Samar Farah Fitzgerald (32.1), whose story “What You Can Endure” was recently published in NER, has been awarded a fellowship of $5,000 from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Fellowships are awarded annually to artists residing in this state in recognition of creative excellence and to support their pursuit of artistic excellence.
Ben Reid (left) & the author, c. 1987
The Annotated Mix-Tape #20:
“Blue Monday” by New Order
(b/w “The Beach,” 12” single, Factory Records, 1983)
By Joshua Harmon
Ben and I were high school scientists. Though, like many kids our age, we pursued old rail lines into tunnels, snapped photos inside abandoned state hospitals, and picnicked at midnight in a field glowing with the local airport’s landing-strip lights, we also stole a centrifuge from our school chemistry lab so we could “separate drinks.” (Ben’s mom later sold it at a yard sale.) We picked random names we found interesting from our city’s phonebook and mailed those people copies of our ’zine, Sketch Fifty-Three. (No one replied.) Ben endeavored to perfect the “cookie loaf,” collecting, in a plastic bag in his fridge, a year’s worth of leftover crumbs from every cookie he ate. When the bag was full, he mixed its contents with some cream cheese, spread it in a pan, and baked it. (Thin, hard, dense.) I sought to condition my body to require less sleep—an obvious waste. I stayed up weeknights until about one o’clock, then set my alarm for 5:24 am exactly, at which point I’d rise, turn on the shower, and pass out on the bathmat for several more minutes before crawling under the water. (“So spiritual,” a friend’s mom remarked when I once explained this process.) Because of my increasingly low enthusiasm for school and my increasing sleep deficit, as well as my almost-physical craving for music, I roused myself each day by blaring my stereo before I left the house at quarter past seven to walk the silent mile to school.
Image Courtesy of Peter Saville Studio
One morning, I chose New Order’s “Blue Monday” to test the power handling of my cheap-but-big Yamaha speakers. The volume control on the amplifier I used then did not go to ten but instead measured decibels from negative ∞ to 0, a scale I admired for its objective precision even if I didn’t fully understand it. (My father had moved out months earlier, and we were all recalibrating our understandings.) That opening drum machine beat, already jackhammer-like, pounded through the house: my mother, still in bed trying to rally herself for her own day’s efforts, howled “not yet!”
Joshua Harmon’s The Annotated Mix-Tape is a work-in-progress; other selections may be read online at Open Letters Monthly and Coldfront, and have been published or are forthcoming in AGNI, The Believer, and The Cincinnati Review. His most recent book is Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, winner of the 2010 Akron Poetry Prize. His essay “Speculative Markets and the 7-inch Single” appeared in NER 32.3. NER Digital is a project dedicated to original writing for the web.
More on Walser
On the web site Golden Rule Jones, it’s possible to follow along with a translation-in-progress of Carl Seelig’s book Wandering with Robert Walser, a book which “recounts conversations Seelig had with Walser over more than 20 years, usually in the course of long walks across the Swiss countryside.” The site also includes Wayfaring maps annotated with Walser locations in Bern, Zurich, and Berlin. Seelig, later a biographer of Albert Einstein, relates how he traveled to meet Walser for their first ramble:
Our relationship began with a somewhat matter-of-fact exchange of letters: brief, objective questions and answers. I learned that, starting in early 1929, Robert Walser was a patient in the Waldau Sanitarium near Bern, and since 1933 had been a patient at the national welfare and nursing hospital of Appenzell-Ausserrhoden in Herisau. I wanted to assist in some way with the publication of his works, and to do something for him personally. Of all the Swiss writers of that time, he seemed to me to be the most original. He told me he was willing to see me. So it was that I traveled early one Sunday morning from Zurich to St. Gallen. Walking along the road, from within a church I overheard a sermon underway on the Parable of the Talents. In Herisau, the church bells rang as I arrived. Soon I found myself with the chief of medicine at the hospital, Doctor Otto Hinrichsen. I introduced myself, and was granted the liberty of taking a walk with Robert.
More at Alice James Books
From Matthew Olzmann’s “The Tiny Men in The Horse’s Mouth”:
The war is ending. Achilles is dead.
Paris lives on in shame.And one man
plays piano as the city burns.I’ve been there. And because I didn’t look,
I never saw it coming.
Olzmann’s poem “Sir Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion” appeared in NER 30.4.
