- From the Editors: Great Leaps
Beliefs bear the weight of truths, perhaps because they feel true. But belief is a gamble, an act performed in the face of incomplete certainty. Belief confidently lays its chips on the possibility that what it believes is true. Sometimes it is.
- Recognition: by Fanny Howe
I have been touched by an image of [George] Oppen and Simone Weil passing on ships through the night, though their actual passage was many months apart from each other. I see the black Atlantic Ocean, with its litter of slaves and mines, and the sky weighing down with stars, and somehow their minds and imaginations intersect there, out in that darkness. In fact they crossed the Atlantic Ocean during the War, each between the same ports, of Marseilles and New York. Both were young and shared many ideas about the world situation. And after he was home and safe again, he read her writing and recognized what she was after.
- Creating Moses: A Conversation with Yoav Gal
The funny thing about Moses is that, typically, he is this kind of genius. Either he is a misunderstood artist or great mind who tries to impart wisdom to the people and they are always rebellious and they never understand him, or his wisdom comes from the ancient culture of Egypt. Schoenberg's opera was based on this first idea, and Phillip Glass' has a bit of the second. My take—and there is a little bit of rebellion here—is that the story is full of little episodes, and it's basically folklore. It is the people's story. So it's not some external wisdom that got imposed. It is a story that grew up and was told between people, and women are kind of—I don't want to fall into clichés—but women are kind of the glue. Again, Miriam is the one who sings the song after the Egyptian army is washed away. Just as in other religions, there are many roles for women in the original text. It is only in later generations of religion that women become less and less important and the texts become much more masculine.
- Tiger Bomb: Aphra Behn Senses Trouble by Dan Monaco
Ambivalent about, partially excluded from, but wholly complicit in, colonial projects, Behn nevertheless foresees, however imperfectly and inchoately, the resistance which will bedevil the continuation of European projections of power in years to come. In the mythical, but wholly enslaved, figure of Oroonoko, and in the figure of the tiger—who totemistically serves as Oroonoko's animistic doppelganger—Behn, in dreamlike fashion, and from the perspective of European anxiety and human sympathy, prophesies the manifold and multifarious disasters to come. The tragedies that will come about as a result both of schemes of domination and of the various resistances to these schemes.
- Sculpture by Eleanor Stride
- Bringing up the Bones by Elizabeth Murphy
Perhaps love has nothing to do with agreeing. What if love and harmony, standing shoulder to shoulder in a secular trinity with peace, are nothing alike. What if all love is based on a misunderstanding between two (or more) individuals.
- Poetry by Emmanuelle Merle (tr. Peter Brown), Elizabeth Murphy, and Rodney Wittwer
- From Tim and Callie: Fiction by Andrew Bissaro
People today are too busy surviving the frenzied overwork and digital distractions that drive us toward a variety of unhealthy outlets. We've lost the inclination to read anything even approximating literature. Literature's appeal is slippery, ungovernable, like a flash of sunlight across the back of a leaping sea bass. Consequently, people have come to prefer the real to the fictive world, to the point that many are downright suspicious nowadays when stories aren't somehow grounded in the real.
- The Straddler Review: Blending me Softly
Commercial culture, strutting the red carpet with the too-often cheap, and always speculative, discipline of evolutionary biology (or one of its harlot offspring) on or off of its arm, makes of beauty what it makes of culture in general: synthetic, profit-making caricature.