by A.L. Major
In November, I watched the National Book Awards ceremony via an online broadcast. A U of Michigan alum of 05′, Jesmyn Ward, was nominated for her novel Salvage The Bones , and if she won, I wanted to witness it. Of course, my impulse to watch the awards was a self-involved, highly illogical one: that if I am a U of Michigan MFA Fiction student and she is an alum of this same program, then I might be able to produce a work of similar notability and talent. When she won, I was surprisingly elated. As if I had won too. I bought her books, the hour after, not yet critical of why it hadn’t occurred to me to buy them before. Later, I realized I’ve become a complacent reader.
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by Marshall Walker Lee
If you believe the Times, and why not believe them, Google is developing everything from robot drones and driverless cars to a space elevator, which, so far as I can deduce, is a kind of hybrid, Wonkafied rocket-cum-slingshot. Great, I say go for it, Google! To tell you the truth, I don’t care about intelligent droids, wireless refrigerators or a dinner plate that loads my bio-feedback straight to Facebook. My interest is in that ‘X’ and it’s whispered hint of secret happenings. The sex of X, the intrigue, that’s what caught my attention, because—here’s my confession— I am obsessed with the letter X
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by Marshall Walker Lee
I say appearance, rather than reading, because the reading portion of the evening (voice and text and presence and performance) seemed if not beside the point then certainly a second-tier attraction. People came to gawk or moon, they came to get their galleys signed or to soak up the air conditioning. They came for the Q & A. Oh, the Q & A! Those words still have the power to summon a pang of sympathetic terror in me, a sour feeling in my guts. As soon as the author closed her book I watched, as in the sudden swipe of frames thrown by a magic lantern, the quiet backroom of the bookstore changed into a shooting gallery. The author blinked and squawked, a lone duck. And me? I hunched over my little table readying the register, stacking and restacking books, fidgeting in order to avoid eye contact.
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by Marshall Walker Lee
In the arts, repetition put to smart use bears fruit almost instantly. Take a phrase of music or a line of poetry and read it, hum it, then repeat it. Again and again. Crack the circle open and you find a spiral, spinning, a single pattern among many. Repeat the line until your mind purges itself, feel the words—their grit, their slick hard shells—transformed into a prayer. Of course, it doesn’t take long for our egos to break down under the pressure of a repetitious cycle, an hour will certainly do it. Bach knew the power of phrase repeated. So did Stravinsky, Satie, and a man named Francis Ponge. Theodor Adorno, the German musicologist, saw in repetitious music the thanatos or “death drive” described by Freud: repetition in extremis undermines the idea of a single, special soul, when we follow a pattern we leave part of ourselves behind and move towards a catatonic state of un-being. It’s awfully hard to carry on believing that you are one of a kind, a single chink in a great chain, when a pattern rises up around you, swallowing you whole. Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.
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by Dilruba Ahmed
I’ve been haunted for much of this month by a bird. Not a real bird, but an animal depicted in “The Documents of Spring,” a poem by Rick Barot that appears in the latest issue of The Asian American Literary Review, which is by far the fattest literary journal to have landed on my doorstep in the past year (RHINO is a close second). As we all know, subscriptions to literary journals are not cheap. But a former instructor’s advice and admonishment to an undergraduate writing workshop still lives with me: choosing to write means entering a community, which in turn means supporting that community by attending readings, buying books, and purchasing subscriptions. And so, when I can, I pick up another subscription… to Inch, because something in its tiny pages stings me every time; to New England Review, because it’s doomed to tank soon; and to AALR, one of several new Asian American literary magazines that are bound to attract a readership that extends well beyond the Asian American community. But first, back to the bird.
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