Air/Light Issue 9 launches with Maxine Hong Kingston, Armen Davoudian, and Jessica Elisheva Emerson, Boris Dralyuk, and Brian Bouldrey
This week in Air/Light:
Conversations: The Chowdhury Distinguished Speakers Series: Maxine Hong Kingston in Conversation with David L. Ulin
Poetry: “Public Enemy” by Boris Dralyuk
Essays/Nonfiction: “Suzanne Somers’s Eggplant Cookbook” by Brian Bouldrey
From the Editor: “Mystery Train” by David L. Ulin
And stay tuned for next week, where we’ll feature work by Toni Ann Johnson and Alisha Dietzman!
The Chowdhury Distinguished Speakers Series: Maxine Hong Kingston in Conversation with David L. Ulin
On November 13, 2023, the Subir and Malini Foundation Distinguished Speakers Series welcomed Maxine Hong Kingston to the University of Southern California. Kingston appeared at Bovard Auditorium in an event presented by the USC Dornsife Department of English and USC Visions & Voices, with additional support from KCRW, and co-sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the USC Center for Transpacific Studies. Kingston read from her work, including an unpublished diary/essay about a visit to the border, and engaged in a wide-ranging conversation with USC Professor and Air/Light editor David L. Ulin.
Air/Light is delighted to present a video of this interview.
Armen Davoudian: “Holy Translators,” “Mirror”
Holy Translators
I’ll always be in love with Father Tigran.
I’ll wear a long black robe and never marry.
I’ll stroke my bushy beard and lecture on
the Holy Translators of the fifth century,
who invented the Armenian alphabet
to record the Bible. To translate means to carry
from one place to another, like a jet.
We are their inheritors in this Muslim country.
We brought the printing press to Isfahan,
we introduced oil lamps in Austria,
we put the first rover on the moon,
and when the Turks marched us to Syria
we sent a student my age to Berlin
to plant a bullet in the Pasha’s brain.
Jessica Elisheva Emerson: “The Drunken Rabbit”
Blumie chose the Drunken Rabbit because rabbit isn’t kosher, and even though it wouldn’t be served at a whisky bar, this somehow compounded the sin she intended to commit.
Actually, there were rabbits at the bar. Taxidermied rabbits, and also birds and rodents. Her flat shoes stuck and then unstuck themselves to the floor with a ffffsshk that echoed as she walked from the front door to an empty stool between two other empty stools. She vibrated with the mistake of her coming. Or anticipation.
She had not considered taxidermy as a feature when she spent most of a day at work scrolling reviews of bars. She started with a map, choosing only spots on the northeast side, far from the shtetl of Pico-Robertson. Not that anyone in her neighborhood was likely to go to a veltlich bar.
“What can I get you?” The bartender was wearing suspenders over a sports bra, a large ring in her nose, curly hair swept into a hairnet. She pushed a small napkin in front of Blumie.
Boris Dralyuk: “Public Enemy”
He’d slinked out of a pre-Code film,
red tooth, red claw, a handsome brute
for whom you knew you shouldn’t root,
knowing what lay in store for him,
Brian Bouldrey: “Suzanne Somers’s Eggplant Cookbook”
When American Graffiti came out in 1973, my parents were thirty. It was their youth in that movie, and once your youth is packed up and packaged into a film like a volume of Collected Poems, you know you’re old.
But I was ten then and didn’t know that.
American Graffiti was held over for four months at the Michigan Theater in Jackson, and my folks went to see it three times. (That was an indulgence, for babysitters were expensive.) When it moved to the drive-in at the edge of town, they took us with them for a fourth viewing, insisting this was the authentic record of their experience in high school. My two younger brothers, aged seven and four, immediately fell asleep in the way back of the Chevy station wagon and I moved up to the front seat, sitting between my father, who was at the wheel, and my mother, behind the glove compartment.
David L. Ulin: “Mystery Train”
On a weekday afternoon in early March, I found myself on Amtrak, traveling from Washington, D.C. to New York. The first time I took this route, I was not quite sixteen, a wanna-Beat reading The Dharma Bums to the soundtrack laid down by the rhythm of the rails. I kept imagining that motion as something spiritual… but then, I have long had a thing for trains. Three years later, I would nearly be killed by one while crossing a freight trestle bridge with a friend just outside the South Texas town of Three Rivers, where we were then on crew at a uranium mine.
Run! I screamed or might have screamed or thought I screamed as I saw the snout of the locomotive round a stand of cottonwoods, and we were off, trying not to look at the gaps between the trackless ties or the dry riverbed twenty feet below us, trying not to slip and fall, or more accurately: trying not to die.