UFR Weekly Newsletter #14: Dispatches from Somewhere
David Cotrone
We started a new series, Talking with Women. Roxane Gay was the first to participate; she talks about the essay she wrote for The Rumpus, “rape culture” and the body as a political object. It’s all worth reading.
Originally we thought of calling it Interviews with Women Who Have Something to Say. But that made it seem like there are people out there with nothing to share, and that’s not true. We want to hear from any woman who wants to participate. We want to hear from you.
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Everyone knows Anderson Cooper. It’s hard not to. He might be the most familiar name in news and lately he’s been busy, before in Egypt, now in Japan. In 2006 he wrote a memoir called Dispatches from the Edge and it was about how his brother jumped from the top of a building, how he wanted to shy away from the world, how there was too much stillness. The book opens with Cooper in New York on New Year’s Eve. He’s on a platform covering the celebration in Times Square because he has nowhere else to go. Later, in his hotel room, he doesn’t feel cause for celebration. He doesn’t feel a new year coming on. He doesn’t feel anything. This is why he dedicated himself to traveling, to moving. He figured it could at least keep him busy. He thought it could make him happy. And look: he’s still moving.
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An iPad drawing by Kara Jansson Kovacev and Shelagh Power-Chopra
Kristin Hersh talks with furniture, saying, “I would put my kids to bed, sleep a few hours and then get up at 1 or 2 a.m. and write until the kids got up. At 4 in the morning, you can remember just about anything. You hear the voices of dead people (in a good way); you see their idiosyncrasies and smell their houses, re-live conversations.”
Pecan by Shome Dasgupta
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A few years ago I met someone who had just left jail. He was trying to get back on his feet, back to what he was. We were just talking, together in Boston. He said he had been in rehab with James Taylor and that the song “Fire And Rain” is the saddest thing you’ll ever hear and that it’s an anthem for anyone on the 12-step program. He said he had a daughter somewhere and that sometimes she talked to him and sometimes she didn’t. He said he could always talk to books, had always liked reading. I had Cooper’s memoir in my bag so I gave it to him, told him he’d like it, as if I could say. He flipped through the book and read the back cover. He held it with both hands and said thanks, all before he walked away.
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This is close to where I’m from. It’s a beach in Plymouth, MA. If you look hard enough on a clear day you can see Provincetown and the tip of the Cape. But it doesn’t look that way here. It looks like the ocean is bigger than it really is, like it keeps on going. I like that.
Be well,
David