New Partisan is proud to present as excerpt from Jason Little’s graphic novel, Motel Art Improvement Service, a crackling good story that’s somewhere about the border of Hergé and Clowes.

If an emergency physician encountered a patient in cardiac arrest, he’d “shock” him and bring him back to life. Presented with the same situation, the state would have a meeting. Then, when the body began to smell, they would have another meeting. Finally, they would dump the body. It was the nature of the state to be bureaucratic. There was nothing more to it than that.

This week’s video feature, by New Partisan regular A.R. Brook Lynn, is a short film about a cash-strapped Greenwich Village mother, Becky (NP contributor Hala Lettieri), and her six-and-a-half-year old daughter, Charlotte (Samantha Becker), on a trip to see her estranged husband, James (Salvatore Interlandi, writer and director of the widely acclaimed  Charlie), and try to collect child support. James also features Angela Pietropinto (Welcome to the Dollhouse), and a cameo by New Partisan editor-in-chief Harry Siegel as the mental patient some say he was born to play.

 

“Just wait until 2009,” the true believer told me as we were departing Tuesday’s mayoral forum on the parks. The prodigal party will return to Gracie Mansion, and all will be made whole.

New Partisan is proud to present Lincoln MacVeagh’s now complete serial novel, Old Money, a dark satire in the manner of Evelyn Waugh and Dawn Powell:

“Look Dante, the question I’m getting at is this: Do you love commercial real estate? I don’t think you do.”

“Does anyone love commercial real estate?” asked Dante.

“I should hope so.”

“Do you love it?”

Mr. Bullard answered carefully. “I like it a lot.”

“Then you don’t love it?”

“No, but I care about it. I care deeply about it.”

Mr. Bullard folded his arms across his chest as if daring Dante to disbelieve him. Dante was genuinely puzzled. He hadn’t anticipated this discussion and he stared at Mr. Bullard trying to imagine what it meant to care deeply about commercial real estate.

There was an embarrassing silence before Dante realized where the conversation was headed:

“I’m being stupid, aren’t I?”

“I want to say something to you or write something about you that would be as beautiful in itself as the life I would have led with you had you loved me.” —Paul Potts in Dante Called You Beatrice.

 
His hands were in the belly pockets of the coat and as he drew close I noticed that he had a lazy eye. I don’t like to categorize people on the basis of their looks, but this man was a perfect rendering of a pulp novel hustler, appearing dangerous not so much for what he could do physically but, rather, morally.
 

After six years of a fellow evangelical in the White House, many no longer take it as a given that the Republican Party and its candidates are in step with Christian values. Mark Foley’s dalliances with pages may be the shorthand for the general discontent, but it’s Jack Abramoff, Bob Ney and Tom Delay, too.

As of today, Democrats are favored to pick up six governor’s seats.

As of today, Democrats are favored to pick up six seats, just enough to win the Senate.

Upstate’s declining population of increasingly elderly and poor remaining residents are no longer consistent conservatives. While Pataki, like Cuomo, has overseen this decline, he’s also clinging to the back of the demographic leviathan.

Like a boxer, he was light on his feet, he hit from the center of his weight outward, and you didn’t know where it was gonna come from, but it always connected.

Flip through Weegee’s photos to see the city’s violent underbelly, or Berenice Abbott’s for razor-sharp views of the city’s canyons. Look to Michael Wesely for ghostlike, long-term exposures. When I look at Bill Travis’s work, I see something different and the closest parallels I can find are with photographs over a hundred years old.

Amber Scoon's Cortelyou Project, a series of paintings of what the 2000 census found to be America's most integrated neighborhod.

I must have studied that novel in at least two classes as an undergraduate. In fact, looking at my beat-up copy from back then, I have a sinking feeling that I even had to teach it one year in freshman comp. That was when I had to go over it carefully enough to explain to students what was good about it, and I always had the nagging suspicion that whatever it was, I’d missed it.

I think of Taras because he loved me when it was easy to love me.

I wore my hair in two braids, a thin whippet of a smiling girl, not unlike a very young Therese: her smooth brow, her lovely cheekbone, her innocent abandon, the pretty white shirt collar, her little ankle socks.

I am no longer that. But what is Taras? I project him on the walls of my memory, a voyeuristic image, a dried rose hung upside down in the attic, stripped of meaning, withered. I do not any longer know what he is or where he is or how he is.

I think of him but I do not dream of him.

But I dream of Kiev.

Place matters: its eradication can neither be reversed nor the sin atoned. No book, no film can ever restore what dies inside us when the wrecking crews descend.

But the big news that day was the source of all these divers and worthy tidings – the debut edition of The Titusville Morning Herald, a four-page broadsheet launched with lofty purpose in the heart of this prosperous oil town. It was Wednesday, June 14, 1865 – just two months to the day that a local oilman, John Wilkes Booth, gunned down President Lincoln.

Literature and music are replete with images of the circle as a signifier of completion and fullness. Steinbeck’s Preacher Casey as well as songwriters Joni Mitchell and Harry Chapin have utilized this metaphor, and the old hymn, “Will the circle be unbroken” points us to that someday when all will be made whole. Completely unbeknownst to me at the time, a circle began forming for me on July 6, 1967, when a fellow Air Force officer named Melvin Pollack climbed into his F-4 fighter jet for his 78th and final mission over the unfriendly skies of North Vietnam

One of America’s best Mother’s Day cards didn’t come from Hallmark or go to anyone’s mom. But in its own sweet way, it helped end the war in Vietnam and warmed the hearts of millions across the country. This special Mother’s Day greeting was mailed by the bagful in 1967 to President Lyndon B. Johnson. On the face of the simple, black and yellow card was a crude drawing of a sunflower. Between the leaves in a child’s scrawl were the poignant words, War is not healthy for children and other living things.