Steve Woodward on Margaret Lazarus Dean & the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize

“Say the words out loud: Cape Canaveral. Say them in JFK’s voice, in John Glenn’s voice, in Walter Cronkite’s voice. The very syllables connote rockets and bravery, the countdown to zero, heroes in helmets, banks of inscrutable computers.” This was how Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight, Margaret Lazarus Dean’s book on the Shuttle era, announced itself to me as I trawled the submissions for the nonfiction prize. This was an opening that stood out for its confidence. The imperative in the first line immediately signaled that Dean had a passion for her subject—human spaceflight—and wasn’t afraid to let me know it.

I was intrigued with the proposal for the book not only because of this directness and passion but also because of the way she approached her subject: to put it simply, she was obsessed. And not only with tracing the history of spaceflight and of the closing days of the shuttle era in particular but also with those early chroniclers of spaceflight, Norman Mailer in particular. Dean was interested in how the rise of New Journalism dovetailed with our early forays into space. Even more important, she was haunted by the question of what it meant that the shuttle program was coming to an end. That kind of passion, that dedication to craft and subject, was clear to reviewers as well. The New York Times called Leaving Orbit “wonderfully evocative,” and said of Dean that she “writes with the passion of a lifelong lover of space exploration and an ability to communicate, with tremendous kinetic power, the glory and danger of its missions.”

The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize exists for these kinds of writers: those who want to engage with the nonfiction form, to test its limits, and to see what it might hold. For Dean, that meant engaging with a tradition, asking questions that hadn’t been asked before. For other writers, that might also mean stylistic innovation, or formal experimentation. It looks different for every writer, and each year the nonfiction prize winners continue to redraw the lines of what is possible. Writers like Leslie Jamison, Kevin Young, Eula Biss, and Ander Monson have each been in a dialogue with what came before—reaching back toward the origins of their chosen form and yet still reaching forward for something new.

The nonfiction prize came about in part because Graywolf Press wanted to encourage writers interested in essayistic writing. That is, not just essays themselves, but nonfiction of all types that contained writing that was questing—always searching for the limits of the known. Writing that dares to act as discovery is in some ways always finding itself, and we love to be surprised by fresh approaches to a subject, a finely honed style, or great storytelling, whether in essay, memoir, or narrative nonfiction. The prize is also intended to support writers who are still fresh to the genre, or perhaps haven’t tried their hand at nonfiction before.

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This year, submissions for the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize are open through Sunday, January 31, 2016. The prize, which comes with a $12,000 advance and publication by Graywolf, is awarded to the most promising and innovative literary nonfiction project by a writer not yet established in the genre. The winner will work closely with an editor to develop the project into a finished manuscript. Complete contest guidelines are available here. Before submitting your manuscript for the prize, please look at the books previously published as winners of the prize—Leaving Orbit, The Empathy Exams, The Grey Album, Notes from No Man’s Land, and more—for examples of the type of work that we are seeking. These are some of the writers, after all, that your own work will be in conversation with. And it is very much a conversation, an ongoing dialogue of our own making. As John D’Agata says in the introduction to his latest anthology, The Making of the American Essay: “Let the essay be what we make of it.”

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Steve Woodward is associate editor at Graywolf Press and the coordinator of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. He teaches at Sierra Nevada College and lives in Minnesota.

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Maya L. Kapoor on Helen Macdonald: M is for Mosquito

M is for Mosquito

A small paperback, H is for Hawk fits in most bags. For a time it turned up in my purse, my plane carry-on, my backpack, after I packed for some task or trip and it occurred to a secret part of my brain that I might want to bring those strong, durable, well-wrought sentences along too. I steadily attempt to foist this book upon friends and acquaintances. It’s not just the sentence-level craft that explains why I’ve read it three times since its 2014 publication. In a Salon interview about H is for Hawk—a book reviewers and sellers have been hard pressed to categorize easily by genre—Helen Macdonald says, “I think grief shatters narratives, and that’s what I was trying to do.”

