nonfiction by Marian Crotty
Admit to yourself that straight girls don’t usually spend four hours a day masturbating themselves numb to “The L Word,” stop sleeping with men altogether, and you might just find her. When you do, it will seem like fate. She will be beautiful and smart with just enough swagger to let you think she might like women. A Ph.D. student at the school where you adjunct. Perhaps, when a friend asked what type of woman you might like, you even said her name. Maybe, years before, when you saw her for the first time, strutting across a parking lot with her long dark hair and mirrored sunglasses, you thought, “I really need this girl to love me,” and were disappointed for weeks to learn she had a fiancé.
It will be years later, after the fiancé and successive boyfriends are out of the picture, that a throwaway line from her—a stupid line you don’t believe about women being the subject of art because their bodies are more aesthetically pleasing—will make you flirt. What you say at this point does not need to be smart, is better maybe, if it’s clumsy, gross, and nervous.
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By Gina Balibrera
Just before leaving town for the holidays I paid a visit to Ann Arbor’s subterranean Aardvark antique shop and came upon several boxes of Stereoscopic gold, at a price even the most frugal of treasure-hoarders can celebrate. I stood beholden to the stacks of rectangular cardstock bearing double images–of a gloomy pair of circus lions, or of two doe-eyed Victorian housewives swooning upon identical hand-colored velvet chaises, or of a bank in San Francisco, the twin photographs taken sometime before the 1906 earthquake that broke Market Street in two. A Stereoscope, for the unknowing, is a trick of the mind. The double imaged cards were once created with the intention of being held by elegant machinery. Lenses would cover the eyes, crossing them, to reveal a single image in three stunning dimensions.
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by Monique Daviau
Among the many barbs that Humbert Humbert lobs at Lolita’s poor, doomed mother, Charlotte Haze, is that she is “large.” Sure, his gaze upon this woman, who has unfortunately reached the same decrepit age that I am now, is never kind. To him, she is dull-witted, her French is horrendous, she is simple and slovenly. But above all, she is that most unfeminine of qualities: the opposite of small. Humbert is not alone in prizing a woman for being of diminutive stature, although Humbert is a terrible example, since we all know what his deal is, one need not venture far from Nabokov’s masterpiece to find male narrators who wax rhapsodic over women with tiny hands, delicate feet, and small bodies that fit into to crooks of their arms. If you, like me, are a woman of formidable mien (I topped out around six feet tall at the age of twelve), chances are that you long ago abandoned hope that the day would come when you would find a man glowing upon the page about his romantic interest, a heroine who can fit into your clothes.
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by A.L. Major
Samuel L. Jackson is the highest grossing actor of all time. I know, I was surprised too. According to the Guinness Book of World Records he has appeared in more than 100 films, that have in total grossed over 7.42 billion. So, I started an investigation —no this was not a form of procrastination to distract myself from writing, I swear. Over the course of two weeks, I watched and re-watched as many films starring Sam L. as I could, in the hopes of understanding what makes his films such a success. Most compelling of his performances, the thread that united his roles, was his voice. Perhaps his success lies, not in what he says, but how he says it.
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by Ann Marie Thornburg
A few days before we walked through the door marked “2012,” my partner and I read an essay together that is, I think, one of the best about poetry I’ve ever read, and one that has pricked my consciousness in a profound way. The essay, written by John Berger (who is many things: a painter, a novelist, a critic of art and an essayist), is called The Hour of Poetry. It is a generous reminder of poetry’s power and, as such, a subtler call to action—with the tools of empathetic heart, meaningful intention, and purposeful language.
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