Abstract: Escape, empowerment, and liberating energy are primary subjects of much post-Victorian children’s fiction (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz), while common themes of serious adult fiction are often the opposite: alienation, purposelessness, and existential angst. In children’s stories, protagonists can float the river, fly in the air, and kill the witch, while in serious adult fiction, they often can’t quite decide what to do, or, even when they try, their expected social or gender roles and their perennial human weaknesses may doom them to failure. One could almost prefer children’s or escapist fiction to the annoying serious adult stuff. The best-selling controversial right ... Read More PubDate: 2017-07-25T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Photo by Stuart Randall Saffen My mother doesn’t usually get out of bed until five in the evening. This is because many of her nights are spent staying awake until the sun rises well above the swimming pool, the slate-black roofs, the curl of oak branches. Her internal clock doesn’t know an appropriate time to become tired. After she’s spent both day and night awake, it’s easy to hear the jumble in her speech—syllables becoming manic and distorted, sentences snapping in two, tongue twisted like a sheepshank knot. She doesn’t ask for anyone’s help if she’s struggling to say something; she just figures out how to do it herself. She says she’s got to keep moving or else she’ll feel her ... Read More PubDate: 2017-07-25T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: My mother had been calling every night for weeks, always a new complaint. The new dog couldn’t be housebroken, the weather was too windy; finally, the linoleum would not come clean. Photo by Erin Riggs There was a grayish scum that wouldn’t scrub off. I had no idea what was really going on. “Replace it,” I said. “I can’t! It’s too expensive!” my mother practically shrieked. “Then just ignore it.” “I would love to ignore it; do you think I enjoy mopping' Your father complains about it.” I sighed. I had homework, hours of Chinese yet to read. My classmates from China could breeze through a novel in a weekend. I labored for hours with my dictionaries to ... Read More PubDate: 2017-07-25T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The Dining Room (Francis Place) (II), 1997 The Dining Room (Francis Place) (VI), 1997 In Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth, the Wellington Brys, a couple insecure about their social standing in New York society, want to attract new friends. To succeed, they must pull off a bold party. After careful thought, the “two baits” they use are an evening of expensive music and tableaux vivants, a series of living pictures popular among upper-class Victorians. The Brys enlist a dozen fashionable young women and costume them as characters from paintings by Goya, Van Dyck, Titian, and Watteau. The women model scenes of nymphs dancing across a patch of flower-strewn grass or ... Read More PubDate: 2017-07-25T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Photo by Charles Miles Oh, he was a lousy fifth grade teacher, certainly worse than any of his own teachers had been with the possible exception of Mrs. Davis, she of the pear bottom and mustache, and he having volunteered himself to teach only because he had no skills and no direction after college aside from the fanciful notion of going home to Seattle and somehow working for a newspaper, which was never anything but an idea, and because his girlfriend Antonia was signing up, and because he sometimes enjoyed her company and she enjoyed his, and he had no better opportunities. Then by the middle of his second year he and Antonia were barely tolerating one another and living with their blond ... Read More PubDate: 2017-07-25T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Ashley Devine hands me an invitation for her birthday party, a Friday-night sleepover. your invited, it reads in a cartoonish font. The missing apostrophe bothers me. At eleven years old, I am big on following all rules: it is the hallmark of my personality, in fact. Ashley has no such desire, at least as far as I can tell. She has the demeanor of a stoned skater kid, though no one in our grade actually does drugs. She wears skater T-shirts and wide-legged JNCO jeans, swaggering a little when she walks, like a guy. She’s about a foot taller than I am. Ashley won’t ever become middle school royalty, but she’s liked well enough, doesn’t seem too concerned. She passes out her invitations in an ... Read More PubDate: 2017-07-25T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The British Museum I have been shorthanded for days and have had to do all the chopping, cooking and cleaning, not to mention grinding the various spices, and have worn myself almost to a shadow. People have promised to find me a servant, but the few who have come to work have proved unreliable. My apartment is inside a rambling mansion in the old part of town not far from Gangauri Gate, and from my very window one can see Hawa Mahal with its many tiers of tiny, lattice-covered balconies. I quite enjoy the view of the hills and the distant Amber Fort, and besides, the rent is most reasonable; my husband has a decent job at one of the royal government offices nearby. There are so many dwellings ... Read More PubDate: 2017-07-25T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Photo by Mike Norton My grandfather, the Reverend Thomas Argyle Faith, lost his right thumb when he was sixty-five trying to save a cow in labor. After that he used his index and middle fingers to write his sermons, the conviction of his strong, boxy penmanship compromised by an imbalanced teetering to the left. I tried to write my name this way to see how it would feel, the difficulty of the task further increasing my awe of him. I would look through his bookshelves, finding slips of his notes in his many Bibles and volumes of theology. I could tell by the handwriting when he had read them, before or after the loss of the thumb. I was nine or ten at that time, taller than all the boys ... Read More PubDate: 2017-07-25T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Streams of galaxies flowing through space reveal the contours of a structure known as Laniakea. ... Read More PubDate: 2017-07-25T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Photo by Dun.can Two tramps were sat across from Eileen in the waiting room at the hospital. They were clapped out, head to toe, and they had a hum coming off their clothes, making it difficult to breathe in the room outside the phlebotomy department, where Eileen was also sat, only more anxious than most, as she had to have blood drawn. One tramp had on a dirty overcoat reaching almost to his ankles, and he wore one white trainer shoe and one black. The other tramp wore a raggedy tweed jacket which was accentuated by the filthiest scarf in the Western world. Eileen was not sure how much longer she could inhabit this sepulcher of odors in the otherwise spotlessly clean University College London ... Read More PubDate: 2017-07-25T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College Library (Ph.f 10.5) Dear Hettie, Just a line to say how happy I am you’ve taken on the job of Class Correspondent. I can’t begin to imagine what hard work it must be, getting news out of all us girls, but I’m sure you’ll do a terrific job. I know I for one always look forward to getting the Alumnae Magazine and reading our class notes so I can find out what everybody’s up to—even though I repeatedly discover I didn’t know most of the contributors when we were in school (like you, for instance). I’m not sure if that’s because I was shy or because we all tended to limit ourselves to the girls we lived with freshman year, now fifty-some years ... Read More PubDate: 2017-07-25T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The old believe everything, the middle aged suspect everything, and the young know everything. Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Cultureby Jon Savage. Penguin, reprint edition, 2008, 576 pp., $18 (paper). By the age of ten, I experienced the melodrama of first love. His name was Tom, and I spent hours during summer twilight trying to catch glimpses of him from my bedroom window as he tore through the neighborhood on his red Huffy Rail with a pack of wild boys. I remember burning up with impatience and frustration, wanting my love life to begin. When I teach James Joyce’s iconic short story “Araby,” I relive my own heightened state of ardor as the narrator pines for Mangan’s sister: “Oh love ... Read More PubDate: 2017-07-25T00:00:00-05:00
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