August 30, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Family, Fleece, and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos By The Paris Review Michael Paterniti. Photo: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey. Earlier this month, I visited family on Cliff Island, off the coast of Portland, Maine. It’s a lovely place, with pebbled beaches and raspberry bushes. And it’s small. Very, very small. The whole island is about two miles from end to end; the total population, according to the most recent U.S. census, is sixty-one. There are no cars or restaurants or hotels. People get around on foot or bike, or with the occasional golf cart. But what Cliff Island does have is a library—and a great one. Run out of an old house and open for only a few hours a day, the Cliff Island Library contains a large and eclectic selection of books, many of which have been collected over the years by the island’s residents or else donated by tourists passing through. On my aunt’s recommendation, I picked up Love and Other Ways of Dying, a delightfully strange and sensitive essay collection by the journalist Michael Paterniti. Paterniti’s writing defies traditional categorization. Is it journalism? Is it poetry? At times it reads like both. At times it reads like something else entirely. In “The Man Who Sailed His House,” for instance, Paterniti embodies the voice of Hiromitsu Shinkawa, a Japanese man who was stranded on a piece of flotsam for three days following the 2011 tsunami. This is a so-called true story, but the empathetic imagination Paterniti brings to bear on it is all his own, drawing upon nearly unbelievable levels of detail—like the purple fleece the man wore, and the notes he scrawled in desperation on various pieces of garbage with a marker he fished from the sea—to conjure the fear and hope and loneliness of the situation. Near the close of the story, just before the man is saved, even the prose itself seems to reflect his condition, becoming somewhat ecstatic and dreamlike, as though Paterniti were right beside him on that plank of wood, lost in a hunger-induced hallucination. In the end, the reader is grateful for these liberties. They leave us with a feeling of expansiveness—a sense that, within the world of the book, anything is possible. —Cornelia Channing Read More
August 30, 2019 Arts & Culture Voicing Our Fears By Jorge Comensal Had I not been a writer, I would have liked to be a singer, a parrot, a spy, or a neurosurgeon. Unfortunately, the only singing I do is in the shower, I only ever fly in economy class, and the closest I’ve come to espionage or brain surgery was when I dressed up as a doctor back in my college days, to sneak into the National Medical Center. Donning a white coat I had bought on the black market, each Tuesday I greeted the hospital guards with Hippocratic aplomb, and made for the language therapy room, where treatment was offered to aphasia patients, whose brain injuries impaired their ability to speak. In those days I was more interested in neurons than people, but in that somber room, shielded by a white coat, I began to find my way back to literature. Not long ago, I discovered a striking coincidence: thirty years earlier, my father also dressed up as a doctor to sneak into the same hospital, with a different purpose—to visit his older brother who had lung cancer, and slip him prohibited foodstuffs outside of visiting hours. My uncle’s terminal illness became the nucleus of family stories of loss and misfortune, and meant I grew up in the shadow of a corpulent man felled in his prime by a rare carcinoma at the age of forty. In time, I realized this preoccupation with cancer wasn’t limited to my family, but that it distills most of our society’s fears and obsessions. Guilt, luck, karma, heredity, suffering, and mortality are just some of the coordinates that guide or mislead us when we face the emperor of all maladies, as Siddhartha Mukherjee calls it. My father loathes the word cancer, to which he attributes ominous powers. A taboo. On the other hand, many people overuse it, to refer not to the out-of-control proliferation of cells, but to politicians, corruption, and bad habits. Reggaetón is the cancer of our society, they say. A man recently wrote on Facebook that feminism is the cancer of our age. (If I didn’t object to the metaphor in general, I’d say guys like him are the cancer of our age.) Maybe we should all dress up as doctors to tame this word, so feared yet overused; to tame the word cancer in a cultural sense, and at the same time, through science, free ourselves from its fury. * Rather than singing ballads, salsas, or Italian arias as I would have liked, I spent my childhood shouting the word “kihap!”—“shout” in Korean, according to my tae kwon do teachers. “Shout! Shout! Shout!” I shouted over and over, kicking the air in my belted white uniform. (By virtue of sheer perseverance, the belt turned red then black). “Shout! Shout! Shout!” I shouted, for fifteen years, all because my parents thought it a good idea to counteract my innate idleness with this ancient far-eastern practice. “SHOUT!” I later learned that the word’s Korean roots refer to vital energy (ki) and to the exercise of channeling it into an action (hap), but alas, I didn’t know that when I spent six to twelve hours a week thinking I was shouting, “Shout!” Read More
August 29, 2019 First Person A Farewell to Summer By Jennifer Croft By the time I went to school, I knew the world was changeable the way people were changeable, especially people like parents, with their moods and regrets and sore shoulders. Over the winter holidays, the world was lit by little yellow bulbs on garlands. There was the peacefulness of surprises that would come and that would not be terribly surprising: our stockings always held one orange, one apple, and a pack of chewing gum, along with something else like stickers or brand-new socks. In the car, the world grew purposeful; at the dollar theater, where our dad could take us to see The Princess Bride on a Tuesday afternoon for fifty cents apiece, the world grew relaxed. Swimming pools turned the world glamorous. Every year my sister and I would look forward to the afternoon when Tulsa’s public pools would open. The pools hosted block parties with free sandwiches served in a long, perfect row, like the world’s biggest snake just lurking in the shadows, and even free cups of pop, which was prohibited at home. In high school, I would make friends whose parents owned their own pools, but back in elementary school, the swimming pool was still a gift the world would only give for a precious few months out of the year, and only when our parents could make the time to take us. We occasionally also stayed in motels on our way to see our grandparents in Kansas or on our annual family vacation in Nebraska, though these places rarely had pools. But when they did, then the world shot clear up to the tip-top of the peak of glamour, and my sister and I became princesses from Lichtenstein or maybe Switzerland who’d been kidnapped by the Oklahoma criminals who called themselves our parents, and accordingly, on those rare nights, we would not speak to them at all. Read More
