FALL 2024
Color Days
by Dian Parker
"Most people think of winter as white—snow, frost, ice. I think of Paynes gray, made up of Prussian blue, yellow ochre and crimson lake. When the trees are leafless, the blue-gray hue saturates everything. Chickadee, snow, ice, tree bark, moods. It’s an edgy color in its soothing wash. Powdered slate. Medieval castles. And women. On the surface, we are shadows and slants, curved angles, hidden recesses, moody and damp. Inside are yellow ochre and crimson lake, ready to geyser and take over the world." |
Today the sky is like whale skin, thick and smooth with slashes of white streaks. Like a whale back crusted by leagues of travel. A Jack London sky. The vast wilderness rushes along, and yet is supremely still. I see a lope of tail surfacing, a fifty-ton mammal swimming above my head. The sky is like a whale’s skin. I sense the markings of a wild thing.
The day before was the white wind. It came in gusts measuring 50 miles an hour, bending young saplings at acute angles, ripping white birch bark off trunks into flying sheets, and throwing copper beech leaves that usually stay attached all winter long. Titanium winds. It is February. The light is white, the snow is white, the wind is white, like shards of bone. My partner has a titanium rod in his arm from when he fell off a 45-foot waterfall, shattering a pool of ice and his bones. That was also in February. A silver rod inside a white body. [...]
The day before was the white wind. It came in gusts measuring 50 miles an hour, bending young saplings at acute angles, ripping white birch bark off trunks into flying sheets, and throwing copper beech leaves that usually stay attached all winter long. Titanium winds. It is February. The light is white, the snow is white, the wind is white, like shards of bone. My partner has a titanium rod in his arm from when he fell off a 45-foot waterfall, shattering a pool of ice and his bones. That was also in February. A silver rod inside a white body. [...]
FALL 2024
Five Weeks
by Alex Poppe
"Miss Alex, you have to see this." Aland, an eleventh-grade scholarship student with shaken-soda energy and a struggling beard waved me over. He sat huddled with Rehan, a soft-spoken son from a less-famous line of the region’s most famous political family, sharing a pair of earbuds. They were listening to something exciting and revelatory, like desire. When I reached their computer, Aland offered me his earbud while Rehan played a video on YouTube. The three of us hunched together like jewelers around the computer monitor." |
The students knew. They were the ones who told us. Of course, we didn’t believe them. Confidently, we told them it was not true. Falteringly, we told them, they must have gotten it wrong. Truthfully, we couldn’t comprehend what they were saying. So very little did we know. [...]
FALL 2024
Will the "Truth of Art" Be Convulsive?
by Daniel Barbiero
"In order for the artwork to confront us with something radically not ourselves, it must convey a world other than our own—a world as the artist apprehends it, interprets it, represents it, and conveys its meaning. The artwork must, in other words, disclose the existential structures of the artist’s world, which is to say what he or she asserts or projects about him/herself into the worlds of overlapping and interlocking social groups or communities to which he or she belongs." |
In some of his writings from the 1960s, Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo suggested that the truth of art is something that inheres in the encounter between the person confronting the work and the artist, an encounter in which the artist, through the artwork, opens a view into a world different from the world of the person confronting the work. Through his or her interpretive relationship to the work, the person confronting the work is brought into contact with that potentially radically other world, with accordingly transformative consequences. Vattimo holds that in confronting the work, we may be put in a position to confront more than our own taste or experience reflected back to us; instead, we may encounter something truly other and intimately unfamiliar. This truly other truth isn’t a propositional truth or a discursive truth; rather, it is a truth that is to be found in what Vattimo describes as “a radical novelty at the level of being-in-the-world” (ACT, p. 50), a truth that communicates itself in a meeting of the different worlds of the artist and his or her audience, through the artwork. I want to suggest that the path toward this nondiscursive, transformative truth leads us through territory staked out by André Breton in his notions of the evocative object and of convulsive beauty. [...]
SPRING 2023
Acts of Humanity
by Anna Badkhen
"A mapped landscape is always tailored to reflect the cartographer’s desire, the way when we say “acts of humanity” we mean “kindness,” though humanity is just as likely to commit atrocities. For what is a cartographer? A dreamer of worlds." |
The word “map” entered the English language in the sixteenth century via the French from the Medieval Latin mappa mundi, map of the world. Mappa—napkin, cloth, tablecloth, signal cloth, flag—is said to be of Semitic origin, perhaps related to the Mishnaic menaphah, a fluttering banner, a streaming cloth. But the oldest known maps were series of hollows, scars, notches—portholes—scooped out of bone, chinked into rock. Some of them appear to depict landmarks, some the starry sky. What each map always shows is a relationship between elements of some space; what each map always implies is the observer, you. Each represents our effort to make sense of ourselves in a particular place—and thus, each charts our reach for meaning.
On my last morning in Addis Ababa, two local acquaintances and I stop at a bistro called Keli’s Gourmet Burger, not very far from my hotel. We sit outside on small wrought-iron chairs and order coffee and banana beignets. None of us can imagine as yet the profound suffering the pandemic will bring, and the mind still drifts to petty things: For instance, that this is my last chance to sit at an outdoor café for weeks or maybe months, since Philadelphia, where I am headed, is already in quarantine. [...]
On my last morning in Addis Ababa, two local acquaintances and I stop at a bistro called Keli’s Gourmet Burger, not very far from my hotel. We sit outside on small wrought-iron chairs and order coffee and banana beignets. None of us can imagine as yet the profound suffering the pandemic will bring, and the mind still drifts to petty things: For instance, that this is my last chance to sit at an outdoor café for weeks or maybe months, since Philadelphia, where I am headed, is already in quarantine. [...]
SUMMER 2022
Doubling Back
by Pippa Goldschmidt
"The long stone wall receding into the distance, the words that require me to lean forward and peer closely at them, the gravel beneath my feet, even the air laden with traffic fumes – everything has a weight here, pressing me down. As I stand in front of the names, I feel on display, considered by a silent audience. There is only one of me and so, so many of them." |
A ferry travelling across the North Sea must take account of the tides, the twice-a-day ebbing and flowing of the sea that is caused by the Moon’s orbit around the Earth. At every port along these coasts, including those identified in my grandfather’s German passport, the timing of the tides will affect the precise route of the ferry and the complex manoeuvres needed to bring it safely to land.
My grandfather made the journey across this water that divides England from continental Europe on at least three occasions, recorded by the immigration authorities when he reached England. The dates and locations of his arrivals are stamped in ink in his passport:
12 Sept 36 Harwich
5 Sept 37 Harwich
6 Sept 38 Newhaven
What I find curious about these dates is their periodicity. Each year shortly before the autumnal equinox, my grandfather left his temporary residence in London and travelled to his original home in Germany for a few weeks, before returning. These journeys back east could be considered to be regressive or retrograde motions, like those that become apparent when we observe the orbits of planets. [...]
My grandfather made the journey across this water that divides England from continental Europe on at least three occasions, recorded by the immigration authorities when he reached England. The dates and locations of his arrivals are stamped in ink in his passport:
12 Sept 36 Harwich
5 Sept 37 Harwich
6 Sept 38 Newhaven
What I find curious about these dates is their periodicity. Each year shortly before the autumnal equinox, my grandfather left his temporary residence in London and travelled to his original home in Germany for a few weeks, before returning. These journeys back east could be considered to be regressive or retrograde motions, like those that become apparent when we observe the orbits of planets. [...]
