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The Daily

September 21, 2018
The Moment

The Moment of Distraction

By Amit Chaudhuri

This is the final installment of Amit Chaudhuri’s column, The Moment.

Last year, I commuted between Oxford and Norwich, where I teach in the autumn. On Mondays, I took a train via London; on Tuesday evening, I took the same route back. It’s a four-hour-journey: you travel south and then go up again.

On the trains I read work by students, skimmed through the Guardian, charged my phone (the London-Norwich train is old but is allocated with power sockets), wrote emails, applied finishing touches to pieces I’d written, talked to my wife and a couple of friends, and, when I wasn’t doing any of this, which was a large percentage of the time, ranged over my collection of music on my iPhone.

I never listen to music on earphones when I’m at home in Calcutta – or in Oxford, where I play songs on a small Bose Bluetooth dock that I carry with me. But, like many others, when I’m traveling I create a makeshift interiority. The temptation to create a portable archive presented itself with the introduction of the smartphone. I deferred carrying Walkmans and MP3 players for much of my life. The iPhone has changed our existence – as we think we know, though we can’t, really, because none of us can experience what it means to live in history. It has changed our children, those who were born at the end of the last millennium or at the start of this one: indeed, the smartphone has invented them. For a long time, we thought the personal computer was destined to take us over. Phones crept upon us unobtrusively. I can no longer recall when I got a Nokia. At first, odd though it may sound, my wife and I shared it. The idea of the personalised phone was still to grow on us. I came similarly late to the iPhone. I can now hardly recall what the words ‘sharing’ and ‘synhronising’ meant in the twentieth century, or for my parents. I have no idea what my daughter’s life would have been like had not the smartphone remade it completely six years ago. It’s useless to speculate on the nature of reality in that way.

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September 20, 2018
Look

Deana Lawson: A Preview

By Deana Lawson
Over the last ten years, Deana Lawson has created a landscape of found intimacy. Using medium- and large-format cameras, Lawson works with models she meets in the United States and on travels in the Caribbean and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes animated by an exquisite range of color and surprising details: bedding and furniture in domestic interiors or lush plants in Edenic gardens. The body—often nude—is central. A selection of photographs from her first monograph is presented below.

Mama Goma, 2014

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- Deana Lawson
- photography
September 20, 2018
Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: Poor Deluded Human, You Seek My Heart

By Kaveh Akbar
In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line.

© Ellis Rosen

Dear Poets,

I am the daughter of two wonderful, loving Chinese parents, and I have a supportive boyfriend and caring friends. But still, I somehow find myself dealing with daily feelings of anxiety and inadequacy. I am a humanities major with an uncertain future and less-than-average academics, and I am faced with continual feelings of shame and embarrassment about the lack of effort I put into my studies. My parents are intellectual giants who came from nothing and worked their way up into high-earning jobs so that they could give me the best possible education and life, and I feel as if I have squandered the opportunities they have worked so hard for me to have. To make things worse, they are extremely supportive of my choices, and are constantly caring and understanding. How do I deal with my fears that I will never be able to honor my parents by becoming more successful than them?

Sincerely,
Dutiful Daughter

Dear DD,

“To make things worse, they are extremely supportive of my choices” is such a strange and quintessentially immigrant utterance—I am smiling with affectionate recognition. What to do with the guilt we feel that our lives are often so much easier than the lives of our parents? How can any of our fears, anxieties, lonelinesses be worth mentioning when theirs have been so great? For you (and often, for myself), I prescribe Hai-Dang Phan’s “My Father’s ‘Norton Introduction to Literature,’ Third Edition (1981).”

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September 20, 2018
Arts & Culture

Looking for Lorraine

By Imani Perry
Lorraine Hansberry was a giver. Bitterness never prevailed long enough in her spirit to destroy the “lift” that was a such a large part of her talent, and which comes naturally when human beings are created on stage. Mostly we see shadows being titillated into life, only to fall because their authors had no lover for them. I hate and deplore her death. We cannot afford such losses. As she once said of Baldwin: “We should be grateful we have him.” I say: we should be grateful we had her. Although what the hell all these words give her now, I don’t know. Relieve my chest. A gift given too late.

—Letter to the New York Times from Camille Skirvanek of Brooklyn, published January 21, 1965

In the tradition of Alice Walker, who followed the literary and literal maps of Zora Neale Hurston’s home and life, I find myself wanting to stand in the places Lorraine stood. I want to make sense of the world in her spaces and on her terms. And I want to tell you about it. It isn’t so pretty. There is as much hell as heaven on this other, after the movement, side. Much has changed, some for better, some worse. Walking in the aftermath teaches this lesson. In the summer of 2017, I wonder as I wander, somewhat angrily at the absence of a marker for Lorraine in Greenwich Village. But in October of 2017, a red plaque was embedded in the rust-colored brick at 112 Waverly Place, in honor of Lorraine. Still, the Village is no longer hers. The multiracial lesbian bar (the only one that was multiracial in New York in the 1950s) was a short walk away from her home, and it is gone. It is now a Mexican restaurant, which I don’t expect will last much longer either. It isn’t highbrow. Although the Village has a queer history and present, Lorraine’s presence is faint at best. She’s not really here. Nor is the bohemia that once was, nor the poor who were there before that. They have been displaced by cool accumulation and edgy wealth. Read More
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- Alice Walker
- Lorraine Hansberry
September 19, 2018
At Work

Beyond Hygge: An Interview with Dorthe Nors

By Alexandra Pereira

Dorthe Nors. Photo: Astrid Dalum.