H is for Hawk has been described in reviews as “genre-defying, “nearly feral,” a “misery memoir.” It also has been described as environmental writing. I dislike environmental writing. In short literary biographies I identify myself as an environmental writer. My genre confusion stems from my problems with writing that valorizes a particular relationship with place. For centuries writers have interpreted the wild in ways that reaffirm their beliefs about themselves and their worlds. These interpretations have brought wonder, adventure, solace to countless readers. They’ve also hurt people—women, communities of color, and other marginalized groups—by imagining them, their stories, right off of the land.

In Macdonald’s book, environmental writing means something different. Macdonald does not write nature as paradise lost, nature as spiritual journey, nature as adversary. She writes the city park. The stubbled farm field. The thorned brambles. The wild places she encounters while flying her goshawk, Mabel. One evening, as Macdonald walks home with Mabel, she encounters a retired couple she knows. They chat about the lovely landscape, the herd of fallow deer that have just fled across the chalk landscape below into the forest. The kindly-seeming older man asks her, “Isn’t it a relief that there’s still things like that, a real bit of Old England still left, despite all these immigrants coming in?” The deer were introduced by the Romans, but that’s not what disturbs her about the man’s comment.

Old England is an imaginary place, she writes.

***

I read H is for Hawk for the first time at a biological field station in northern Arizona. Outside, hummingbirds zipped between pine trees growing above tawny grasses. At night I read by light of my headlamp in my sleeping bag on the bottom bunk of a knotted pine bed in the corner of the women’s quarters. At lunchtime, on warmer days, I scooted a plastic chair into the sun and read through my sunglasses. Shotgun-peppered road signs. Air-delivered nukes inside grassy tumuli. Wet fens and parched sands. Halfway through the first page, which is all one paragraph. Nothing much has happened. Macdonald’s describing a landscape she loves. I’m tangled in her grassy tumuli. I look up tumuli.

I’d traveled to the field station to write for a few weeks. I was writing about desert organisms, but the inferno where I lived—Tucson in the summertime—made it difficult for me to want to have anything to do with the desert. What’s more, the uninvited organisms inside my home—mosquitoes—were driving me crazy. Adding insult to injury, one of my essays in desperate need of revision was about mosquitoes. I was out of ideas. I’d done the right things: observations, interviews, historic and current research. The interviews included one with a renowned expert on climate change and mosquito-borne disease epidemiology. The observations were acute, personal, bloody. The research was thorough, including both moldering personal journals by famous explorers in mosquito-infested tropical jungles and academic papers on modern-day globalization and disease transmission. I studied The Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence. I wrote about the slave trade. I wrote about my apartment. The essay was a shambles. I’d run out of things to say, but all I’d really said was: Mosquitoes were driving me crazy, and they’d driven some other people crazy a while back, too. And, in case you were wondering, if you lived in Tucson you probably wouldn’t get dengue fever.

Tucson, in its own way, is an imaginary place. Tucson’s identity politics are complex. In writing about mosquitoes, and in other essays, I delved deep into local history. Who imagined the Tucson where I lived? Whose story did I tell when I wrote about Tucson in one way and not another? Whose stories were impossibly tangled with that of the mosquito?

Still, I could find no resonance from which to build an essay about mosquitoes—until I read Macdonald’s meditation on falconry. Questioning the meaning that rare animals can have for humans, when all they are associated with is rarity, Macdonald explains that interacting with Mabel makes the hawk real for her in a way that wild creatures are not. I did not experience a paradigmatic shift in my compassion levels for mosquitoes after reading this. But I did consider what mosquitoes could mean to me in the larger framework of my life. I thought about the past few years of my life, chronic illness, an inability to leave town, a garden overrun by mosquitoes, confusion about how to make contact with unpaved landscapes. I searched an invasive bloodsucking species in an urban desert environment as a clue into the most tender truths of my life. And then I revised again.

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Maya L. Kapoor holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona and an MS in biology from Arizona State University. She is writing a collection of essays about nature in the urbanizing West.

