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A Public Space

No. 23

G.  R. Swenson protests MOMA with a ? / Pita Amor in neon lights / Fame and Rejection / Saul Bellow’s letters from a safe-deposit box / Looking for Natalie de Blois on Park Avenue / The last years of Black Mountain College / Elena Ferrante and the art of concealment / Merce Cunningham dances / On the life of studios / The architecture of freedom

Table of Contents



 

Note

Chance Encounters

Brigid Hughes


 

Art

Untitled

Etel Adnan


 

Fiction

Interiors

I’m moody, damn it, and restless… and life has so many tuneless days.

Kathleen Collins


 

Poetry

The Book of Petitions

Who will find lost time / who will tie it to the foot of the bed.

Vénus Khoury-Ghata


 

Portfolio

Lady Antaeus

An out-of-print book discovered in the one dollar cart at a used bookstore leads to the rediscovery of an acclaimed writer, her unpublished work, and a forty year correspondence with Saul Bellow in a safe-deposit box in Tulsa, Oklahoma.


 

Portfolio

W-3

At last it had dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. I was always rolling these stones from my grave.

Bette Howland


 

Portfolio

A Life in Letters

Thirty-one, a single mother of two young sons, she labored at her typewriter day and night, worked part time as a librarian and an editor for the University of Chicago Press, and often threw bills directly into the trash.

Jacob Howland


 

Portfolio

A Visit

I was wondering what the chances might be of undertaking a crash course in self-improvement here in Eternity. Not so hot.

Bette Howland


 

Portfolio

The American Heroine

Edna is no American Bovary. She is American—period. The American heroine on her quest for experience, in all her problematic American innocence and ignorance.

Bette Howland


 

Portfolio

Ever Your Friend

One should cook and eat one’s misery. Chain it like a dog. Harness it like Niagara Falls to generate light and supply voltage for electric chairs.

Saul Bellow


 

Portfolio

Blue in Chicago

And yet I found myself reacting to her in the same way—noticing all through the meal that she seemed to talk only when her mouth was full and her cheek was bulging like a fist. As if she were chewing a quid of tobacco, and about to squirt. Alarming.

Bette Howland


 

Art

Untitled

Ana Hatherly


 

Cahiers

Time’s Weather

I let myself be carried by my language as if it were endowed with tiny wings.

Friederike Mayröcker


 

Fiction

About Two Women

You listen to the wind's instructions, its steady siege.

Mark Hage


 

Poetry

Three Poems

Sin pricks me like a convict’s suit of arrows / For here my evil, blue, and moody youth / Has found its old lair.

Rosemary Tonks


 

Fiction

Speaking Up

We have thrown ourselves into the cause, body and soul.

Yang Jiang


 

Fiction

The Goldfish

Cannot we create a new world by emptying this one out and adding fresh colors one by one?

Susie Mee


 

Reminiscence

Early On

It was absolutely revolutionary and liberating, and so full of possible experiment.

Isobel and Michael Armstrong


 

Photography

Dancers

Hazel Larsen Archer


 

Portrait

Public Access

Pita in the Arms of God

I believe in the time of my glands and arteries.

Elena Poniatowska


 

Fiction

The Truck

The “nothing” I am talking about is a perfectly successful cocktail of darkness and fog.

Elisabetta Rasy


 

Impressions

Looking for Natalie

Annie Coggan


 

Fiction

Souvenir Button

Never in the course of history has a work of art disposed of itself. A strange suicide indeed.

Rosalyn Drexler


 

Memoir

Outside Inside

Baz and I had Fame and Rejection. We lived in a flow of contradiction.

Martha King


 

Architecture

MASP

Lina Bo Bardi


 

Essay

She’ll Make Herself Alive

Concealment, discretion, secrecy: I found myself thinking of Epicurus’s advice, lathe biosas: “live in obscurity.”

Antonio Romani


 

Meditations

Night

I peeled every trace of light off the walls. Withdrew into blurred definitions.

Etel Adnan


 

Performance

A Body in a Station

Eiko

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