August 15, 2018 Arts & Culture Pop Songs in English, Written by Native Speakers of Swedish By Anthony Madrid ABBA. If you were in the land of the living in ’93, you’ll remember a song called “All That She Wants,” by the Swedish band Ace of Base. I don’t know anybody who resisted that song. I, who usually hate songs like that (porny-poppy, slick, computer-generated), bought the CD and sang along with it happily. I can still play it on the guitar twenty-five years later. I’m about to say something that has been said many times. The power of that song resides in a mistranslation. Not a mistranslation—better say a slippage. The chorus of the song goes (and I’m doing this from memory): All that she wants is another baby she’s gone tomorrow, boy a-a-all that she wants is another baby uh-uh-huh The intended meaning was “All that she wants is another lover” (so watch out, you sensitive boy who might foolishly fall for her). But of course, no native speaker of English understood it that way. We all thought the song was taking this really surprising angle: “All that she wants is to get pregnant. She’s done this many times, and it’s what she’s doing now … ” It was a long time (long, long time) before it occurred to anybody that those lyrics were simply a choice example of botched English idiom. Baby can indeed be used to mean “lover,” but not here. Wait, why? These are song lyrics. Doesn’t baby mean “lover” in song lyrics? Read More
August 14, 2018 Arts & Culture Mothers as Makers of Death By Claudia Dey Stages in pregnancy as illustrated in the nineteenth-century medical text Nouvelles démonstrations d’accouchemens. I wrote the first draft of my novel Heartbreaker in a ten-day mania in August 2015 with a fist-size bandage over my left ear; beneath it, a track of dark-blue stitches. The smallest bone in the human body, my stapes bone, which is charged with conducting sound in the middle ear, had stopped working. I now had a thin hook of titanium fluttering in my head, and in the on-switch manner of miracles, my hearing returned. My husband had taken our two young sons on a road trip to a small cabin on the east coast of Canada. I could not lift anything heavy. I had to keep my heart rate low. I could not wash my hair and wore it in a knot shined with grease on top of my head. I turned off my cell phone, unplugged our landline, and disconnected from the Internet. This was my plan: to be unreachable. Didn’t Jonathan Franzen pour cement into his USB port and work in some kind of carpeted hell-mouth of a rental office to finish—which one was it now? Ah yes, Freedom? My husband could see I had a novel inside me, and it was a commotion, and the only way to settle it was to write it, and the only way to write it was to be alone. I had not been alone in a decade. I had not been alone because I am a mother, and a mother is never alone. When she is washing, sleeping, raging, she is not alone. For a mother, this is the state of things. Children hang from your clothing. They pummel you with questions. Like a gunfight, like the most consuming love, like an apocalypse: they take up all of the available space. I finally had my hearing checked when, pregnant with my second child, I could no longer hear my first son’s dear earliest words. (I would soon learn that my disease, the same one that befell Beethoven and Howard Hughes, was exacerbated by pregnancy.) I entered the testing booth, a grim room of knobs and wires, closed the heavy door behind me, sat down, and put on the too-tight headset. My audience of one, the audiologist, looked at me through the thick glass, her face evangelist heavy with makeup. As I had been instructed, I pressed the button on the remote whenever I heard a tone or a word. I could tell there were serious gaps between my pressings; a vast amount of life occurred outside of my experience of it. The clock on the wall counted down. I pictured the execution chambers of inmates. For many years of my life, it had been as if sound lived on the other side of a fast-moving river. In my exchanges with others, I got very good at signaling, Oh, I know exactly what you mean. This seemed to be signal enough. Read More
August 13, 2018 Arts & Culture The Historical Future of Trans Literature By RL Goldberg Whatever happens against custom we say is against Nature, yet there is nothing whatsoever which is not in harmony with her. May Nature’s universal reason chase away that deluded ecstatic amazement which novelty brings to us. —Michel de Montaigne If you were trying to get anywhere in the late thirteenth century, the Hereford Mappa Mundi wouldn’t have been particularly helpful; the map is rife with topographical omissions, compressions, and errors—the most egregious of which is perhaps the mislabeling of Africa as Europe and vice versa. Of course, as any medievalist will tell you, mappae mundi weren’t intended for cartographic accuracy anyway. Rather, they were pictorial histories, encyclopedias of the world’s mythological and theological narratives, records of medical fact and fable. Notable places—Carthage, Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Jericho—appeared, but their placement on the map emphasized their symbolic import rather than their geographical specificity. Thus, Jerusalem, at the very center of this map, was the moral center of the medieval world. The map’s graphic histories were organized chronologically, with the outermost strata of the circular map representing the deepest, most sedimented layers of recorded history and theology. Bounding Africa, due east of the Nile, was a corridor of oddities, a single-file parade of queer embodiments and types: the Blemmyae and Troglodytes, Himantopodes, Cynocephali, Amazons, Marmini, and Monocoli. These foreign, “abnormal” people, marginally situated in this uniquely “African” space (though it was erroneously labeled Europe), were characterized by the peculiar adaptive technologies of their bodies: the Blemmyae were depicted as having mouths and eyes lodged in their breasts; the Sciopods were distinguished by their giant foot, which grew out of a trunk-like leg at the center of