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Quixote with a Camera
Dave’s office is right next door the college library, which houses the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. He often comes home with a stack of obscure art films to watch after a long day of work. This is how my husband unwinds. “Which one do you want to watch?” He’ll ask, genuinely excited and unable to choose. I’ll pick through the titles, imagining each one to be more bleak, pretentious, incomprehensible, and French than the next—from the complete works of Godard to twenty three short science films by Jean Painlevè, score by Yo La Tengo. But recently he assembled a mini-festival of the “essay film,” which included the entire filmography of Ross McElwee. I’d never heard of McElwee, but the description on the box included the word “hilarious,” so I rolled the dice....
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The School of Chant
When the email circulated that there would be a traditional Latin Mass at our parish for the Feast of the Assumption on August 15, I immediately and foolishly wrote back that I wanted to be in the Schola Cantorum. The extent of my Gregorian chant experience is one weekend at the Abbey of Gethsemani five years ago. My Latin is limited to two semesters in college, the Sign of the Cross, and a CD of hymns by Beth Nielsen Chapman in heavy rotation at our house every Christmas. I’d been to exactly one Latin Mass, almost a decade ago, and remembered only how completely lost I felt among all those Mantilla-clad women, shuffling the pages in the Missal. All I had was bravado....
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In the Flesh
The baby—Alexander Day—is three months old. Life is groaning forward again after a summer lived in 20-minute intervals at the breast pump, the awkwardness of a new baby in the house a little like coming home with a third arm. What do I do with this? I’m looking now at a little black box that contains souvenirs of the end of my pregnancy and his first days in our home. I’m not much of a scrapbooker, but I’m sentimental, so I save everything and throw it in shoeboxes marked with our names. Little time capsules, like Andy Warhol used to make in the Factory....
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What’s in a Name
“Change name” has been on my to-do list since my wedding day, October 2, 2004. With a new baby coming, a new list was made, and I moved the errand once more to the top. It suddenly seemed terribly important to me to have the same name as my husband and children. Plus my Indiana driver’s license was due to....
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Triple Scoop
My best friend died suddenly almost two years ago. She’d lived across the country from me for almost ten years by then, and since our relationship mostly happened over the phone and email, it’s easy to sink into the feeling that we just haven’t spoken in a while. The phone will ring and I’ll catch myself hoping it’s her. Then I have to....
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Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
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