All posts tagged: 2012

Annals of Mobility: On Youth, Adventures, and the Territory of Adulthood

By SONYA CHUNG

Click here to read more about “Annals of Mobility,” a monthly column here at The Common.

Of Wes Anderson and his latest film Moonrise Kingdom, Geoffrey O’Brien wrote in the New York Review of Books:

To make a world where everything looks newly made is part of the great adventurousness of his work […] It is perhaps the only setting in which Sam and Suzy could begin to articulate their goal:  ‘to go on adventures and not get stuck in one place.’ 

Annals of Mobility: On Youth, Adventures, and the Territory of Adulthood
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Ten Questions on Writing and New York City: An Interview with Phillip Lopate

MELODY NIXON interviews PHILLIP LOPATE

Phillip Lopate headshot

In this month’s author Q&A, Melody Nixon speaks with Phillip Lopate about public art and communal spaces, his relationship to cities, and New York City as a “place that encourages wit.” Lopate’s essay “Above Grade: New York City’s Highline” — about the public park built on an elevated freight rail line in Manhattan that opened in 2011 — appeared in Issue No. 02 of The Common.

MN: At the end of the Brooklyn Book Festival this year, you read outdoors on the Brooklyn Bridge Park waterfront before the illuminated lower Manhattan skyline. You read a short piece of your own and excerpts of other writers who have taken the place of Brooklyn as subject, such as Paul Auster, Truman Capote, and Hart Crane. Each piece related somehow to the changing scene: the moving East River, the lights of the skyline as they switched on, the rattle of cars through Brooklyn brownstones. I found the hyper-awareness of setting, in relation to the reader and the text, very satisfying. How important is place to your identity as a writer? 

PL: In terms of my identity I think of myself as a writer first, a New Yorker second, a Jew third, and an American as (probably, a distant) fourth. But certainly my identity is very bound up with this particular place. New York City is in all my works — novels, poetry, nonfiction — whether as a backdrop or a character. In a sense I’m what you might call a “regional writer,” and I feel very positive about cities in general. I don’t want to apologize about cities — I like cities, and I think the rhythm of being in the streets or being indoors works into the sentences. There’s a sort of New York speech, which is compounded of Jewish, black, Hispanic, and Irish, and so on, that percolates into one’s syntax and one’s way of forming sentences. All of that makes me very much a writer of a certain place.

Ten Questions on Writing and New York City: An Interview with Phillip Lopate
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From the Stone House: On Belonging

As the crow flies, Montereggio is perhaps a dozen kilometers from Castiglione del Terziere, my Italian home for a year.  But Lunigiana—this northern part of Tuscany, between the Emilian plain and the Mediterranean Sea—is so hilly that I never know how many dizzying switchbacks a road might boast, thus how long it’ll take to get from A to B.  (Or how many times en route our car will have to edge past another coming at it.  Sometimes both vehicles must fold in their side-mirrors like wings so as to squeeze by.)   

From the Stone House: On Belonging
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Uneasy Sleep

By YVETTE CHRISTIANSE

Who was it that cried out? This cry,

a call that opens night

breaks out like a bird

breaking to greet dawn, or

the arrival of a high tide

that brings schools of fish

whose scales make the waters

glint and shimmer, glint and shimmer.

Uneasy Sleep
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Reading Place: Insiders & Outsiders

By HANNAH GERSEN

 

I don’t think I understood the idea of a “love-hate relationship” until I moved to New York City. Over the years I have become one of those obnoxious people who talk constantly of leaving New York while at the same time shutting down all possible escape routes. Having grown up in a small town, I can tell you that this flavor of self-delusion is not unique to New York City, but perhaps it happens in greater numbers here, simply because New York is host to so many outsiders — outsiders who eventually become insiders.

Reading Place: Insiders & Outsiders
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The Body

By HAIDEE KRUGER

the Body rearranges
itself around
the other.       points of entry and exit,
embraces.     Embraces.     the
thrill of skin.         density
surrenders to Liquid.         semen, blood,
mucous, milk.         the Body yields to

The Body
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