Michigan Quarterly Review

The Ubiquitous I

The writing was just damned good. [...] on. [...] perhaps more importantly, the privileging of experience as a route to knowledge appears to be part of a larger generic shift away from both the straightforward memoir, of which God knows we also receive enough, and the essay form qua essay - we receive fewer and fewer of these with every passing day - toward a genre that calls itself "creative nonfiction" - a genre which doesn't have to foreground the experience of the narrator but which, fr...

Agee After Cavell, Cavell After Agee

The exclusive settings of these Depression-era comedies may spur resentment or alienation among some viewers and readers, Cavell admits, but they are not at all accidental: only "settings of unmistakable wealth" allow the pursuit of happiness to be dramatized in its purest state and without extraneous concerns. Whatever unhappiness these films' protagonists may suffer comes not from material need or external constraints on their freedom (contra the chief family burdens in Famous Men), but fr...

The G20 and the E17

[...] it was preceded by nearly twentyfive years of encounters, from 1924 to 1948, between the Palestina Esperanto-Ligo (PEL), a group of Jewish Esperantists in British Palestine, and the Egipta Esperanto-Asocio (EEA), an assortment of Arabs, Britons, and others who convened in Cairo. In Palestine with his student, Nassif Isaac, to attend a PEL congress in April 1944, Megalli visited a couple of Jewish agricultural settlements, and his post-congress effusions in the Arabic-language magazine ...

The Most Lifelike Thing in the Room

The recruiter, a polite, nervous man with tattoos on his arms and a thin layer of hair, wanted us to know what we were getting ourselves into. The moment was far worse in which I discovered that my daily life consisted of sequential chunks of time spent doing unpaid model work. Each time I returned to the room I saw her image of me on an abused sheet of paper, bunched up in the corner where no one else noticed.

Toledo, 124 [Miles]

Though I knew my admiration was misplaced, I even loved Gary, the shadowy mechanical city, smelling of rotten eggs and belches (we always rolled up the windows), bursts of orange flames from blast furnace pipes, huge smokestacks spewing dense plumes that unfurled quickly like colossal dark roses blooming and dying in time-lapsed photography under the chemically colored phosphorescent pink, yellow, and limegreen sky. Earlier at the McDonald's, a group of thin punkish college girls, giggling, ...

As Kingfishers Catch Fire . . .

What, then? I will never know, supposing that I do not immediately abandon such a dream. [...] during that night, and perhaps thanks to a night that no longer appeared opaque and definitive this time, I also told myself that, despite everything, it must have been the bird that had enabled me to see the whole scene otherwise, to experience it otherwise: as when, in a fire that you thought was about to go out, a final flame bursts up and lights a corner of the room, or the fields, revealing th...

Refraction

Grace Paley I bought a low-cut purple dress for my daughter's graduation from college and surprised my ex-husband by kissing him on the mouth.

Eyesight

Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost I have sunglasses, computer glasses I don't use, piano glasses I would use if I played piano, red glasses I can't read supertitles with, chartreuse glasses I wear when I wear chartreuse and don't care if I see, black glasses in which I don't look like myself, dark brown tortoiseshells that were remade because when I wore them I felt nervous, blue outside and green inside glasses and new glasses the color of cheap wine.

Do You See What I See

Once I read a serious, painful poem to a group of writers in which I was the only stranger and instead of the attentiveness I expected they laughed, the laughter escalating, as I read, from giggles to near-hysteria.

The Couch Conch

[...] the Couch Conch's cameos, which it acquires at puberty, are a natural enhancement to attract mates, much as body piercings or tattoos mark our own debuts. Conches make the real article, which we can't imitate, while lolling in beds of sea grass with no more heat than puberty calls for, and with no more wasted effort than the lilies whose folded white genitals trumped Solomon in all his glory.

The Oormz

According to a speleological legend, deep under one of North America's large cavern systems lies an enormous chamber, a bubble in the earth's mantle, completely sealed. Inside it, like a woodchuck in a snug burrow, lives an Oormz that is miles long yet no thicker than an earlobe, suspended from the roof and walls. Because of its size, the monster is vulnerable to spreading rips and tears, so nature has given it a marvelous failsafe.

Think Monkey

[...] . Here's what the brain scientists say about her: . . . somewhere in the confines of the frontal lobe are neuronal networks that act to all intents and purposes like a homunculus. No image captures more surely the intermediate place of our conscious minds, looking around with wonderment between the superb blank of our inmost thought activity and the stupendous blank of our sensory activity.

Emptying My Pockets

Arrowhead, death certificates for unmet father's father's father and his brothers and their sons, dripping honeycomb, pocketwatch from the junk store downtown by the shrimp shack where at sixteen I learned to work in the steam, how to de-vein and swear and love-talk in Acadian.

Joyride

In another year she would put a bag of potato chips in her oven and burn part of her house down, and they would put her in the nursing home, which, as far as I knew, she hadn't left since then except for one trip to the emergency room when she fell out of bed and broke her arm. [...] I still thought we would only go for a short drive, and be right back. In a couple of years, I would be a sophomore in college, and a girl I'd had a crush on for many months would come stumbling down the hallwa...

It Is. I Am. I Do

Happy

Reep's Knee

The starters played together and drank together and ate their canned tuna and their baked beans on the two couches in front of the one TV. Once I got in the house I began sharing my clothes and books and deodorant, but when my girl would come over I'd lock my door for the weekend and order pizza. Reep had been a vegan chef in Colorado and insisted the only book worth reading was the epic of Gilgamesh. After he moved back in, he decided that we should begin a strict exercise regimen in orde...

Tuck Pointing

From Sonnets to Celia

Elegy for an Apple Tree

Gloss

He Sees Himself in Google Maps Street View

Longing to Belong: Levantine Arabs and Jews in the Israeli Cultural Imagination

[...] Israeli artists, both Arab and Jewish, struggling against the closure and stability of the nation have a special regard for the Levant as an affirmative space for exercising their sense of selfhood as open, unstable, and unbounded. Because of its diversity, the Levant has been compared to a mosaic: bits of stone of different colors assembled into a flat picture.

So Much Depends

Realistically, what can poetry say, much less do, about global warming, seas rising, species endangered, water and air polluted, wilderness road-ridden, rain forests razed, along with strip mining and mountaintop removal, clearcutting, overfishing, overeating, overconsumption, overdevelopment, overpopulation, and so on and on? In an effort to revivify a poem seen perhaps a bit too often in other contexts, he clearly enjoys copying and recopying Williams's eight lines: so much depends upon a ...

Owning It

[...] McGurl instead turns to the cultural critic Rita Felski's understanding of shame as an emotion produced in moments of "geographic and other forms of social mobility"3 to envision the writing program as, more positively, disseminating modernism's tenets "to a range of student populations previously underrepresented in the writing profession." [...] McGurl suggests that, during periods of increased demographic access to higher education, the shame produced by crossing into new social ter...