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Obesity

Any discussion of obesity comes down to the not particularly friendly contest between thick and thin, with the body as the chief battleground. Mostly the female nude, because that has been the main interest of heterosexual men, the principal arbiters. Women and homosexuals had far fewer votes in the matter of svelte versus corpulent, in art as in life. Thick or thin has been the great divide, as the expression “through thick and thin” encapsulates. Between them, they subsume the world

Let me state right off: I am a partisan of thin in human bodies as well as many other things. But let me make clear: slim, trim, slender, yes; but not spindly, emaciated, frangible, anorexic. It is, I believe, the majority view, excess being, as usual, undesirable. That majority view is exemplified in the history of painting and sculpture, but is the majority always right? Or do you think that intelligence lords it over stupidity, that sagacity outnumbers benightedness?

All right, you say, forget about majority, but what is so attractive about slimness? I suppose it is partly its suggestion of moderation, elasticity, embracableness. Also the practicality, the implication of flexibility, of not hogging too much space. And also gracefulness: how does a somersault by a fat woman compare with that of a slender one? Which one would you rather share a bed with or have plunk down in your lap?

And further: don’t clothes fitting snugly but not constrictingly look better than those stretched to bursting? But where exactly lies the boundary between just right and too much? Is the eighteen-inch waist so striven for by the girls in “Gone with the Wind” the correct ideal or is it exaggeration? Finally, are angels ever depicted as anything but slim, and what man would not cherish an angelic woman?

However, let us look at specific instances of thin versus thick. Even among animals, plants and objects, isn’t slim generally preferable? To be sure, among trees, a sturdy oak is as fetching as a willowy willow, merely in a different way. But that is a case where thickness means dependability in storms, a joy to be climbed up on, a potential for a tree house. In other words, function, even when merely implicit, may unconsciously color our aesthetics.

Consider another example of where thickness may beat out thinness. I am thinking of the beloved ante bellum Negro mammies of the era leading up to the Civil War. Their attraction lay in the capacious bosoms on which a hurt child might find refuge and solace. I am not thinking of the Hottentot Venus.

It may be argued that there were times and societies in which ample females were in favor: think Junoesque, think Rubens. But may it not be merely the consequence of some important personage, say a queen or some powerful aristocrat, having been stout, though she could just as easily have been thin as a rail.

Language, too, may play a role. The notion of “fat cat” seems to have an appeal beyond the mere rhyme—otherwise “bitty kitty” might have been the cat’s meow. But language does have emanations: if “large” did not have some positive connotations, would “largesse” be such a good thing? And does not “portly” carry fortuitous implications of “port,” something we all seek in our tempest-torn lives?

For my part, however, the capital sins are, in that order, wickedness, stupidity, cowardice, and obesity. To me, they are the Four Riders of the Apocalypse. I find relatively few things more painful than sitting on the subway opposite a truly obese person. I would risk an uncomfortably averted head just to avoid having to look at the fatso.

To be sure, there are the charitable souls who speculate that it may be a glandular matter over which the obese person has no control. I tend to think that it is rather a case of laziness: a careful diet and steady exercise are simply too much trouble. Yet even assuming that it is a problem of recalcitrant metabolism, it hardly makes fat acceptable. After all, stupidity is also a guiltless infirmity, yet we do not pardon it.

Now take dogs and cats. Doesn’t obesity in some of them—a belly that hugs the floor—strike us as offensive? Isn’t much of the beauty of leopards and panthers in their lissomness? But then what about elephants, whose bulk we do regard with admiration? There is something proportionate about their structure and a kind of lumbering grace in their movement. And their size itself fills us with awe akin to that with which we view loveliness. As for the whale, we may well want to save it, but not for its obese looks. And dolphins, however intelligent, are downright homely

in their chubbiness.

There are many things in nature that are obese. A melon, for example. But we do not value it for its looks, which it takes a still-life painter to make, conceivably, beautiful.

I personally find a well-made barrel attractive, but it may be only a transference from the good potables it contains. Usefulness may simulate sightlines.

