August 12, 2019 Archive of Longing The Literary Marmoset By Dustin Illingworth Crop of cover, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, by Sigrid Nunez For all the High Modern sophistication of the writers who made up the Bloomsbury set in England in the early 1900s, there remains something creaturely about the collective. It is as if, beneath the frocks and tweeds, a simian itch lingered. To begin with, there were the names they gave one another, curious and whiskery terms of endearment: Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard called each other Mandrill and Mongoose; Vanessa Bell referred to her sister as Singe (ape in French) or Goat, while Vanessa herself was known as Dolphin; Virginia’s friend and sometime lover Vita Sackville-West gave her the private name of Potto, a kind of lemur; and several members of the group referred to T. S. Eliot in private letters as Old Toad. The impulse would occasionally manifest in their art. Take, for instance, Flush: A Biography, Woolf’s imaginative consideration of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. The fictions of Sigrid Nunez are often similarly attuned to animals, though they serve different ends here. They are not, as in Woolf, an uncharted tributary into the river of animal consciousness. Instead, they act as a conduit for the unpredictable weight of self-knowledge. In her 2018 National Book Award–winning novel The Friend, a woman charts her course through grief by adopting Apollo, the Great Dane belonging to her dearly departed. It is a novel of tender transference, delineating intimacies between different species that are not precisely sexual, though also not without an erotic dimension. (In bed, the paw Apollo places on the narrator’s chest is “the size of a man’s fist.”) Read More
August 9, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Barbecues, Beyoncé, and the Bourgeoisie By The Paris Review Nancy Hale. Photo courtesy of the Nancy Hale Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. Before picking up Where the Light Falls—a selection of Nancy Hale’s short stories forthcoming from Library of America this September—I had never heard of her. My ignorance, unfortunately, seems to be common. Despite being one of The New Yorker’s most prolific writers from the thirties to the sixties and a recipient of ten O. Henry Awards, Hale has been woefully overlooked. In some ways, this is understandable. Her concerns are primarily upper-crust, her scenes largely composed of WASPs feeling fraught. But how many men have written about these subjects to lasting acclaim? And while Lauren Groff, the collection’s editor, argues that Hale’s bourgeois subjects belie fierce political commitments, Hale’s prose is so compelling I hardly care. Every sentence pulses with energy and specificity. In “Midsummer,” Hale makes teen angst exciting again: “She wanted to climb the huge pine tree on the lawn, throw herself upward to the top by some passionate propulsion, and stretch her arms wildly to the sky. But she could only sit around interminably in chairs on the lawn in the heat and quiet, beating with hate and awareness and bewilderment and violence, all incomprehensible to her and pulling her apart.” Hale’s stories are rich, delightful, and often strange. They nearly always end abruptly, as if on an inhale, preparing you for whatever comes next. —Noor Qasim Read More
August 9, 2019 Arts & Culture Don’t Eat and Read By Walter Benjamin Walter Benjamin, 1928. Courtesy of the Walter Benjamin Archive at Akademie der Künste, via Wikimedia Commons. All books should not be read in the same way. Novels, for instance, are there to be devoured. Reading them is a voluptuous act of absorption, not an act of empathy. The reader does not imagine himself in the hero’s place, but assimilates what befalls him. The vivid report of these experiences is the appetizing trimmings in which a nourishing dish comes to the table. There is, to be sure, a raw diet of experience—just as there is a raw diet for the stomach—to wit: one’s own experiences. But the art of the novel, like the culinary arts, begins beyond the raw ingredients. Read More
August 9, 2019 Arts & Culture David Foster Wallace’s Pen Pal By Michael Erard Photo © Giovanni Giovannetti/Effigie On the morning of January 12, 2010, Susan Barnett and Greg Delisle said goodbye to their three dogs, closed the door of their Cape Cod–style farmhouse in rural upstate New York, and got in their car to go to jobs twenty-five miles away in Ithaca. Susan was a copy editor at Cornell University Press, Greg was a website manager for an academic department. A big snowstorm was scheduled to arrive that afternoon and they anticipated their return might be difficult. What they didn’t know was that in the ceiling of their kitchen, faulty wiring was sparking against the rafters. At two o’clock, a neighbor called them to say their house was on fire. Susan rushed home through the snowstorm. She was stopped by the police down the road from her house, and from that spot she could see blazing curtains fluttering