August 29, 2019 Arts & Culture The Real Tragedy of Beth March By Carmen Maria Machado Illustration from Little Women, 1869. Courtesy of Houghton Library at Harvard University. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. In the first chapter of Little Women, when Louisa May Alcott is doling out archetypes to the siblings, Beth asks, “If Jo is a tomboy and Amy a goose, what am I, please?” “You’re a dear,” Meg answers, “and nothing else.” People who have studied anything about Little Women know that the novel is based, roughly, on Louisa’s family, a clan of thinkers, artists, and transcendentalists who rubbed elbows with some of the premier minds of their time: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller. Beth is no exception; she is based on Alcott’s second-youngest sister, Lizzie. Lizzie, like Beth, was stricken with scarlet fever. (During this initial illness, her family—vegans and believers in alternative medicine—did not send for a doctor.) Like Beth, she recovered from the illness but, her heart weakened, never regained full health. Like Beth, she died tragically young, though not quite as young as her literary counterpart. But while Beth bore her suffering gladly, with unconscionable cheer and resolution, Lizzie was enraged at the fact of her own mortality. “In Little Women,” writes Alcott biographer Susan Cheever, “Beth has a quiet, dignified death, a fictional death. Although young Lizzie Alcott was a graceful, quiet woman, she was not so lucky. A twenty-two-year-old whose disease had wasted her body so that she looked like a middle-aged woman, she lashed out at her family and her fate with an anger that she had never before expressed.” Louisa and the others caring for Lizzie plied her with morphine, ether, and opium, though eventually the drugs lost any effect they once had on her. “[The] pain,” writes Cheever in American Bloomsbury, “seemed to drive her mad … even on large doses of opium, Lizzie attacked her sisters and asked to be left in peace.” Read More
August 28, 2019 First Person Portrait of Our White Mother Sitting at a Chinese Men’s Table By Jennifer Tseng Image courtesy Jennifer Tseng, photographer unknown. February 1982 It’s night. The curtains are closed, which gives the room a claustrophobic look. The men are all wearing brown or black, with white. Our mother is wearing blue, which both complements the oranges on the table and is the color that, as a child, I thought of as a white person’s color. When asked what their favorite color was, white kids almost always said “blue.” It’s our mother’s favorite color, too. Mine is red, the Chinese color of happiness. The men match the room, its fixtures and decor. Our mother and the oranges stand out as things that have come in from the outside; things that, like imports or immigrants, have come from elsewhere. Though the oranges agree with the orange chairs, one of the men’s shirt collars, the painting on the wall, our mother is the only blue thing. This photograph, taken when I was thirteen, always provokes mixed feelings in me. I spent much of my childhood observing the ways in which our Chinese father didn’t belong in the mostly white, English-speaking town where we lived. Chinese parties (sponsored by the small Chinese association of which he was president) were both the one place where our father could speak his native language and a place where our mother was usually miserable. She was shy. She dreaded these parties. They meant stepping out of her comfort zone. Our father stepped out of his comfort zone every day. He moved through the streets of our California town because he had to in order to survive. Relatively speaking, our mother had the luxury of choosing when (or whether) to step outside her comfort zone and into an all-Chinese situation. But our home—most people’s primary comfort zone—was a place where she felt distinctly uncomfortable. Under our father’s strict rule, she lived on tenterhooks. So it’s complicated. Read More
August 28, 2019 First Person I Was Dilapidated By Mary-Kay Wilmers Émile Bernard, Mother and Child, 1898, oil on canvas, 15″ x 18″. Public domain. “What did you have?” “A boy.” “Congratulations.” If your first child is a girl I’m told people say: “How nice.” How nice. My child is of course wonderful but I am also—embarrassingly—slightly proud that he’s a boy. Childbirth is full of such pitfalls, where the wish to be congratulated overrules common sense. I don’t find the standard notion of the good wife very compelling. But the pressure to be “a good mother” according to the prevailing definitions is practically irresistible. I can keep my head when David Holbrook, in his most recent outburst against “art, thought and life in our time,” warns that it is a failure in mothering that produces intellectuals and other pornographers: it’s less easy to steer a clear course through all the varied strictures of the psychoanalysts themselves. Worse still, it’s by no means adequate to try to behave like a good mother, because that involves an act of will: goodness itself is supposed to emerge. Before Bowlby, you had only to keep your children clean and set a decent moral example. Now ordinary selfishness is thought somehow to be expelled in the moment of delivery, or sooner: it’s selfish, you’re told by the masked figures gathered expectantly around you, if you can’t manage without forceps. Better mothers don’t need them. Read More