But now take the case of pigs. Full-grown they are obese and unsightly. But piglets, even if you haven’t read “Winnie the Pooh,” may strike you as pretty. And so they are, not merely for their winsome smallness and roseate color. Isn’t a piggybank a pleasing object? There is a shape involved, and the shape is geometrically articulate.

This is the beauty of curves, which we find enticing. It suggests the undulation of a fair-weather sea, the hand-favoring rotundity of a perfectly designed pitcher. But they are beautiful only on a slender person, where they are perceived as such. On an obese person, we see curves only as lard. They function best in conjunction with firmness, say the firm flesh of youth or the perdurability of marble. Which makes a statue such as the ever-young Venus de Milo a paragon of beauty, even without a full complement, or armament, of arms.

And please don’t talk to me about inner beauty being more important than outer.  So it may be, but it is the outer that usually leads the viewer to the inner. It is the pursuit of the outer beauty of youth that lures the aging virago and still cruising homosexual to desperate stratagems that turn them into grotesques. You cannot be young forever, but you can try hard, and more often than not successfully, to eschew obesity.

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CPE 2016 Sample Essay for the Cambridge Proficiency exam

A warm hello to all our CPE-holders and CPE-takers, and congratulations to all of you who have recently passed the exam. I am always glad when you write me to say you achieved a certificate. We certainly share your happiness in this blog. 

 

Anyways, for all of you who still don't have a CPE certificate and are planning to get it soon, here there is more practice !

 

The following essay was sent to us by a very good friend to this blog: SYB, a blogger from France.

 

Please note that the task comes from an old versión of the exam, and that is why it is in the form of a graphic. In the new versions of CPE, you get two pieces of text (no graphic) and you are asked to summarise both of them. 



 

 

The education of the future

In the next decade, the advent of new technologies will bring change to the traditional teaching and learning models. It may be even the case that human teachers will be replaced by computers and robots.  However, it remains to be seen if this new approach  in education can be effective and beneficial for both the teachers and the students.

 

Nowadays many educational instutions are offering e-learning courses. These offers are highly convenient as learners can join the classes anywhere, from the comfort of their own home and without time constraints. The interactivity factor of video conferences, microphones and chat-rooms makes them also fun and stimulating.

 

Another reason why e-learning is so attactive is that, there are in the web numerous free application and on-line resources for self-Learning. These programs, very often tailored to the students needs , help them master the skills they want, at the speed they want. Once again very convenient.
 

However, there is a  downside to these teaching methods, and it has to do in my opinion with the essence of human nature and also with the future.  In a world which is constantly in social crises and which faces so many environmental challenges, are we not forgetting something? 

It is in "old-fashioned" classrooms where students learn to live together, and where they develop friendships and learn important life-skills under the eyes of a friendly supervisor.  It is also teachers, and not robots, who can teach students to think outside the box, and to be creative.

The education of the future needs to benefit from both "old-fashioned teachers and classrooms" and "the new technologies". It is only working hand to hand, that they can help shape a better world for the new generations that come.

Sent by Syb
Number of words 290
 

                                                                                                                                                       

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Financing a Tulane Education

Tulane isn't cheap, but we definitely think we are worth the investment. I previously wrote a bit about why I personally think a Tulane degree truly is worth the (albeit large) price tag. We have a lot going for us here, and we also work to make Tulane affordable to all students.

So... speaking about affordability. If you are an applicant or admitted student for the class of 2021, you've got a few options at this point if it's looking like Tulane could be out of your financial reach. Let me break a few of them down for you.

Need-based aid- Need-based financial aid can make all the difference here at Tulane. Just like how you have your own personal admission counselor here at Tulane, you've also got a financial aid counselor who is going to walk you and your family through this whole process. We require both the FAFSA and CSS profile, and you can get all the info you'll need on applying for aid here. Many families will say, "Jeff, I don't think we'll qualify for need-based aid." I always say you have nothing to lose by applying. It could make a small difference, and plus, the worst outcome is that you don't qualify, so you have nothing to lose! Want to get a rough estimate? Check out our Net Price Calculator. Apply for need-based aid. Seriously. We recommend you apply by the end of January and in last week's blog, you can read tips right from the source. You can apply for aid even before you've gotten a final admission decision from us.

