Sean Hill

For Which It Stands

January 22, 2020

Nonfiction from NER 40.4 (2019)

https://homeofheroes.com/flag-of-freedom/the-pledge-of-allegiance/

When folks say the war was about states’ rights, that was the right—the right to hold people as property . . . That is the history that [the Confederate] flag commemorates.

I was born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, and going to school in the 1980s I said the Pledge of Allegiance along with my classmates, facing the American flag with our hands over our hearts, at the start of each day. I liked the rhythm of the words in my mouth in the cadence we were taught—the syntactical pauses inevitably ran “for which it stands” together to almost become one word. It and those other morsels—“and to the Republic,” “indivisible,” “with liberty / and justice for all”—pleased my tongue and my ear, though first-grade me surely didn’t have enough context to understand to what I was making my pledge.

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Nathaniel G. Nesmith

A Love Song for the Theater: An Interview with John Guare

January 20, 2020

Nonfiction from NER 40.4

JOHN GUARE’s career as a playwright has made him a dominant figure in theater for over six decades. Born in New York City in 1938, he has received Tony, Obie, and Olivier awards, among many other distinctions. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and nominated for an Oscar. Guare, who earned an MFA from Yale University, began his career in the theater during the 1960s at the legendary Caffé Cino. His most recent play, Nantucket Sleigh Ride, opened at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in March 2019, directed by Jerry Zaks. . . .

I had the pleasure of sitting down to talk with Mr. Guare at his apartment in New York City in September 2018, covering everything from his early days as a child dramatist to his upcoming opening at Lincoln Center.

NGN: You’ve said that you’ve loved to go to the theater since you were seven, and you knew that writing plays would be your way of working there. Why theater and not another artistic field?

JOHN GUARE: I had two great uncles who toured in vaudeville from 1880 to 1917 and I had their handwritten sides—actors’ sides with the cue lines. Their plays were terrible melodrama—Pawn Ticket 210, The Old Toll House—but I was absolutely fascinated by the past, about traveling around America. And then when I was a kid, I went to see Annie Get Your Gun and it was overwhelming. The immediacy of the theater, and that it was so formal: You had to go at a certain time. You had to sit in a certain seat. It began, it ended. I loved being part of the audience. It was amazing how something up on stage could make a thousand people laugh or gasp at the same moment. Growing up in New York City, I would go and see a show at least once a year, always on my birthday. Going to the theater always meant something special, you got dressed up for it back then. I loved that—that world seemed to me to have an excitement and exhilaration. . . .

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Andrea Appleton

Curation Conservation

September 19, 2019

Nonfiction from NER 40.3
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Feral cats can jump as high as six feet. Juvenile mice can fit through a hole smaller than an aspirin tablet. Stoats move so quickly they can scale an electric fence between high voltage pulses and land on the other side unscathed. We have learned these things by trying to fence these animals out.

We are fencing them out to atone for our mistakes. Human beings have rearranged the matrix of life on Earth, sometimes on purpose and sometimes by accident. In the nineteenth century, the British wanted to blow bugles and hunt foxes in Australia just like they did on their Yorkshire estates, so they shipped some over. The foxes still live there in vast numbers, devouring numbats and wallabies.

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Ellen Hinsey

Polish Poetry in Translation: Bridging the Frontiers of Language

July 12, 2019

Torn Posters III Rue Ordener Paris, by Roger Camp

Translation is a mysterious, imperfect art. Its impetus often arises out of unforeseen circumstances: impromptu voyages, a book’s accidental discovery, or the punishments and revelations of exile. These chance factors mean that, despite the increasing so-called globalization of the world, one can never definitively be sure that a text, no matter how important it is for one culture, will make its journey across the frontier of silence to another language.

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