Exhibit 24.4

"Posterity might think I had terrible handwriting. Truth is, I wrote everything on trains.”

Bridge & Tunnel
(& Tunnel & Bridge)

by Joshua Cohen

Now Available‏


1 tape-bound volume
Cover Image F by Eric Doeringer
Book Design by William Todd Seabrook

$15/year subscription, $5/individual

The Cupboard is pleased to announce the release of Bridge & Tunnel (& Tunnel & Bridge) by Joshua Cohen. 12 stories, to be read as they were written—on the bridge, in the tunnel, in the bus, on the train.


*ABOUT THE VOLUME*

A man performs the role of the Sun in a bit of modern choreography, a young ballerina ruins a dinner party with one violent sneeze. A painter paints paintings of walls and hires a painter to paint onto a wall. Some lifestories get rejected. Some stalkers get stalked. Here, for you: twelve stories. Read excerpts here.


*ABOUT THE AUTHOR*

Joshua Cohen was born in New Jersey in 1980. He is the author of two collections of short fiction: The Quorum, and Aleph-Bet: An Alphabet for the Perplexed, and two novels: Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, and A Heaven of Others. Another novel, Witz, will be published in 2010. Cohen lives in Brooklyn, NY and can be found online at http://www.joshuacohen.org.


*SUBSCRIBE*

This is our sixth volume of The Cupboard, and we publish a new volume every three months. One year, four volumes=$15. Subscribe here. Past volumes from Louis Streittmatter, Mathias Svalina, Caia Hagel, and Michael Stewart are also available individually for $5.


*SUBMIT*

The Cupboard will be accepting submissions until March 1st. We are looking for prose submissions between 4,000 and 8,000 words. Submissions should be sent by email attachment to submit [at] thecupboardpamphlet [dot] org. Full submission guidelines can be found here.


*OUR NEXT VOLUME*

Amanda Goldblatt’s essay Catalpa will be the next volume of The Cupboard. It's good. Very good.


www.thecupboardpamphlet.org

Exhibit 1.13

The most shocking thing about this whole bridge collapse--okay, maybe third most shocking thing after the relatively low mortality rate and the fact that the Royals and Twins played an hour after the bridge collapsed within a few miles of the stadium--is that more bridges don't collapse all of the time. We're talking about metal and cement structures spanning hundreds of feet in the air which are nearly constantly supporting the weight of hundreds of cars and passengers. These cars run on fire! The people in these flaming death chariots atop decades old structures built by the Irish or whoever are driving at 70 m.p.h. are within a few feet of other drivers, some of whom are probably drunk or on their way home from a drug deal.

I can't believe this doesn't happen all of the time. Of course, I can't believe gas stations don't just blow up sometimes . I can't believe more buildings don't fall over in the wind. And don't even get me started on planes.

I'm not even afraid to drive or fly, yet the world as I imagine it, the world we deserve, is a wasteland somewhere between The Road Warrior and Escape from New York. I mean, the President flies everywhere. Of course sometimes his plane is going to crash and some of those times his escape pod is bound to land in a prison. I mean, do you know how many prisons there are? It's simple arithmetic. This is why we have Snake Plissken in the first place.

This kind of rhetoric is just sad, however. And I like Hillary and agree with everything she has to say about funding for our infrastructure, but nothing is wrong if in the 21st century we are scared to drive over bridges. Bridges are in the air. We should, naturally be scared of them. We should be more scared of bridges than, say, cougars.

Don't get me wrong, it is a tragedy. However, we were also pretty lucky. So far only five deaths have been confirmed. The media hasn't been this upset over five deaths since that summer everyone was afraid of sharks. We got over that, and they even have super sharks now. They killed L.L. Cool J for god's sake.

Anyone on a bridge about to collapse has the right to think whatever they want, but I imagine at least some of the people in Minnesota weren't entirely surprised. They had always known the world could turn on them like this. The sort of people who looked at the Leaning Tower of Pisa and thought it was only the natural state of a building that old. On the bridge, people like that, people like me, probably had a stunning moment of clarity where they thought Of course this was going to happen. This is the Mississippi River we're trying to cross in explosion machines. What a fucking stupid idea.

I like to think the president in Escape from New York thought something like this too as his pod spun towards an island of trashcan fires and bloodied crowbars. And I'm sure the off-screen media was clamoring on about how in 1997 surely we should be able to build a presidential escape pod that can avoid prisons. We can't. We can't.