My Central Park Office

View of Central Park

My Central Park Office
by Lee Matthew Goldberg

I’m a born and raised New Yorker, used to the city’s grit and urban sprawl, but I retreat most days to Central Park when I’m writing. I have a tree, which perfectly contours my back where I’ve written many of my books. I sit in the grass, take off my shoes and socks, and locate a sense of calm in a city where it’s often hard to find moments of peace. Since office spaces cost a lot of money, and I enjoy leaving my apartment to write so it feels like a job, Central Park becomes the perfect respite to fuel my creativity. 

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Dad Died Twice

Stylized ocean image

Dad Died Twice
by Laura Claridge

I recall him as mostly asleep after days of riding his postman’s bicycle under the Florida sun, delivering mail during those long, unremittingly hot Florida days. No wonder he fell to the cool terrazzo floor and lay there, more unconscious than just resting.

The tan mailman’s shirt and shorts had replaced his decorated Marine’s uniform. At nineteen he had gone to war in the Pacific and fought in the famous Battle of Saipan and on Iwo Jima. He came home with many medals, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts—and a chrome plate in his head. My young, handsome father was grievously wounded, how wounded no one knew at first; but as time wore on, his brain injuries worsened instead of abating. We did not know then that he had begun to die. My dad, William Powell, was the first in our family’s series of serious brain injuries, and I have reason daily to think of him, and with regret.

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Ooh to be Ah: the Author as Rock Star 

Music

Ooh to be Ah: the Author as Rock Star
by Patrik Sampler 

What role does an author play—or not—in our understanding of their work?  Answers can be found in surprising places, and the 1983 promotional video for “Ooh to Be Ah,” a song by the band Kajagoogoo, is one such location.  In it, we encounter wisdom regarding the role of literature, the folly of authorship, and how the two interact. 

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Information and Play in the Postindustrial City: A Mixtape

cassette tapes

Information and Play in the Postindustrial City: A Mixtape
by John Talbird

1. Calvino

In Italo Calvino’s story, “The Garden of Stubborn Cats,” his protagonist Marcovaldo follows one of these titular cats to the upper-class Biarritz Restaurant where, through ankle-height transoms, he discovers a strange and wonderful world, the five-star restaurant. He watches an elderly waiter in tails following a wealthy patron to a glass tank full of trout. The waiter carries a little net “as if he were going to catch butterflies” calling to mind the comic trope of loony bin workers arriving with nets to take away the crazies. A world where a man points out a particular fish to be captured, cooked, and brought to his table must seem, to a post-war Italian like Marcovaldo—a man who works arduous hours in a warehouse and makes so little that he, his wife, and six children must sometimes skip meals—the height of insanity. And so, just as Chaplin’s Little Tramp might, he behaves logically in a crazy world: With fishing pole, he catches his own trout from the restaurant’s fish tank. 

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Can This Be Dystopia?

Parade

Can This Be Dystopia?
by Karen Heuler

Parades belong to dystopias.

Ha, you say. Prove it.

What is a parade but a display of solidarity with the norm, with the perceived perfection  of society? We love to celebrate, of course, and we love crowd emotions, which provoke a sense of unity and—here, I’ll say it—superiority.

If you’re not part of the parade, you’re part of the problem.

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Puce

Puce

Puce
by Marin Kosut

At four, I wore a fringed black dress formerly owned by a go-go dancer who worked at my grandmother’s bar. There’s a photo of me in the dress smirking in the driveway of my family’s ranch-burger house, eyes behind bangs, sweeping the fringe forward like liquid through my hands. I liked how the strands split apart and landed back into place. 

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The Female Fool

Stack of books

The Female Fool
by Jenny Hatchadorian

It was 2003, I’d just finished my freshman year at Tulane, and I was thinking a lot about A Confederacy of Dunces, the picaresque novel that was basically required reading in New Orleans. The novel has flaws, but I drank up Ignatius Reilly’s grand, ungovernable, garrulous manner. He was insensitive but not cruel, his irascibility was shrouded in originality and humor that revealed the artifice of society. Not entirely a burnout, he was a fool or clown who navigated the world without following the rules – to me, he oozed possibility and invention. 

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Black Box

Scalpel

Black Box
by Ariana Kelly

Lying in bed, drifting off to sleep, I thought about how my father was losing his driving leg and that the best conversations we had when I was a kid were when we drove together, just the two of us, first to do errands, then to travel to and from boarding school and college. Scattered around the cab of his Toyota pickup, receipts for building supplies intermingled with cassette tapes of jazz. I can still hear Bill Evans’ introspective piano notes hanging in the air against the white noise of moving sixty-five miles an hour through space. Alone in his truck, cocooned in a glass and metal bubble where we were together but didn’t need to look at each other, my father made optimistic statements about my future—which always seemed tenuous to me—as assured as if issued by a Delphic oracle.  

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