Community Service Scholarship- The deadline passed last week, and we're looking forward to reviewing those applications next month. We're looking for students who have really committed a good deal of time to a major community-impacting project. It's not about the hours, but more about the impact you have made. You can read my tips here.

Additional Merit Scholarship and scholarship appeals- In previous years, Tulane had reconsidered any student who had asked about additional aid. However, inevitably little to no additional aid would become available. Occasionally, we were able to increase a very small fraction of students' aid and usually only by a small amount. It became a very drawn out process that yielded virtually no additional aid for most students. As more and more students have committed to Tulane, we have no additional aid available and no need to award more aid to fill spots in the class. This year, we will be unable to reconsider any students for merit aid.

On and off campus jobs- I would estimate that well over half of our students work a job, either off campus or on. I worked two jobs when I was a student here, one on campus (right here in the Office of Admission) and one off (believe it or not, I was a beer man at the Saints games at the Superdome!). We have a job fair for both work-study and regular jobs that goes down right as classes start in the fall. You can work the desk of a residence hall, lifeguard at Riley or even get paid to assist with research! All the info you'll need to work on campus can be found here. Plus, as we are within walking distance of great shops and restaurants on Maple Street (and a quick bike to Oak or Magazine), there are loads of places around campus eager to hire Tulane undergraduates.

Resident Adviser on campus- Being an RA at Tulane is a great way to finance your Tulane education. Housing and Residence Life hires hundreds of RAs each year and offers great compensation for students. You can get more info here. For payment, RAs get a private room with bath facilities, a stipend of $2,600 for the year, and a meal plan valued at approximately $1,000 per semester.

External Scholarships. First tip here: do not wait! Start now! There are literally billions of dollars of scholarships floating around, just waiting for you to apply. Check with your guidance or college office on your campus or ask your counselor for tips. Many scholarships are available for specific majors, extracurricular activities, backgrounds, etc. My favorite sites for checking out scholarships are FastWeb and the College Board scholarship search. But, get started now. Deadlines approach quickly and are usually pretty strict. Apply to everything you possibly can- you've got nothing to lose! Here's a great scholarship opportunity if you attend high school in the south.

Good luck out there, and as always, contact us here in the Office of Admission with any questions you may have.

A young Jeff Schiffman as a beer man at the Saints game during college. YES, beer was only $6 back then. 

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Nora Almeida: Moscow

Moscow

People are lost to velocity.

                        -Bernard Cooper, Futurism

Because my father is in Moscow, I am no longer able to see him. Of course, I reason, he is really no more remote than he was during the difficult years of my adolescence when we lived under the same roof. Or during the decade he spent in the small, dilapidated house in Molokai, Hawaii, which I had visited and knew. And I do see him, when he comes “home” (as he still calls it) once a year, in the confines of the New England suburb where I grew up—a place where my father and his life are wholly imaginable. The trouble is Moscow, as strange to me and as removed from time as the moon is.

A place which composes itself now as a strange amalgam of video footage from the 1969 Apollo landing, static (or is it snow?), a Soviet flag, a little doll inside of another little doll inside of a spacesuit, the smell of winter, and a Dostoevsky staircase—coiled like a conch.

“What’s Moscow like?” I asked my father on the telephone when he first moved there.
“It’s cloudy today,” he said, “probably 50 degrees, warmer than I expected. It rains a lot but it isn’t raining now.”

“No, dad. Not the weather, the city. What’s the city like?”

“Oh. It’s a big city but it feels different than New York,” he said, “older, more spread out.” “People here…” my father paused and I could almost see him, squinting as though trying to make out an image more clearly, “ride bicycles on the sidewalk.”

“Oh, yes,” he continued, remembering something, “I keep getting lost but I’ve invented a new system for reading Russian signs.”

“You’re learning Russian, you mean?”

“No. I just think of a word in English that the Russian names remind me of. Like the name of the subway station near the Embassy reminds me of the word ‘barracuda’ and I have a map that I write the English words on.”