Todd Boss
Pitch
“In Pitch, Boss re-creates the world as music—one thinks of Frost, of Kay Ryan—that undoes us even as it enchants us. What a pleasure this book: what a gift.” —Jim Moore
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Lucky Fish
“Nezhukumatathil’s fourth book is fascinated with the small mechanisms of being, whether natural, personal, or imagined. Everything from eating eels in the Ozark mountains to the history of red dye finds a rich life in her poems. [...] Even as the poems jump from the Philippines to India to New York, they still take their time, stopping to notice that “there is no mystery on water/ greater than the absence of rust,” and to draw small but wonderful parallels: “I loved you dark & late. The crocus have found ways to push up & say this/ too.” —Publishers Weekly
Matt Bondurant
The Night Swimmer
“But when Bondurant explores what it is like to push yourself to the brink, whether with physical activity, drugs and alcohol, or lust, he captures an intensity of experience the reader won’t soon forget.” —BookPage
D. A. Powell
Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys
“No accessible poet of his generation is half as original, and no poet as original is this accessible.” —Stephen Burt, The New York Times Book Review
The new issue of New England Review has just shipped from the printer, and a preview is available here on our website. Order a copy or subscribe today to receive the full content of this beautifully printed issue of NER.
In these pages, you’ll find new stories by Peter LaSalle, Zana Previti, Katya Reno, Caedra Scott-Flaherty, Gregory Spatz, Megan Staffel, and David Yost, appearing alongside new poems by Larry Bradley, Adam Giannelli, Janice Greenwood, A. Van Jordan, Laura Kasischke, Matthew Olzmann, Jacques J. Rancourt, and Carrie Shipers.
In nonfiction, Eileen Pollack revisits the ranch house of her childhood, Theodore Leinwand contends with Charles Olson contending with Shakespeare, Robert B. Ray asks if movie stars are ultimately unskilled workers, and Jonathan Levy makes a case for the use of dialogues in learning. Plus a new translation of Virgil’s Aeneid Book 5 by Ian Ganassi, Samuel Butler‘s thoughts on memory, Norman Davies on “How States Die,” and cover art by Tim Fitts.
For NPR, Gregory Orr chooses Jennifer Grotz‘s new collection, The Needle, as one of five best poetry books of 2011 in “Truth and Beauty: 2011′s Best American Poetry.” (Grotz’s poems “The Fog and “The Forest” appear in the current issue of NER.) Orr also recommends NER poetry editor C. Dale Young’s book Torn, because, as Orr writes, “no critic can refrain from recommending more books than he’s supposed to.”
One of the few things almost everyone can agree on about contemporary American poetry is that no one can agree on much. At present, poetry is a jumbled landscape, with no single, dominant style and few living figures whose importance is accepted in more than one or two of the art form’s tiny fiefdoms. Although some might find this state of affairs discouraging, I think there’s good reason to be optimistic — poetry often needs to undergo periods of confusion to achieve the clarity for which we’ll later remember it. Here are five books that suggest that even if American poetry isn’t entirely sure where it’s going, that doesn’t mean it’s gotten lost.
Paul La Farge on his project Luminous Airplanes, which features both a printed novel and a hypertext for the web:
In the fall of 2003, I wrote a novel about a young man who’s summoned back to his family home in Thebes, NY, a sleepy town in the Catskills, in order to clean the house of five generations of junk. His grandfather has just died and no one else wants the job. So he goes. This was the seed of Luminous Airplanes, a book which would surely have been easier to finish if I hadn’t been haunted by the idea that the novel could be something more, that it could extend its branches indefinitely in the vast space of the Internet. After many false starts and dead ends, Luminous Airplanes became both a book and a hypertext.
[read more about the project]
[or start reading the hypertext at luminousairplanes.com]
Wires & Sky, San Francisco
Monica Youn’s poem, “25th & Dolores,” appeared in NER 22.3:
“The most beautiful freeway
in America” is beginning
to the right: its heaped-up hills,
its full-strength sunlight burning offthe camphor-infused fog.
You were wrong. I’m still capable
of begging.
Vol. 32 / No. 4 Cover art by Tim Fitts
Middlebury College is home to both NER and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. On this site, NER posts an audio highlight from Bread Loaf's many readings and lectures as a regular feature. Here is Lori Ostlund, "Talking Fowl with My Father."
