Collected Prose

intricate ways in which individual destinies are shaped by society at large. Some of the older contributors, looking back on events from their childhood and youth, are necessarily writing about the Depression and World War II. Other contributors, born in the middle of the century, continue to be haunted by the effects of the war in Vietnam. That conflict ended twenty-five years ago, and yet it lives on in us as a recurrent nightmare, a great wound in the national soul. Still other contributors, from several different generations, have written stories about the disease of American racism. This scourge has been with us for more than 350 years, and no matter how hard we struggle to eradicate it from our midst, a cure has yet to be found.
    Other stories touch on AIDS, alcoholism, drug abuse, pornography, and guns. Social forces are forever impinging on the lives of these people, but not one of their stories sets out to document society per se. We know that Janet Zupan’s father died in a prison camp in Vietnam in 1967, but that is not what her story is about. With a remarkable eye for visual detail, she tracks a single afternoon in the Mojave Desert as her father chases after his stubborn and recalcitrant horse, and knowing what we do about what will happen to her father just two years later, we read her account as a kind of memorial to him. Not a word about the war, and yet by indirection and an almost painterly focus on the moment before her, we sense that an entire era of American history is passing in front of our eyes.
    Stan Benkoski’s father’s laugh. The slap to Carol Sherman-Jones’s face. Little Mary Grace Dembeck dragging a Christmas tree through the streets of Brooklyn. John Keith’s mother’s missing wedding ring. John Flannelly’s fingers stuck in the holes of a stainless-steel heating grate. Mel Singer wrestled to the floor by his own coat. Anna Thorson at the barn dance. Edith Riemer’s bicycle. Marie Johnson watching a movie shot in the house where she lived as a girl. Ludlow Perry’s encounter with the legless man. Catherine Austin Alexander looking out her window on West Seventy-fourth Street. Juliana C. Nash’s walk through the snow. Dede Ryan’s philosophical martini. Carolyn Brasher’s regrets. Mary McCallum’s father’s dream. Earl Roberts’s collar button. One by one, these stories leave a lasting impression on the mind. Even after you have read through all fifteen dozen of them, they continue to stay with you, and you find yourself remembering them in the same way that you remember a trenchant parable or a good joke. The images are clear, dense, and yet somehow weightless. And each one is small enough to fit inside your pocket. Like the snapshots we carry around of our own families.

    October 3, 2000

A Little Anthology of Surrealist Poems

    1968. I was twenty-one, a junior at Columbia, and these poems were among my first attempts at translation. Remember the times: the war in Vietnam, the clamor of politics on College Walk, a year of unending protests, the strike that shut down the university, sit-ins, riots, the arrest of 700 students (myself among them). In the light of that tumult (that questioning), the Surrealists were a major discovery for me: poets fighting against the conventions of poetry, poets dreaming of revolution, of how to change the world. Translation, then, was more than just a literary exercise. It was a first step toward breaking free of the shackles of myself, of overcoming my own ignorance. You must change your life. Perhaps, Back then, it was more a question of searching for a life, of trying to invent a life I could believe in….

    January 22, 2002

The Art of Worry

    Art Spiegelman is a one-of-a-kind quadruple threat. He is an artist who draws and paints; a chameleon who can mimic and embellish upon any visual style he chooses; a writer who expresses himself in vivid, sharply turned sentences; and a provocateur with a flair for humor in its most savage and piercing incarnations. Mix those talents together, then put them in the service of a deep political conscience, and a man can make a considerable mark on the world. Which is precisely what Art Spiegelman has done for the past ten years at The New Yorker.
    We know him best as the author of Maus , the brilliant two-volume narrative of his father’s nightmare journey through the camps in the Second World War. Spiegelman showed himself to be an expert story-teller in that work, and no doubt that is how