their body and which shielded them from the sun. Particularly interesting among these foreign peoples is the figure identified as “hermaphrodite”; unlike the other figures represented—the race that exclusively ate food through straws, the hirsute peoples that walked on all fours—the hermaphrodite was not a cultural or site-specific identity. If every other form could be understood, from the cartographer’s European vantage, as a foreign but intelligible adaptation to the world’s varied topography, the hermaphrodite’s difference was ambiguous, a maladaptive representation of corporeal strangeness and sexual illegibility. Though most of these “monstrous races” were rendered naked, thereby signaling their non-European primitivity, the hermaphrodite was unique insofar as their uncanniness was solely a matter of their genitals. That is, if each other example of a monstrously raced person was monstrous for their general strangeness, the hermaphrodite was monstrous for genital strangeness. Read More
August 13, 2018 Arts & Culture Holy Disobedience: On Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal By Patti Smith In the first stirring lines of The Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet bares his youthful aspirations, his doctrine as a poet, and his tenets as a man. He offers a single sentence—“Convicts’ garb is striped pink and white”—then embarks on a paragraph of Proustian proportions, where straightaway the reader is hurled into the inner sanctum of the convict, privy to his gestures, sounds, and scents, his unspoken codes. We view the swagger of muscular gods, outfitted in the striped colors of a child’s party dress or a faded candy cane—colors most likely chosen to mock the wearers, the most hardened criminals of France. Yet Genet has imbued this mockery with grandeur; these are the colors of his chosen university, colors he believes he will one day wear on his own back, graduating from foundling to criminal to convict. Thus achieved, he will earn the privilege of joining his chosen comrades as they are transported by ship from the Breton port of Brest to the Salvation Islands, off the coast of a barely colonized French Guiana. He imagines himself among them, chained at the ankles, treading the muddied path to the prison of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, where the most feared will be ferried across the piranha-infested Maroni River to rot in the hell of Devil’s Island. Read More
August 8, 2018 Arts & Culture Notes Nearing Ninety: Learning to Write Less By Donald Hall Donald Hall, who died in June this year at the age of eighty-nine, was a prolific poet, essayist, and editor whose work has had an enormous impact on American letters. He was The Paris Review’s first poetry editor, and he served as the U.S. poet laureate. His Art of Poetry interview appeared in our Fall 1991 issue. Before his death, he compiled one final book of essays, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, an excerpt from which appears below. Donald Hall, 1977 When I was sixteen, I read ten books a week: E. E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Henry James, Hart Crane, John Steinbeck. I thought I progressed in literature by reading faster and faster—but reading more is reading less. I learned to slow down. Thirty years later, in New Hampshire with Jane, I made a living by freelance writing all day, so I read books only at night. Jane went to sleep quickly and didn’t mind the light on my side of the bed. I read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and six huge volumes of Henry Adams’s letters. I read the late novels of Henry James over and over again. After Jane died, I kept reading books, at first only murderous or violent writers like Cormac McCarthy. Today I am forty years older than Jane ever got to be, and I realize I haven’t finished reading a book in a year. An athlete goes professional at twenty. At thirty, he is slower but more canny. At forty, he leaves behind the identity that he was born to and that sustained him. He diminishes into fifty, sixty, seventy. Anyone ambitious who lives to be old or even old endures the inevitable loss of ambition’s fulfillment. In a Hollywood retirement home to meet a friend, I watched a handsome old woman in a wheelchair, unrecognizable, leap up in ecstasy when I walked toward her. “An interview!” she said. “An interview!” A writer usually works until late in life. When I was eighty, still doing frequent poetry readings, audiences stood and clapped when I concluded, and kept on clapping until I shushed them. Of course I stayed to sign book after book and returned to my hotel understanding that they applauded so much because they would never see me again. Read More
August 8, 2018 Arts & Culture Joan Morgan, Hip-Hop Feminism, and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill By Danielle A. Jackson Lauryn Hill. One recent midsummer afternoon, I trekked from Central Brooklyn to the South Bronx to meet the pioneering hip-hop journalist and feminist writer Joan Morgan, author of the new book She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. We were to meet off the 5 train’s 138th Street stop, in an area some new shop owners and developers have taken to calling “SoBro.” This part of the Bronx feels industrial but also very much in flux. The highways are wide and noisy, and overpasses blot the skyline. On the same block, there are old, seemingly abandoned storefronts, low-level project buildings, and high-rise condos under construction. Morgan and I were meeting for drinks and dinner at Beatstro, a new restaurant on Alexander Avenue that serves as an homage to hip-hop—arguably the multicultural borough’s most well-known cultural export. Hand-painted murals and graffiti-inspired paintings adorn the walls; classic records from artists such as the Wu-Tang Clan and MC Lyte line the shelves by the entrance. Definitive books on the art form—Decoded, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, The Tao of Wu—lie out on the tables. Soft, textured, and deep-ruby, the lounge furniture comes from Bronx-area manufacturers. Read More