Interviews

Jennifer Burns

Clayton Trutor

In the fifth edition of our monthly interview series, American Polymath editor Clayton Trutor chats with Jennifer Burns via email. Jennifer Burns is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of a fascinating new intellectual biography of Ayn Rand entitled Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Since its October release by Oxford University Press, Goddess of the Market has received a great deal of publicity. Burns herself appeared on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Goddess of the Market has been reviewed positively in a wide range of publications and appears on a number of year-end "best of" lists.
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Your Favorites

What’s Your Favorite Decade?

As the 00s come to a merciful close, American Polymath’s panel of experts looks back on their all time favorite decades. Evidently, some members of the panel fancy decades well before or after they were born.
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Images

Bonnie and Clyde

Christopher Woods

Christopher Woods is a writer, photographer and teacher. He lives in Houston and in Chappell Hill, Texas. His work has appeared recently in Litchfield Review, Glasgow Review, and Narrative Magazine. He shares an online gallery with his wife Linda at Moonbird Hill Arts: www.moonbirdhill.exposuremanager.com/
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Fiction

Antiquing

Kevin P. Keating

They are lost, well, maybe not quite lost, how can they be, there are only so many roads out here, impossibly long ribbons of blacktop that roll across immense tracts of untilled farmland, bisecting one another at ninety degree angles every two or three square miles, a thousand nameless lines plotted with monstrous logic on a grid in the middle of this vast, vacant, November desolation. The leaves have peaked, the trees are practically bare, and few things remain to attract their attention--a crumbling dairy barn, a collapsed grain silo, the skeleton of an old windmill. From time to time they see painted ponies loping and cantering in the fields, and further on, as they crest the rocky summit of a hogback ridge they can make out a thin gray spire of smoke from a smoldering campfire rising from a valley. Further on, long rusty lengths of barbed wire stretch from fence post to fence post, marking either the beginning or the end of a wilderness, it’s difficult to tell which, and just beyond the wire there are swales of twisted yellow grass that swish back and forth and sound like a million whispering voices and where buzzards squat with outstretched wings and scratch at the black earth and pick at the fleshless bones of deer and rodents.

On a distant hillside, erupting from the earth like the skewed teeth of an exhumed skull, they see a dozen simple white gravestones, the last signs of a town long since abandoned, its inhabitants gladly returned to the anonymity of dust and bone. Many of the stones have been toppled over by drunk and listless teenagers, the inscriptions faded by a century of rain and snow that comes slashing sideways out of the sky.

"Think of the erosion," Claude murmurs. "After awhile I bet the coffins slide down that hill like bobsleds."
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Fiction

Saturday

Daniel Davis

The two boys sat on the rim of the drainage culvert. That was at least what Jared insisted on calling it—a "drainage culvert." To Ronny it was a piece of pipe poking out the side of Custer’s Hill.

“You scared?”

Ronny looked up. He saw that Jared had caught him staring down at the ground eight feet below, and smiled. “No. Just, you know, wondering what this thing is here for.”

“They’re doing construction a couple miles away. Think they’re building a new housing complex. This is probably for the run-off from that.”

“Run-off?”

“Yeah. Industrial waste. Wood scraps. Rainwater,” Jared said, winking.

“Shit.”

“Not literally.”

“They gotta put that Port-A-Potty waste somewhere, buddy.”

“Shit.”

“Exactly.”

They laughed, but neither moved away. Instead they sat there, legs dangling. An oak tree provided them shade from the afternoon sun, though Ronny still felt like taking his shirt off. He didn’t though. He didn’t want Jared to see the weight he’d been gaining ever since Melissa had decided to go out with Eric Patterson instead. The weight wasn’t much, but Ronny sensed that it wouldn’t stop—that he had begun a downhill decline that would haunt him the rest of his life. Silly notions—he was only seventeen, after all, and still in halfway decent shape—but they kept him awake enough hours of the night that he figured, if nothing else, the stress would add a few more pounds.
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