I google “metro station near the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.” The station is called Баррикадная or anglicized, Barrikadnaya. Barracuda.

As he talks, I conjure up ornate facades, iron windows, a lonely garret, gilded stitching on the hem of a dress. On Google Maps, which are censored in Russia, Moscow is shaped like an oyster upon which my father, a superimposition or a virtual pin, stands among paper snowflakes, Tsvetaeva’s golden headed churches, the glint of foreign syllables, disembodied leg of a dancer, waterways, battlements, and a puffed up soviet chest.

Moscow, where my father lives in 1916 along a hillside.

“Moscow!” people say, “what on earth is your father doing there?”

“Plumbing,” I say, as I picture him in the basement of some bell tower rapping on a copper pipe, “but I can’t imagine what else.”

Though I do imagine him, imperceptivity aged since I saw him last September, wearing an old coat, perched on the banks of the Moskva, leaning into the wind. He is smiling because he is being photographed and because he is surrounded by a language he doesn’t understand, as always, a little harsh, tuft of breath, visible, it is cold, and his large callused hands are holding his camera out to a stranger, a Russian man. “Photo?” my father says indicating the button. “I speak English,” the stranger says and it is likely enough. Then my father doesn’t say anything, he just grins until his face hurts. And until the flash goes, he is frozen and imaginable, a real man in an unreal city.

I sometimes worry that my father, now that he is in Moscow, is becoming less real.

“Yes,” my mother confirmed when she learned that he was moving to Russia, “it is obvious that he has abandoned reality altogether.“

Consider the ontology of reality, not just of words, father, to use a recent example, but being itself. The fatherness of my father. What exactly constitutes that?

“Your father,” my mother calls him, as though he belongs to me.

It occurs to me that as my father perhaps I am responsible for maintaining his reality in some way. I wonder if I should consult my sister in order that we might form a more objective father, one whose reality is enforced by the two of us.

Other times, I decide that my real father belongs to the past. It is true that lately, when I see my father, I often don’t recognize him. My real father has coal black hair and wears work boots and drives fast with the windows open.

Certainly, he is not also this old man whom I meet at the Port Authority bus station with gray hair and an old backpack, who mutters to himself and doesn’t watch the traffic when we start across the intersection.

“I’m moving to Russia,” my father announced suddenly on the telephone one afternoon. He was in Hawaii, where it was still morning, and I was walking through downtown Brooklyn on my way home from my job at the library.

“What?” I said, “why?”

“Moscow.” He said with some definitiveness, “I always wanted to travel.”

“Moscow,” I repeated.

It occurred to me that my father was returning to some fork that he had seen in the road of his own life, before he was my father. It wasn’t a do-over exactly, but it was, perhaps, his last chance at a futurity not prescribed by the life he had led thus far, a life, instead, informed by an image of the person that he thought, as a young man, that he might someday like to become. All of this knotted up in the memory my father has now of the aspirations of his younger self. Perhaps the fork only visible from this present vantage. But regardless, the idea being: to travel, back, to the fork, and then forward, as though we, my mother, my sister, Hawaii, all of it, had never really happened.

Futurity, a term wrapped up in both idealism and death, is the precept that underlies fiction, a product of imagination that informs and is informed by the past. “Futurity…what we are to be, determined by what we have been,” wrote Horace Smith, a nineteenth century British poet and parodist of Lord Byron. Contemporary literary theorist, Amir Eshel, characterizes the “various expressions of futurity” in literature as modes of “redescript[ion]” and ways of processing and giving shape to history.

Eshel cites Kafka’s “Little Fable” as a quintessential example of the kind of existential conundrum—the choice between being stuck or swallowed—that precludes futurity.

"Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."

    "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

To lose sight of futurity is to confront the hopelessness of the inevitable (ie. death), and to reside in a place (or a time, rather) where the past can’t be made meaningful and “the future, that reliable horizon, might be forever lost.”

