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Backstory – France: The Cake Frosting Country by Joan Frank

23 Friday Oct 2015

Posted by Grace Curtis in Backstory, Essay

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backstory, Essay, Joan Frank, non-fiction, The Antioch Review

In the “The Astonishment Index,” contributor Joan Frank provides what she calls a piece that functions more as a “coda” to her original essay, “France: The Cake Frosting Country,” that ran in the Winter, 2010 issue of The Antioch Review. She says her essay describes realizations gained from a (very!) recent trip to France, and concludes that while the beautiful Cake Frosting Country is still a wonder, one can’t not see it differently with age and experience: certain scales have tumbled from one’s eyes.

The Astonishment Index
by Joan Frank

Someone close to me recently suggested, about the work of a famous living poet, that everything she writes is an expression of shock—arising from the thunderbolt comprehension of the fact that we will die.

That shock evokes—rather, tugs like an attached cart after itself—the ancillary question of how then to live, how to be, during our brief tenure of time on earth.

It strikes me increasingly that we never really recover from this first astonishment: that it extends vastly from and through our lives, like spokes of a wheel.

It strikes me too that everything we say and do, once that double-whammy realization cracks open, is driven by it. Perhaps more strangely, the fact of Place feels intimately bound up with the whole business—this acute, spreading recognition of a finite self, operating so briefly in time and space.

We wonder not just how to be, but why—and inevitably, where.

It’s arguable that my American generation, post-World War II, was saddled with a sanitized moral vision—a series of givens about fairness, or at least of eventual tit-for-tat. We were taught to do good, and expected that good would be offered back to us in return. We were encouraged to reason, never questioning the (hard-won) modicum of food and shelter enabling this luxury: food, shelter, and a resuming moral order, furnished by a shaken adult population doing its best to rebuild in the wake of unspeakable horror.

So when we grew up and began to travel to the classic world capitals, we viewed them through a rosier lens—possibly a Disney-fied lens, of princesses and castles and kindly old shoemakers. (Later we applied the Jamesian/Kerouacian lenses: “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.”) A piquant paradox: how my own great-grandparents, and those of countless others, likely fled Europe for Ellis Island, and how their progeny’s progeny eventually returned to Europe as self-styled rogues and daring artist-adventurers (never mind the exciting new venue’s dark history). This imposed romance, in effect appropriating a backdrop, persists to some degree in our own kids—though I think that it probably peaked in my own generation; that young adults now, chafed by the bizarre trials of making their own lives (paying off loans), look coolly at any notion of Dharma bumming (unless someone else is funding it).

I recently revisited France, starting in a small, sleepy southern town and moving north to Paris, the journey viewed this time through a pair of eyes seasoned by inevitabilities of age—windfalls and personal loss: books published, babies born, the death of an only, beloved sibling. And while L’Hexagone delivered everything described in my essay of 2010, those real joys felt limned this time by deepened tensions and frailties. All the jewels remain intact in the crown, but they seem to have shrunk a little. Life feels tougher there, more fraught. North African storekeepers look grimmer, more vigilant; teenagers act out more recklessly; clerks, streetpeople, business types, even nannies all seem tightened, more pinched by want and need as they move through the day’s obligations. A certain playfulness seems to have vanished. Everything’s bewilderingly expensive. True, restaurants and cafes still bustle with people who appear poised, accomplished, at ease with the world and with their meal’s bill. But waitstaff, as they hustle about, damp and breathless, exude a telling, desperate fatigue. The divide between haves and have-nots grows starker.

This, too, counts as astonishment. If we are honest with ourselves about it, we’re never ready for the next revelation, whether for good or (too often) for ill. It falls to an individual’s mettle—an inborn or willed resolve—to be able to witness the rise and fall of of empires and ideals, live with surging change and uncertainty, and knit meaning from them; carry on with what remains. Part of what is gained, with age, is a richer sense of how little these parsings (and the parser him- or herself) finally matter. France does not care who loves or hates it, just as a piece of timeless music or art does not care. Do I still champion the Cake-Frosting Country? Yes, but with an asterisk—an existential qualifier, an expressive shrug in the best Gallic tradition: “as it stands, as best one can.”

