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Sy Safransky's Notebook
February 1980
On The Run
Russia invades Afghanistan, and the United States, playing the outraged suitor, wags its hips at China. The problem of relationship is global and personal. What are the boundaries? Who do we kiss and who do we kill?
February 1980October 1979
The Open Door
Reasons, someone wrote, are whores. I believe that. The rational mind bends and scrapes like a sycophantic servant caught napping. I’m not against reason. I just don’t trust it if I’m out of the room.
October 1979August 1979
Three . . . And Three
After she left, he sat up all night watching his body for signs of change, then watching his mind, trying to arrange his thoughts like jewelry.
August 1979July 1979
Orbits
By the time you read this, Skylab may already have tumbled out of orbit and crashed back to Earth. I wish something else would tumble: the kind of mentality that put Skylab up there in the first place, with so little regard for the future.
July 1979June 1979
Words
There are no words / for who I am. I / build myself up, / I tear myself down.
June 1979March 1979
The Sun Also Changes
I’d always been interested in journalism, in writing and in self-expression. The magazine actually grew out of a conversation with Mike Mathers, who then ran the Community Bookstore. That’s when I was running the juice bar and I used to bring him juice drinks for lunch every day. Then one day we got to talking about how it would be nice if Chapel Hill had a newsletter or a magazine.
March 1979February 1979
Stories
The eyes she discovered by a lake in thirteenth century France. They had rolled down the hillside, gathering momentum until they saw their own reflection.
February 1979January 1979
Fathers
To let our parents be, to accept them as people, human and therefore imperfect, rather than as gods — that is the challenge.
January 1979December 1978
Thanksgiving
Anchors raised, we were a free people journeying into our own living flesh, and consciousness striving to know itself: political freedom; economic freedom; sexual freedom; artistic freedom. The freedom to abuse freedom. To enslave, and to set free. To become President, and to bear arms: to lean a rifle on a window sill, take aim, squeeze the trigger, and hurl a tiny speck of our own dark heart into the tissue of another. All for the sake of freedom — the greatest burden, the greatest joy.
December 1978Five Poems
I want to love loneliness / the way I love you. I want / to enter it and twist up its / hair in my fist.
August 1978Request a free trial, and we’ll mail you a print copy of this month’s issue. Plus you’ll get full online access — including 50 years of archives. Request A Free Issue