Rating: Three Stars
Whether we are
surrounded by a four wall enclosure inside one of Louis Sullivan’s creations or
in a tightly compressed studio apartment in downtown Chicago, the structure
that make up these rooms come alive and will continue to outlive us
throughout history. MAKE’s Architectural 2013 Issue: Now we’re in the bodies
of the previous occupants is dedicated to Chicago’s longstanding
architecture and the people that inhabit these buildings on a day-to-day
basis.The interviews, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual art are printed
in MAKE’s Spring Issue #12 for the purposes of humanizing architectural
compounds. Buildings are beings that are shaped by our own perceptions of
ourselves, by the way we might place our stack of books on a hard wood
floor on the edges of each wall space, or the way we might throw a
tattered copy of Fifty Shades of Grey across a living room, leaving a
dent on our whitewashed wall. A building must settle in with our needs and
wants. It must suffer with us when our walls become yellowed by our constant,
anxious smoking at 3AM, or the excruciating August heat.
John O’Toole’s
unwillingness to comply with his wife, Mary’s desire to put a chain link fence
in their house, demonstrates the protagonist’s desire to keep his only
possession pure in Erin O’ Sullivan’s fiction piece, “Chain-o-Link.” The Jencho
boys bulldoze through front yards as they toss their football across what seems
like everyone’s property but their own, and Mary and all the other wives on the
block despise them.
John is a
Korean War vet who recently moved to a Chicago suburb with Mary and their son
Mikey. He envies his howdy-greetin’ neighbor Bob because unlike him, Bob
actually has a handful of war stories to share at get-togethers. The man
actually did something. The only upgrade John got in the army, was to be
deployed to Missouri. John craves the mindset of a Post-Traumatic; instead,
he’s forced to be surrounded by neighbors that don’t seem to notice that their
soon-to-be-caged fences will take away the innocence of two boys who are simply
doing what young boys are supposed to do. To the protagonist, a fenceless house
means freedom. It represents a world without boundaries and aesthetic symmetry
within the confines of a house.
Other stories
in MAKE’s 12th Issue take on the task of further personalizing objects, like
Tovah Burnstein’s nonfiction piece, “Other People’s Wigs: Buying a New Life at
Estate Sales.” Burstein flings us into the first estate sale in a 1960s “sitcom
house in Wisconsin,” whose “second floor was decorated for three perfect sitcom
daughters: a pink room, a yellow room, and a blue room, each with a canopy bed
and matching upholstery.” It’s not difficult to imagine, the owner of the
house—an old woman that hasn’t been to the grocery store in decades—with her three daughters,
helping their mother pin oddly shaped wigs on her thinning hairline. The wigs
are sold at $50 a piece, memories included.
The fiction
and nonfiction pieces in the magazine’s spring 2013 issue did the
architecturally themed concept justice. Amy Yoes’ silver gelatin prints
demonstrate the life of buildings without inhabitants—grayish death tones,
places left to rot.
The issue,
however, lacks proper formatting. Genre labels are present in the table of
contents, but not within the pages that follow. Though this is standard form in
many literary magazines, it makes for disruptive reading. One must constantly
refer back to the table of contents to know what is what. Worse, some of the
pieces are not numbered correctly. In the contents, Randa Jarrar’s short story
“Building Girls” is said to be on page thirty-three, but is really on page
seventy. There are six other pieces with this same error.
One of the
most eye-catching fiction pieces in this issue is Jarrar’s story, which takes
place in a summer home in Egypt. Jarrar’s syntax is flawless:
My father’s
skin is black like the street on which the summer children play soccer, and his
teeth are white and gleaming, with the occasional cavities, so they look like
the soccer balls. He runs errands for the women who don’t have their husbands
with them, or whose husbands are lazy; I sometimes see the women blush when
Father talks to them because he is unbearably handsome.
“Building
Girls” is written in first person point of view from Aisha’s perspective whose
routine, quotidian life manifests itself into an exquisite mixture of language
and detail. Unfortunately, it’s a bit difficult to get to know this character
after the first two paragraphs—the place where MAKE’s editors seem to have mistakenly
duplicated the author’s first two paragraphs in one page. It's possible this
repetition was the author's intention, yet “Building Girls” is not experimental
and similar repetition is not seen anywhere else in the story.
“Know When to
Shut Up: A Q & A with Chicago’s Official Cultural Historian, Tim Samuelson”
placed several pages into the lit mag is decorated with a considerable amount
of photographs taken from Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium Building at the Roosevelt
University, Samuelson’s ultimate structure. The images are the only reference
the reader obtains from the interview. It would have been nice to see Samuelson
provide a more detailed account of the reason Sullivan’s Auditorium has
impacted his life, or else to see photographs with greater detail in precision.
Despite these
oversights, MAKE is a good starting off lit mag for current creative writing
undergraduates that want to get into the habit of reading something other than
literary classics or for writers whose work has never been published before.
MAKE is the perfect magazine to send your name off into the sometimes
overwhelming literary world.
Here's the link for this review: http://www.thereviewreview.net/reviews/bodies-previous-occupants-lit-mag-looks-architecture
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