This is the archive page for Otium, Volume 2, Number 3.
“Sarah, the weather report foresees clear skies statewide and winds will diminish. An excellent omen for the future of Otium, Vol 2, issue 3.”
“Quel optimist, Deanna. In Greek, though, it is the past, not the future, that is conceived of as being in front of you, written enthade.”
“So the future is actually behind you, unseen, whereas the past is in the here and now?”
“Precisely. And writing, I’m convinced, renders the past legible. Otium authors engage that this issue, mapping what has happened before to a potential future. In ‘Roberto Melendez A.K.A. Esteban Martinez,’ Felicia Rosshandler retraces her escape from Nazi Germany through fragments of a letter that expose the fiction in her memoir.”
“The illegible self also turns up in the short by Hugo Perez, ‘This Babalu Goes out to You…,’ where the narrator longs to reveal one name: Ricky Ricardo.”
“The exposure in that piece did fascinate you, Deanna.”
“Well, names are key. I was telling you the other day how the turnpike in my state is being widened and all the exits renamed.”
“How arbitrary.”
“No, just people coming together to determine a better way to travel. Convention makes the journey easier. That’s why I think we should italicize foreign words in our publication: to cue shifts in language and help the reader through the piece.”
“I fear that italics say to a reader, you don’t have to understand this word, which marginalizes the subject, and creates an Other.”
“But languages are different—any change without notice can throw the reader out of the story. Why not indicate that shift?”
“Because italics presuppose not what is foreign but what is unfamiliar. How do we know who knows what a bodega is or what hapa means? There is no way to tell and no accurate way to impose.”
“Well, since we cannot divine what people know, let’s privilege the author’s voice. Felicia, for example, believes that italics ‘accentuate the tension between cultures.’”
“Actually, I was thinking we’d wait for a tutelary divinity to call on us. I got her name off an awesome box of Cornflakes.”
“What shall we do while we attend the daimon?”
“Read. I brought raincoats and Greg Allen’s Writing as it is Being Written and somebody’s mom’s copy of Rosshandler’s memoir, Passing Through Havana.”
Vol. 2 No. 3 Articles
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A Conversation With Felicia Rosshandler
by Sarah Adair Frank
14 October 2005SF:
I understand that you have an extensive Barbie doll collection. I’m curious if you connect this hobby to the American dream and/or your photographic work.
FR:
…I have been criticized for using an idealized version of beauty, one that no woman can live up to. Yet the history of art has been dominated by the unobtainable; the Renaissance virgins and the Pre-Raphaelite beauties are as much an ideal as Barbie, yet no one questions them because they are established and consecrated.
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Roberto Melendez A.K.A. Esteban Martinez
by Felicia Rosshandler
14 October 2005I always perceived my mother as brazenly coquettish and remember being intensely aware during my adolescence that she was having a turbid love affair in Havana. We never spoke about it, she and I, but I believe that it imprinted me deeply. Perhaps that is why I drew the character of my father in such a sad sympathetic light.
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Writing As It Is Being Written (A play to be performed by five performers.)
by Greg Allen
14 October 20055&6&1&2&3:
I could be writing a play on the beach or in the bath
4:
or while getting a blowjob.
ALL:
I could be writing a play on the beach or in the bath or while getting a blowjob
5:
but I’m not.
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This Babalu Goes Out To You…
by Hugo Perez
14 October 2005I am the son of Ricky Ricardo… I see that you do not believe me, that you are skeptical. The look on your faces seems to ask why the son of the great Rumbero is working in a small lounge off Calle Ocho in Miami instead of performing on his own TV show on Telemundo, or perhaps on Sabado Gigante as a special guest of that great host and humanitarian Don Francisco. Before I continue with my next song, I will explain.
Otium
