The Southern Review articles from January 2006

The Southern Review archives from January 2006

A conversation with Thomas Lynch.(Interview)
January 1, 2006... THOMAS LYNCH AND I FIRST MET nearly twenty years ago, when he came to The College of Charleston to give a reading and speak with students. His first book, the poetry collection Skating with Heather Grace, had come out not long before, and the...

Simple past.
January 1, 2006... I AM IN A STREETCAR, on a seat made of wooden slats varnished yellow, too hard and straight for a fifty-minute ride. It's a morning in July, and we are clattering along Leningrad streets, nearly empty. All the citizens who could get out of the...

The thrill of being here: a letter from Fortin de las Flores, Mexico.
January 1, 2006... May 9, 1998 DEAR P--: Morrey says I should tell you that we're thrilled to be here, and though we're certainly happy, I'm not sure I'd express it quite as she does. We love Mexico, of course; that goes without saying, but the...

The ventriloquist's daughter.
January 1, 2006... Be in front of all parting as though it were already Behind you, like the winter just gone by. --RILKE, from Sonnets to Orpheus IN WEST VIRGINIA, where the blue belly of the autumn sky presses against hot hills, and goldenrod steeps in...

I am learning Czech.
January 1, 2006... CZECHS SHOULD DO AWAY WITH DIACRITICS, or maybe only use them sparingly like the French. It is a perfectly rational though unnecessary system invented by Jan Hus and enshrined by later academicians. Any non-Czech who has written about things...

Tabula rasa.(slum in Philadelphia)
January 1, 2006... DURING THE SUMMER OF 1970, between colleges, as I liked to say back then, I worked for my uncle Max, a landlord in Philadelphia. It was West Philadelphia to be exact, and Max's tenants were a mixture of the poor and the privileged--black people...

Indian summer.
January 1, 2006... IT WAS EARLY, BEFORE DAWN, when we set out, Harold in front, I in the middle, and my stepfather, Pete--who I then thought was my father--bringing up the rear. We were going deer hunting in the same woods, surrounding the same small, rural...

Wild duck.
January 1, 2006... THIS MORNING, AS SOON AS I GOT UP, I went outside with the dogs. I wanted to see what had happened to the garden since I had last seen it. That had been only twelve hours earlier, but in the spring the garden is an astonishing place and must be...

"Traditional somethings": the persistence of Aale in Nigeria.
January 1, 2006... Kini yii? What is this? --Yoruba expression IN AUTUMN 1995 I SAW AN IMAGE that blew a hole in everything I thought I knew about African art. I was sitting in a darkened classroom at Amherst College, watching slides dance on the...

Juice.(Zimbabwean poetry)
January 1, 2006... BEHIND ME IT IS TOMORROW. I'm on the outer edge of the troposphere, my body numbed by the vibration of some six million airplane parts holding together at 600 miles per hour. Somewhere between the Southern Cross over Zimbabwe and the last scene...

Through the eyes of a scrivener.(Monty Python's Flying Circus )(Excerpt)
January 1, 2006... IN FALL 2001 All Things Considered aired a short segment from Monty Python's Flying Circus that reconstructs Thomas Hardy's first attempts to write Return of the Native, in the style of professional sportscasting. A crowd cheers and sighs...

Dancing in the dark.
January 1, 2006... Dancing in the Dark Dancing in the dark 'til the tune ends, We're dancing in the dark and it soon ends, We're waltzing in the wonder of why we're here Time hurries by, we're here and we're gone Looking for the light...

Nietzsche and me.(Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche)
January 1, 2006... I FIRST READ THAT GOD IS DEAD in a tunnel on my way to class at the small midwestern liberal arts university I attended my freshman year. I had arrived there from the Houston suburbs just a few weeks before, terribly unsure of myself, and was...

Body language.
January 1, 2006... THE MIX OF CAMPHOR AND AMMONIA still scrapes my palate like a spatula. As I recall, a man talks over me as if I am in some other room. He says I have pneumonia. At age two I may not know what the word means, but I recognize it as a somber...

Setting forth in their footprints.
January 1, 2006... ON THE LONG, HAIRPINNED CLIMB from the Valley of the Gods, heading north from the town of Mexican Hat, Utah, I meet only one other vehicle on the road, a pickup headed south. So by midafternoon, when I see the guy with his thumb out and a...

She's gone: the eternal ache of the love song.(Fictional Work)
January 1, 2006... FRANKIE WAS MY OED BAND BUDDY, and we had grown up together like brothers. From the age of thirteen, when we first picked up our instruments--me, the saxophone; Frankie, the guitar--the course of our friendship swerved distinctly, insistently...

Sharpening teeth.(Them: A Memoir of Parents)(Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother's Journey)(The Glass Castle)(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... PARENTS MAY BE, AS PETER USTINOV WROTE, "the bones on which children sharpen their teeth." Few of us who raise children emerge from the experience unscathed. At the same time, a significant portion of moms and dads do their own tooth...

December 15th, 2004.
January 1, 2006... I can't help but think of eels, tiny electric eels; that's what blood starts to feel like in these places: silvery, amped up, and flashing, as if legions of swishing tails have become such a blood-blur that the ordinary roundness of cells is...

Epilogue.
January 1, 2006... So, now that it's all over and done with, why, you may well ask, did we make this a special nonfiction issue? Let's start here: I am writing this in the throes of a toothache, the likes of which I can't remember. But I do remember having...