via Feces Contaminates More Than Half of U.S. Public Pools – Bloomberg.

Jacqueline Kharouf, contributor and production manager for Numéro Cinq, has had a piece of flash fiction published in the Spring 2013 issue of NANO Fiction, a print magazine that publishes shorts of 250 words (or less).  Jacqueline’s piece, “Buffalo,” is a 247-word account of a funny dream she once had.  Here’s a very short excerpt of this very short story:

After work, I found a perfect miniature buffalo grunting in the alley behind my building.  He had deep brown eyes, tiny slate gray horns, and his coat was frizzy like the carpeting in my car.  With the apple from my bag I coaxed him inside, his hooves clopping as he followed me upstairs.  I’d never had a pet before—not even a stupid fish—but he seemed valuable and small enough that he wouldn’t be a hassle.

Kind of makes you want a miniature buffalo, no? Buy the magazine and read the rest!

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Does this mean I can write off my cleaning person as a medical expense?

“persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions due to a perceived need to save the items and distress associated with discarding them,”

via 15 new mental illnesses in the DSM-5 – Slide Show – MarketWatch.

1. more book reviewers (only apply if you have read carefully several recent book reviews published on NC and you have read the review guidelines and you read literature in translation and you are conversant with literary Modernism and you can supply good clean copy that requires minimal copyediting);
2. poetry reviewers (I have discovered that these are as scarce as whooping cranes; only apply if you can explain a poem in technical terms, influence and tradition and you fit the general requirements for book reviewers above);
3. French language editor/curator (someone of taste who can find and shepherd through production contemporary works in French; we have published some Quebec literature in French, but my source ran dry);
4. Spanish language editor/curator (someone of taste who can find and shepherd through production contemporary works in Spanish; I would really like to expand NC’s reach into Mexico and beyond);
5. music editor/curator (someone of taste and musical expertise—we are leaning to jazz and contemporary New Music but open-minded—who can find and shepherd through production pieces on contemporary composers and compositions).
6. ebook production person (someone with expertise in shepherding ebooks through production and into the hands of Amazon or whoever).

I wish for more, but there is a start.

I want to emphasize that I am looking for culturally aware individuals who are conversant with the history of traditions, read widely in international literature, and who can write good, clean copy. Also, more and more, it is necessary that people who come to NC with the intention of contributing more than once need to be able to handle themselves on WordPress. By this I mean that you are able to upload text and images and design a piece on your own according to house style. In this day and age, if you can’t do this, you’re a dinosaur.

There is no pay for this; the magazine costs me money and none comes in. But there is the glory.

Send expressions of interest to editor@numerocinq.net, but before you do, think it over and make sure you’ll fit.

dg

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2. From Stories to Canon

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3 The Greco-Roman World

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4 Judaism in the First Century

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5 The New Testament as History

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6 The Gospel of Mark

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7 The Gospel of Matthew

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8 The Gospel of Thomas

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9 The Gospel of Luke

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10 The Acts of the Apostles

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11 Johannine Christianity: The Gospel

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12 Johannine Christianity: The Letters

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13 The Historical Jesus

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14 Paul as Missionary

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15 Paul as Pastor

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16 Paul as Jewish Theologian

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17 Paul’s Disciples

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18 Arguing with Paul?

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19 The “Household” Paul: The Pastorals

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20 The “Anti-household” Paul: Thecla

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21 Interpreting Scripture: Hebrews

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22 Interpreting Scripture: Medieval Interpretations

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23 Apocalyptic and Resistance

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24 Apocalyptic and Accommodation

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25 Ecclesiastical Institutions: Unity, Martyrs, and Bishops

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26 The “Afterlife” of the New Testament and Postmodern Interpretation

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If you want to, you can also go to the Open Yale site and download audio files of all the lectures.

dg

1 The Parts of the Whole

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2 The Hebrew Bible in Its Ancient Near Eastern Setting: Biblical Religion in Context

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3 The Hebrew Bible in Its Ancient Near Eastern Setting: Genesis 1-4 in Context

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4 Doublets and Contradictions, Seams and Sources: Genesis 5-11 and the Historical-Critical Method

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5 Critical Approaches to the Bible: Introduction to Genesis 12-50

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6 Biblical Narrative: The Stories of the Patriarchs (Genesis 12-36)

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7 Israel in Egypt: Moses and the Beginning of Yahwism (Genesis 37- Exodus 4)

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8 Exodus: From Egypt to Sinai (Exodus 5-24, 32; Numbers)

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9 The Priestly Legacy: Cult and Sacrifice, Purity and Holiness in Leviticus and Numbers

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10 Biblical Law: The Three Legal Corpora of JE (Exodus), P (Leviticus and Numbers) and D (Deuteronomy)