out of the second-floor window. Fire crews from three towns battled the blaze late into the night. The result, in insurance parlance, was a burnout. The next day, Greg buried the dogs, who had been trapped in the living room. He and Susan had made a mental list of items that he should try to find. A computer hard drive. Passports. Jewelry. And Dave’s letters—Susan wanted Greg to look for those, too. Did it seem like an odd priority, I asked Greg, to want to save these letters? “It’s not an odd priority, if you know Susan,” Greg replied. I did know Susan. We were undergraduates together at Williams College in the late eighties. Susan was pale, blond, with chipmunk cheeks, and she’d dress in fur muffs one day, straight from Doctor Zhivago, and the next day in pigtails and a gingham dress, à la Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the next in a Boy George black wide-brimmed hat and thick eyeshadow. At the time, she seemed to be trying too hard, but now she seems like one of those low-key counterculture heroines who knew everyone, had been everywhere, influenced everything. She treated us as if we were Andy Warhol’s Factory, documenting the silly mayhem of our class with a camera, even though we made a sad version of a counterculture. Read More
August 8, 2019 In Memoriam David Berman, Slacker God By Erin Somers Pour another gallon into the bucket of our national grief, David Berman is gone. The poet and front man of the Silver Jews was fifty-two. The phrase national grief is Berman-esque, though municipal grief or federal grief would be even better. I was in awe of him, and like so many people today, I am crushed. I knew Berman’s poetry, specifically his 1999 collection Actual Air, before I knew his music, but both became deeply important to me. I think of his lines weekly, maybe daily. You can’t change the feeling, but you can change the feeling about the feeling. I love your amethyst eyes and your Protestant thighs. And of course: All water is classic water. Berman’s great topic was the impossibility of being alive. I was glad to have him on the job. Being alive is fucking impossible! Berman knew this but still saw beauty and strangeness and humor, too. His work seemed to be saying that the world is impossible, yes, but you didn’t have to take it too seriously. When Hunter S. Thompson died, my dad, who loved him, said, “It’s especially hard because you thought that someday you’d meet up with him and all the people who got it.” With Berman, I did sort of think that. I don’t know what I imagined. A pool party? All the fragile souls, the people who got it, in bikinis and trunks, with Berman at the grill. But anyway. I never met him and that’s probably for the best. I wouldn’t want to have to tangle with my admiration up close. I wouldn’t want to stand there waiting for an anointing that didn’t come. Stammering out something foolish and leaving disappointed. Read More
August 8, 2019 Inside the Issue The Caribbean’s Deadliest Fruit: A Taste Test By Jonathan Escoffery In Jonathan Escoffery’s story, “Under the Ackee Tree,” which appears in our Summer 2019 issue, the protagonist, homesick for Jamaica, attempts to grow an ackee tree in his Miami backyard. No amount of water or fertilizer will make the seeds sprout. After Hurricane Gilbert devastates the Caribbean, and all the phone lines back home go out, the protagonist sits his sons down at breakfast to: try teach them them culture to make sure it survive. The tropical market on Colonial start carry canned ackee and green banana and salt cod, so you cook the boys ackee and saltfish and try explain why it Jamaica’ national dish. You see this here, you say. The ackee grow in a pod and it must open on it own or else the ackee poison you. You point to the picture on the can, so them can see how it grow, and it remind you that you never eat ackee out of no can before. This summer, we mailed Escoffery three varieties of canned ackee (the only kind of ackee available in the U.S.) and asked him to conduct a taste test. If you’ve ever spent time in Jamaica, you’ve likely had the opportunity to sample the island’s national dish, ackee and saltfish. Typically served at breakfast time, the ackee fruit is lightly boiled and paired with dehydrated salted cod, an assortment of onions and peppers, including scotch bonnet, and rounded out with sides of boiled green banana, dumplings (or spinners as they’re called in Jamaica), and johnnycakes. If you order ackee and saltfish over the counter at a restaurant in Brooklyn or Hartford or Miami, these sides will likely be referred to simply as food, as in, You wan’ food wit’ that? If asked this question, avoid dwelling on the confusion of being asked if you want food with your food, and say yes. The mild sweetness of the green banana and dumplings balances out the cod’s saltiness, and the result is pure magic in your mouth. If you’re interested in cooking the dish at home, it’s relatively simple to prepare once you’ve sourced the ingredients, except for one thing: get it wrong and it will kill you. Read More