Futurity is also the title of a contemporary musical in which, “two people try to imagine their way out of impossible circumstances.” Set simultaneously in 1864 and 2015, the narrative centers upon a highly fictionalized Ada Lovelace—the visionary British mathematician and daughter of Lord Byron—and Julian Monroe, a wholly fictional American civil war soldier. During the course of the musical, Julian and Ada invent a machine they call the steam brain. The machine is the product of pure mathematics, is morally neutral, and has the capacity to imagine—but not quite perpetuate—an alternative, peaceful future.

The steam brain becomes an improbable beacon, a technological singularity, and a metaphor upon which the future of civilization hinges.

There’s a fiction that folds all my failures and frailties into powerful triumphs of will. Julian sings of a past reconstituting itself.

There’s no problem not solved by the twist of a nob, Julian sings, in 1864, in 2015, amid the echoes of an occasion we cannot rise to.

Our family was a late adopter of the PC. Too expensive, my father thought. My mother was worried we would stop playing outside and when we finally got one, in 1996, an ancient Dell with dial-up, I was disappointed when nothing drastic happened.

But slowly information trickled in, like sand, gently pulling apart geography. Or perhaps it was time? Replacing all the people I’ve ever known with photographs, dates, facts. On the other side of this screen: my father on holiday in Siberia, land of disappeared persons, on the banks of the Baikal, a bottomless lake, waving.

“We could skype, dad,” I’ve offered, picturing him at the computer plucking out letters with two index fingers; he’s still never really learned to type.

“Hello, Nora,” my father says into my answering machine, “is this a bad time?”

A singularity pulses in the night sky and my mother, in New England, returns to her dark, empty house.

Here, in Brooklyn, in the library, I am peering into the corners of the internet. At this fork where the past and the future intersect, obliterating the present. Where everything is possible and nothing is actually happening.

And you will rise, happened of / wonderpowers, Tsvetaeva writes in her Poems for Moscow.

“It isn’t real,” my mother insists, in a conversation about our lives online. “Algorithms, all of your personal information floating around out there. I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel like actual life.”

What does it mean that these conversations never really happened? That I need to redescribe the past this way. And that these exchanges feel more honest than what really happened: silence, a slow erosion, resentment, then the vacuum of Moscow.

From my hands—take this city not made by hands, Tsvetaeva writes.

Is this the future we imagined? Or perhaps the façade of one? Filtered and gilded, almost real but not quite.

Hi Nora, my dad writes in a rare text message, how are you? It’s been more than 2 months since we’ve spoken.

And then,

Been thinking of you, the
Russian government is
working hard at
controlling and
restricting information
and media (in a different w
ay so does ours). Not to
mention the internet
biggies and their pre-
selected “news”
Libraries are more
important than ever.
Keep up the fight! Love,
Dad

I wonder how to respond. Not because I don’t have anything to say but because my father would never write this. But he has, I remind myself, he just did.

“Is morality made of information?” Ada asks Julian in 1864, in 2015.

Is reality?

By the end of the musical, Ada and Julian have finished building the steam brain and the civil war soldiers, all dead, are part of it—victims of futurity. Or recast in light of it: illuminated and in motion.

And I was in the second row, inert, in the dark. Watching the present imagine the past imagine the future.

And today I am here, on the internet, in my apartment in Brooklyn, imagining my dad in dirty coveralls in the belly of a government building in Moscow, his hands black from grease and almost indistinguishable from the boiler he’s fixing.

What would I say to him if I were standing beside him now? I wonder if he would be happy to see me or if he would even recognize me.

And if I would still be myself, or if anyone is, in Moscow

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Nora Almeida is a writer and a librarian. Her work has appeared in The Normal School, Diagram, No Dear, Caketrain, and other journals. She lives in Brooklyn.

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References:

Eshel, Amir. Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

“Futurity.” The Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com. Web. 12 Nov 2015.

The Lisps. Futurity. 2012. MP3.

Tsvetaeva, Marina. “from Poems for Moscow.” Dark Elderberry Branch. trans. Ilya Kaminsky, and Jean Valentine. Farmington, Me: Alice James Books, 2012. Print.

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