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11 On the Steps of Moab: Deuteronomy

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12 The Deuteronomistic History: Life in the Land (Joshua and Judges)

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13 The Deuteronomistic History: Prophets and Kings (1 and 2 Samuel)

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14 The Deuteronomistic History: Response to Catastrophe (1 and 2 Kings)

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15 Hebrew Prophecy: The Non-Literary Prophets

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16 Literary Prophecy: Amos

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17 Literary Prophecy: Hosea and Isaiah

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18 Literary Prophecy: Micah, Zephaniah, Nahum and Habbakuk

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19 Literary Prophecy: Perspectives on the Exile (Jeremiah, Ezekiel and 2nd Isaiah)

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20 Responses to Suffering and Evil: Lamentations and Wisdom Literature

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21 Biblical Poetry: Psalms and Song of Songs

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22 The Restoration: 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah

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23 Visions of the End: Daniel and Apocalyptic Literature

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24 Alternative Visions: Esther, Ruth, and Jonah

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I try to acknowledge the dark side on the Omens page, wherein we note the hysterical violence, stupidity and cupidity that is the general rule in the human comedy, but then I turn happily to Eric Foley’s review essay on Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle or Pat Keane’s essay on Nietzsche and Mark Twain (what a dream pair) or Bruce Stone’s essay on Nabokov and the provenance of Lolita or Peter Mishler’s gorgeous interview with David Ferry or Paul Curtis’s essay on The Alexandria  Quartet or Betsy Sholl’s essay on Osip Mandelstam or Robert Day’s essay about his mother (for Mother’s Day, of course).

One of the perks of the job here is that I get to read all this stuff. Can you imagine? (Sigh.)

This really is a stellar issue in terms of depth but also surprising (as I try to stretch the imaginary envelope of art) because we also have Leonard Bellanca’s fine furniture images and David Helwig’s graffiti photo essay (originally we were going to put up the images and have you guess which city they came from). R. W. Gray took time from making his own movie to write about Wes Anderson’s Hotel Chevalier — have you watched it yet?

Jordan Smith contributed poems wherein you can read such things as “…we disciples of friction, know how each little slip/ Undoes becoming, becomes undoing…” Hilary Mullins wrote a Childhood piece focusing on her grandmother nicknamed Germ and featuring photographs taken by bill hayward. Steven Henighan gave us a story “Grade” about class and race assumptions and their comeuppance (Aristotelean reversal at the end, satisfying). Jason DeYoung introduced a slender, surprising minimalist story in translation by Danish author Simon Frueland.

Steven Axelrod reviewed Elizabeth Strout’s new novel The Burgess Boys; Russell Working, journalist and Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer, adverted up the use of research (the crucial demand for those annoying things called facts); Anne Loecher introduced us to the great, forgotten poet Lorine Niedecker; and Donald Quist wrote beautifully about what it is like living in Bangkok.

Burgeoning is a word that comes to mind: count the names, the works, the connections, the words.

Also it’s worth mentioning again that NC is a community, a mutually supportive entity; this issue wouldn’t have come into being without the background work of Production Manager Jacqueline Kharouf, also the extra editing and layout work of Jason DeYoung and the editing help I got from Richard Farrell.

Now May is done — on to June!

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Since Descartes (whose Radical Doubt long preceded Nietzsche’s God is Dead moment), Western philosophy has been dominated by a nostalgia for lost Being, for the sacred cosmos that made our lives an epic drama of  interaction with the gods. The 20th century was dominated by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who turned mostly away from the problem and thought about how language constitutes the world we live in, and Martin Heidegger, who seems to have maintained the possibility of a romantic semi-mystical phenomenological intuition (for want of a better word) of Being.

When I was an undergraduate and graduate student at Edinburgh, the problem of lost Being did obsess me (probably more than was healthy); my solution was to throw myself into the study of Kant, who turned out not to have solved the problem. My son Jacob has inherited the family obsession, and, willy-nilly, has thrown himself into the study of Heidegger (and his student Gadamer). It’s a fascinating family dynamic; I only grasped it the other day walking the dog, who is a Cynic.^[1]

Wes Cecil is, as I have said before, a remarkable, funny, passionate lecturer, a massively helpful Virgil in the Land of the Philosophical Shades.

dg

Just 56 percent of college students complete four-year degrees within six years, according to a 2011 Harvard Graduate School of Education study. Among the 18 developed countries in the OECD, the U.S. was dead last for the percentage of students who completed college once they started it ― even behind Slovakia.

via 11 Public Universities with the Worst Graduation Rates.

