but how can you know they’re guilty, how can you prove they’re guilty? This tied in, I realized, with Conan Doyle’s black hole of emotions, this secret area of his life, which had never been written about before, probably because there was no documentary evidence — these ten years when he was involved with another woman while his wife was suffering from tuberculosis.

Featuring the poems: Linnaeus’s Patient Syringe [Featured as Poem of the Week, Feb. 6, 2008] Afternoon, Códoba Moon Jellies   Syringe In 1853, Charles Gabriel Pravaz and Alexander Wood developed…    read more