***

Joan Frank (http://www.joanfrank.org) is the author of five books of fiction and a book of Joan Frankcollected essays. Her last novel, MAKE IT STAY, won the Dana Portfolio Award; her last story collection, IN ENVY COUNTRY, won the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award, and was named a finalist for the California Book Award. Joan’s book of essays, BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO: A WRITING LIFE, won the Silver ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award. A MacDowell Colony Fellow and recipient of many grants and awards, Joan is also a book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in Northern California.

 

© The Antioch Review 2015

Backstory – “In the Brief Egyptian Spring” by Bruce Fleming

30 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by Grace Curtis in Backstory, Essay

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Bruce Fleming, Egypt, Essay, Spring in Egypt, The Antioch Review

 

carphoto Bruce Fleming (2)Contributor, Bruce Fleming, shares the backstory of his prophetic piece, “In the Brief Egyptian Spring,” published in the Fall, 2007 issue of The Antioch Review. In that piece, Fleming describes contemporary Egypt as “a country on economic life support,” and proceeds to take readers on a journey—one he took with a native guide—through Alexandria and Cairo. He explores its hotels, restaurants, museums, people, even its tobacco, through the eyes of a seasoned sojourner. In this piece, Fleming notes similarities between his visit to Egypt to that of other countries he’s spent time in that were also on the brink of radical change.

***

I’ve lived in three countries that, within a reasonable period of time after I left, suffered upheavals and revolutions that upended the order I knew. One was Rwanda, where I was the Fulbright Professor at the National University from 1985-87. In Rwanda, at the time a dirt-poor but beautiful series of mountain ridges dotted with huts and banana trees and slumbering in the highland sun, the invasion of Uganda (ex-Rwanda) Tutsi in 1990 caused a civil war, that in turn unleashed the largely Hutu-on-Tutsi massacre that we in the West know as the Rwandan genocide, and in turn produced the current Tutsi state grown fat on the exploitation of Congolese mines.

Another country (sort of) was the island of West Berlin, where I was a Fulbright scholar from 1982-83. In 1989, the Wall that defined West Berlin’s island existence fell. The self-proclaimed country of the GDR has ceased to exist, and Berlin, both East and West, is once again the capital of the reunited Germany, glittering with new buildings of glass and steel and a spanking new railway station to replace the tired Eastern Alexanderplatz, where I took trains to Dresden and Prague. And the third was Cairo, which I visited a few years before what came to be called the Arab Spring.  Continue reading →

Backstory – “Pilot Light” by Thomas J. Cottle

04 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by Grace Curtis in Backstory, Essay

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backstory, Essay, On being Jewish, prejudice, The Antioch Review, Thomas Cottle, Thomas J. Cottle

thomas-cottleIn his essay, “Pilot Light” (Winter, 2013) Thomas J. Cottle tells of living with the “low murmur of fear” related to being Jewish. He calls this murmur, a pilot light, the small flame that burns continuously, and that at any moment can be used to ignite the full flame of terror. Cottle goes on to speak of the hundreds of things that today, keep the pilot light lit, even the small things like a colleague’s off-handed remark or a tasteless joke. As a child growing up with parents who well remember the Holocaust, Cottle recalls below, the time when, as an adolescent, he came face to face with betrayal and physical assault at the hands of someone he thought was a friend for no other reason than the fact that he was Jewish. He writes that “the words of philosopher Michael Oakeshott are relevant here: ‘We are what we have learned,’ Let us add, and what we continue to learn, and, for all I know, what our forbearers learned.”

 

On Brecht, French Horns, and Pilot Lights

Thomas J. Cottle

I remember the heat, the oppressive heat that one summer morning and I remember being cut by the bushes when Sam, a boy who lived in the neighborhood, and another boy, my French horn playing comrade, someone I thought of as my best-out-of-school friend, shoved me face first in to the corner of the garden behind Sam’s house. There was dirt in my mouth along with blood, and the two of them sat on me and pounded me and told me I was a dirty, filthy, Jew. They hated Jews, they said. “We hate Jews. And you’re a Jew. So we hate you!” And they pounded my arms and back. My crying only made them hit me harder and shove my face more forcefully into the dirt. “You’re a crying Jew girl. Sissy girl Jew. Sissy Jew.” To this day I feel so hurt by the one boy, I can neither mention his name nor employ a pseudonym for him in these musings. He shall remain the French horn player. He went away for high school and college and I never entered his home again. Years later I learned that he had died; I think he might have been no more than thirty. It was from an illness. I remember not knowing what to think, or what to feel; not a single emotion came forth. But by then the pilot light had been burning for years. Continue reading →

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