The Danish writer Dorthe Nors lives alone with a black cat so far west on the Jutland peninsula that she’s practically in Scotland. It’s not far from the rural parish community where she was born, in 1970, and raised by a carpenter father and hairdresser-turned-art-teacher mother. After years spent poring over Swedish literature and art history at Aarhus university (harnessing a lifelong adoration for Bergman’s Magic Lantern and his Workbooks), the capital called.

This interview took place whilst Nors was just up the coast from Copenhagen, where she lived for seven years, for the Louisiana Literature Festival. We met early on a Saturday and the award-winning author guided me to a no-frills cafe where bossa nova musak was playing. ‘The music and the food is terrible,’ she told me, but this is where she found a writing sanctuary free of pretence or distractions, and created some of the curiously existential, semi-autobiographical characters who color the four novels and countless novellas and short stories that have captured the global literary sphere’s attention in recent years. In 2014, Nors received the Per Olov Enquist Literary Prize. In 2017, Mirror, Shoulder, Signal was a Man Booker International finalist.

Scouted in 2012 by Brigid Hughes, former Paris Review editor and founder of A Public Space, Nors’ alarmingly succinct short story collection Karate Chop(published to acclaim in Denmark in 2008) was received rapturously in English. Its story The Heron was the first by a Danish writer to be published in The New Yorker. The staccato novella Minna Needs Rehearsal Space appeared on the flipside of the reversible edition and cemented Nors as an author who is able to thoughtfully admonish our digital generation. Minna is a struggling musician whose thoughts we read in staccato status update-like sentences, and who would be producing more music if she wasn’t so taken with monitoring the online activity. Early on, Nors had hoped to integrate Copenhagen’s cliquey literati, but she soon realized it was time wasted and taken from her writing.

Being alone is not something that feels particularly Danish, a small, cozy country embued the national concept of hygge. Yet solitude is a recurring motif in Nors’s work. Nors often returns to lonely flaneurs, as they wander through the shiny streets of a city renowned for its happiness. Her protagonists, who are most often female, navigate their way through cities they’ve outgrown, un-friend ex-lovers, reference long-dead Scandinavian writers and gaze out onto the Oresund Strait. Like Lorrie Moore, Nors writes heart-rending and compact stories, though they are punctuated with satire. Her tone is pensive, sardonic, and sometimes macabre.

In person, Nors is as unfussy as her prose. She is undramatic, typically Nordic and matter-of-fact, with a tendency to laugh and smile often. She is never disingenuous, instead she seems genuinely surprised and delighted that I’ve read much of her work in preparation. Her utterances are gentle. They lack the usual harsh Danish ‘eeehhh,’ instead, she intersperses a soft ‘om’ here and there amongst otherwise clear, direct phrases. Read More

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September 19, 2018
Arts & Culture

The Most Unread Book Ever Acclaimed

By Meghan O’Gieblyn
Like the holy books, long novels are more often maligned than read. Critics complain that they are exasperating, or impossible, or not worth the time. But in the history of my reading life, I’ve encountered nothing like the caveat lectors surrounding Margurite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. They felt less like user warnings or cautionary tales than being forced to gaze upon the skeletons of those who had previously made the attempt. When it was published in 1965, the critic Peter Prescott gave up after two days, even though his editor offered him four times the normal rate (everyone else had refused). The online reader reviews I found varied between naked revulsion and sheepish endorsement. One Amazon reviewer claimed he had given a copy of the 1198-page novel to each of his friends and promised that if they finished, he would pay for their children’s college education. “I’ve paid for no one’s education!” he wrote. Upon Young’s death in 1995, thirty years after the novel was published, the New York Times proclaimed it “one of the most widely unread books ever acclaimed.”

I came across Young by way of her essay “The Midwest of Everywhere,” a short piece about a series of bizarre sights she claims to have witnessed first-hand in the American interior: Elephants browsing the banks of the Wabash river; an entire town populated by deaf people; a dead whale in a boxcar, stranded in the middle of a cornfield. Young was born in Indiana and spent many decades in the Midwest—at the University of Chicago, where she studied Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, and at the Iowa Writers Workshop, where she taught fiction—but in the essay, she writes about the region in a way that is entirely unfamiliar. “For me, a plain Middle Westerner, there is no middle way,” she writes. “I am in love with whatever is eccentric, devious, strange, singular, unique, out of this world—and with life as an incalculable, a chaotic thing.” I read the essay last winter, at my home in Wisconsin. At the time, I was in a slump that was probably seasonal but felt dire and endless and linked, in a vague way, to the fact that I lived in a region that was bound up in the American imagination, and increasingly my own, with the television reboot of Rosanne. I have always lived in the Midwest, and had often defended it against reductive stereotypes. But the notion that it was an economic and political wilderness had become such an insistent article of national consensus, I’d begun to doubt my own frames of reference. I was not in a particularly ambitious mood that winter, but I kept thinking about the strange consciousness I’d glimpsed in the essay. A couple days later, I’d found a copy of Miss MacIntosh. Read More
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