Many Americans awoke this morning to discover that (a) the mayor of Toronto is a guy named Rob Ford, and (b) Rob Ford smokes crack. Gawker reported last night that a cell-phone video clearly showing Ford lighting up a crack pipe — which was supposedly filmed within the last six months, while he was mayor — was being shopped around for six figures. Gawker’s John Cook saw the video in person with his own two eyes, as did two reporters from the Toronto Star. Ford’s lawyer calls the video “false and defamatory” and asks, hilariously, “How can you indicate what the person is actually doing or smoking?”

via 20 Things Worth Knowing About Rob Ford — Daily Intelligencer.

New Plains Review has just published a short story by NC Senior Editor Richard Farrell in the Spring Issue.  “Livin’ the Dream” is a story about a stay-at-home dad trying to get his kids ready for school.  Here’s a short excerpt:

I pray that my daughter changes her underwear. I pray that, in his top drawer, one pair of clean socks remains for my son. That existential question looms over everything: How many times can children ignore their oral hygiene before every tooth rots?

It was Sara once told me that anger engenders panic and accomplishes nothing. We often spoke of our domestic lives the way soldiers might of a distant battle. On the good days, I think of her words again and direct my tribe with the stern, calm demeanor of Sitting Bull astride a horse, clear-eyed in the fog of war, undaunted by the imminence of death or cavities. During the stormier times, when my harsh words echo across our home and out toward the future like arrows shot against the coming cavalry of my children’s memories, I worry about how they’ll remember me. How my failures as a father will scar and calcify, until all that remains will be the parts which blame. Childhood, like history, forms its own narrative apart from the reality of cause and effect. I suddenly feel a great sympathy with men like Napoleon and George W. Bush.

I begin sopping up the milk as Moo pulls her brother to his feet and directs him away from the mess and my growing irritation.

Moo is Katherine Grace, our precocious eight-year-old, a girl so singularly obsessed with cows that her bedroom is a living homage to every resplendent dairy farm between Oshkosh and Salzburg. Cow sheets, cow pillows, cow lamps, Holstein statuettes, a Milking Shorthorn bank, a pair of Brown Swiss slippers. Posters, photos and drawings of the cud-chewing variety adorn every square inch of her bedroom and have begun spilling out into the hallway, so much so that I’ve half-seriously considered countering her bovine extravagance by displaying a few reminders of my own, some contrast to her cartoonish fixation, a harsher version of the domesticated ungulate’s reality. Perhaps a few black and white photos from the abattoir would do the trick, or from the old Chicago stockyards—meat hooks, cow skulls, bone saws, gray entrails and glistening plates of prime rib. Her grandfather, after all, was a butcher, an Irish meat-cutter who came home from work with hair that smelled of blood and hamburger. I wonder sometimes if Moo’s obsession with ruminants has come down through the bloodlines, like some kind of genetic haunting that drives her to decorate her room and body in a vainglorious attempt to erase the ancestral slaughter which funded her family and fed a nation.

— Buy the magazine & read the rest!

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Wes Anderson’s short film “Hotel Chevalier” is a lean, bruised and naked tale in a Paris hotel room. Anderson shot the short with his own funds (and the actors, Natalie Portman and Jason Schwartzman, donated their time) two years prior to his feature The Darjeeling Limited but it was often screened at the same time and is referred to by many as a prologue to that feature film that followed it (as mentioned in this previous NC at the Movies entry). The two are aesthetically consistent, but that’s not surprising as most of Anderson’s films belong to the same visual palate and characters seem descended from the same family tree.

Though they were conceived separately, Anderson brought the short and feature together through their common character of Jack Whitmore.  Whitmore is precious, careful and, in his manicured construction of his hotel room a bit compulsive. In contrast, his beloved shows up with her fierce toothpick-in-mouth machismo, her velociraptor-attack dialogue (“What the fuck is going on?”), and her sudden bruised nakedness.

It is an uncomfortable film on several levels: visually there are the awkward, stagey wide shots of the room, the contrasting dolly shots and camera pans, the manicured way Jack has designed the room for his beloved’s arrival (complete with soundtrack queue on the ipod and a freshly painted painting): has he created the perfect setting for their reunion or a well designed bunker to defend himself against her impending assault? And does it matter since either would be in vain?

Then there is greater discomfort as Portman’s character arrives, asks almost mockingly “What’s this music?” and then touches all the carefully laid details of the room with further ridicule, even touching the wet painting, all as if to throw aside any attempts he had to set decorate or defend himself.

Does he love her or hate her? At this late stage they’re post woodchipper and it seems futile to sort through the bits of each. We’re given next to no back story except that she says to him “I never hurt you on purpose” and that he escaped her and seems clear when he says to her, “I will never be your friend. Ever.”

We don’t need to know more. This is the story of a man who fled, waits, then with gentle bath robe in hand shows her his view of Paris and offers her back her toothpick.  She’s only there for the night after all. It’s a perfect condensation of past and present with no future.

– R. W. Gray