SE
O 28th and Ankeny!
I heart your
ankle lace-up
booties
and piecey
top knot
To Portland, with Love
November 27, 2013
Dispatches
All posts tagged: 2013
Six Feet from the Sun
November 26, 2013
Essays
When you’re a carpenter’s son there are things you don’t tell your mother. The old asbestos siding Dad had you driving nails into, for instance. Or the ceiling fan he wired without first shutting off the power. Or how you close your eyes when you bring the round whirling blade of the chop saw down on a length of spouting so you won’t get any flecks of aluminum in your eyes. How it just seems safer that way.
Whole Cloth: A Weaver’s Daughter Looks at the Met’s Interwoven Globe Exhibit
When I see handmade cloth, with its uneven selvedges and irregularities, I feel a kinship. My mother was a weaver. I would come home from school and find my mother weaving, warping, or winding yarn. She wove on traditional four- or eight-harness looms, wooden frames the size of a grand piano. I grew up with the household sounds (and vocabulary) of the 1700s—the whizz of a shuttle, the thump of the beater, the rattle of heddles, and the shunk of harnesses.
My mother made suitings, dress fabrics, coverlets, upholstery, shawls, tablecloths—hundreds of yards. Now eighty-nine, she wove into her late seventies when the physical labor became too strenuous. But her creations will last forever, as handwoven cloth does. The oldest known textile fibers, twisted flaxen cords from the Caucasus, are 34,000 years old. I am pretty sure that 34,000 years from now archaeologists will be baffled by evidence of a mid-twentieth century handweaving culture in the Washington, D.C. suburbs.
November 2013 Poetry Feature
November 23, 2013
Poetry
For this month’s poetry feature, we are publishing a collection of seven new poems by four The Common contributors.
Across Gymnasium Bridge
By SCOTT GEIGER
“We have the mind, body, and the mind/body all organizing this building,” offers architect Chris McVoy, metaphorically describing the Campbell Sports Center that opened this fall at Columbia University. The building is the outward expression of an athlete’s inner journey. In a short film, McVoy and his partner and mentor, Steven Holl, discuss their design intentions and the character of experience they’ve created.
Nomenclature: Sundays
November 20, 2013
Dispatches
Sundays, my parents would pin
their names to dress clothes.
The labelmaker’s impressions formed
letters unevenly, and at the end
of service, the tags were stuck
Sawt al-Watan (2013)
November 20, 2013
News and Events
Sawt al-Watan, a major Palestinian news website, shares The Common‘s vision and work with Hisham Bustani’s writings.
Believe It
November 19, 2013
Issue 06, Issue 06 Poetry, Poetry
Hard to believe that, after all of it,
in bed for good now, knowing you haven’t done
one thing of any lasting benefit
or grasped how to be happy, or had fun,
They Called It Shooting Then
November 19, 2013
Fiction, Issue 06, Issue 06 Fiction
By TYLER SAGE
1.
He wakes from dreams of killing. Heavy timber. Shaggy forms moving through the rocks, the alpine flowers. A plane passing overhead in his sleep, in his dreams, a silver spot against the sky. He raises the rifle. He wakes and is in the night. The animals fade, the air thickens. He is alone and paralyzed, and he wakes, and she is sleeping next to him.
Cosmopolis, Now
November 19, 2013
Essays
