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Paris, April 7, 2018 Saturday

June 13, 2018 Dispatches

Paris, France

I found a book by Georges Perec called Tentatived’épuisement d’un lieu Parisien, or An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris. I like Perec very much. He loved word games and wrote crossword puzzles, and very often invented challenges for himself in his writing. In 1969 he wrote a book—La Disparition—in which the letter “e” does not appear. It was translated into English, also with no “e’s” but since the literal translation—The Disappearance—has three “e’s”, the English title is A Void. In 1972 Perec wrote Les Revenents, in which “e” is the only vowel in the book. Perec died of cancer in 1982 when he was only forty-six.

The Globe

May 23, 2018 Dispatches

By SEAN GILL

Berlin, Germany

Inside Berlin’s Deutsches Historisches Museum, there is a quiet passageway which serves as a spatial juncture between the Nazi era and the Soviet one. There is only one exhibit in this place: an enormous metal globe, encircled by wooden framing and encased in glass. Its lands are tinted municipal yellow-brown, its seas faded cyan. This particular globe may once have belonged to Ribbentrop, Goebbels, or perhaps Hitler himself. This is not a shock; Hitler’s actual desk rests in the preceding room, about forty meters behind you. You have therefore already experienced such a flood of icy association; an anxious dread similar to when you behold a steep precipice, or pass by a policeman toting an automatic weapon.

Take Me With You

May 9, 2018 Dispatches

By MARCIA DESANCTIS

Morocco

An hour from Marrakesh, a car delivers my friend and me to Imlil for a day-hike in the High Atlas Mountains. Judging by the heavy-gauge North Face jacket and ice-climbing boots worn by our guide Abderrahim, it’s clear I’ve miscalculated trekking in Morocco in February. I scan the snowy peaks and wonder how I will fare in my paltry jacket and no hat. And there he is. He sits patiently, about five feet from me, looking timid and cold. His head tilts downward, and although there is no eye contact, I sense he knows I’m there. I’m overtaken by a swell of tenderness and yearning, and I say to my friend, “I think this guy just AirDropped me his heart.”

Scratching Beneath Divinity

April 25, 2018 Dispatches

By HONOR MCELROY

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

It’s a conundrum—where to put the baby in the grime—how to remove him from his blanket and place him on anything in this room. This room is what my husband and I get for $99 a night on Trip Advisor at .2 miles from the Philadelphia airport. The hotel sits in a strangled urban desert—a place bereft of tree, water, flow—a sprawl of light and concrete. This is a hopeless place for trapped people, meant to curb the anxiety about the most unnatural of journeys.

Trespasser’s Minutiae

April 11, 2018 Dispatches

By ANGELA CANNON-CROTHERS

Finger Lakes Region, New York

I am a trespasser. It’s difficult not to be one when so much of the hills surrounding the Finger Lakes of New York are owned by so many, “somebody else’s.” Even the abandoned Tenny’s Farm, with its heaviness of barren barns and feral fields, is stitched with Posted signs. Nearly daily I hike, or ride my pony, along the top of Grimes Gully with its whispering waterfalls below, to the end of the the Old West Hollow Road: an echo of a carriage road overgrown and barely remembered. It’s not really the end though, it’s a path dismembered by a twelve-foot-high fence that surrounds hundreds of acres of private deer reserve. I press my face to the cold wire, longing for the wide trails that continue inside there. Just being here, though, I’ve passed numerous signs. I am trespassing.

Me Matas, Te Mato

March 14, 2018 Dispatches

By AMANDA GOMEZ

San Luis de la Paz, Mexico

I. Ver

We stayed with your mother in a tenement made of metal and painted stucco during the high holy days of August, the little chapel of La Virgencita a vision from our bedroom window. Flanked by powerlines and pigeons, its white façade projecting shadows on pedestrians as they strolled past. Each day we woke before dawn to sip bitter coffee and watch men in stiff robes ring the chapel bells, tracking their steps as they ascended the tower. Together they tugged the ropes to rouse the townspeople—to check they were alive.

Ireland’s Forgotten Borderlands

February 28, 2018 Dispatches

By ANNABEL BARRY

On my final day in Derry, a city barely inside the northwest edge of Northern Ireland, I hired a taxi to drive me past the city’s boundaries and across the United Kingdom’s border. Through the window, the Republic of Ireland was all endless rows of barley like coiled rosary beads. I wanted to see the Grianan of Aileach, a stone ringfort originally built almost fifteen hundred years ago by the Celtic king who then ruled Donegal’s hills.

Winterscape

February 14, 2018 Dispatches

By AMANDA GIBSON

The day is drab and cloud-soaked, the sky a quilt of gray. I take the dog to walk on a path beneath the power lines near our house. Although it’s the first of February, there’s no snow. Everywhere I see brown, tan, dull green. Overhead the lines buzz and pop, the towers that carry them straddling undulating hills.

Charlottesville: A Nightmare Tableau

January 24, 2018 Dispatches

By ANDREW JOHNSON

You arrive at the scene to play your part. Actors fill the stage, bodies motionless.

Stage right: Metal barricades and a long row of riot shields outlined by helmets, batons, cans of pepper spray, guns. Bodies of men behind it all. One body stands atop a tank, bullhorn raised to his face.

Stage left: Costumes include robes, vestments, yarmulkes, collars, habits. Props include holy books, prayer beads. Arms are interlocked.

Acid Raindrops

January 10, 2018 Dispatches

By JARED ALAN SMITH

Soaked students trudge with their arms wrapped around one another, some toward their apartments to scrub the liquefied tear gas from their clothes, some to the nearby bars to wash away the stains they’ve gained on their souls. I am holding my weapon tight in both of my hands.

The wet warning shots have had the desired effect, dispersing a crowd that gathered in front of the Teatro Universidad de Chile to protest for the third time in as many days. A graying caribinero whistles low, and one of the stray puppers that roam the sidewalks of the Alameda runs up to nibble at some chorizo the green-clad cop produces from the pocket of his vest. I check my firing mechanism and center the old man in my crosshair. I can’t get a good shot; civilians in the way.

All posts tagged: Dispatches

Paris, April 7, 2018 Saturday

The Globe

Take Me With You

Scratching Beneath Divinity

Trespasser’s Minutiae

Me Matas, Te Mato

Ireland’s Forgotten Borderlands

Winterscape

Charlottesville: A Nightmare Tableau

Acid Raindrops

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