May 3, 2018 Arts & Culture Smoke By John Berger PROLOGUE There’s never smoke without fire. This was first said by someone suggesting a rumor might be well-founded. Words in the media today often function like a smoke screen for hiding flames. The government of North Korea has just announced that they have tested an H-bomb fired from a submarine. Endless discussion about whether this is true or a bluff. No reflections around the fact that in the oceans of the world there are about sixty fully armed nuclear submarines awaiting instructions day and night. Read More
May 3, 2018 Arts & Culture Shirley Hazzard at the 92nd Street Y By Stacy Schiff “75 at 75,” a special project from the 92nd Street Y in celebration of the Unterberg Poetry Center’s seventy-fifth anniversary, invites contemporary authors to listen to a recording from the Poetry Center’s archive and write a personal response. Here, Stacy Schiff reflects on a recording of Shirley Hazzard’s reading from The Transit of Venus in December 1981. It had snowed that morning. It rained hard that evening. Both Shirley Hazzard and F. D. Reeve, who introduced her, thanked the audience for braving the downpour. The weather suited the occasion: no one who has ever picked up The Transit of Venus, for which Hazzard that fall won the National Book Critics Circle Award, is likely to have forgotten the tempest with which the novel opens, one that seems to split earth from sky to deliver a man—amid streaming mud, crackling thunder, wet wool, and a dissolving suitcase—to his destiny. He advances, Hazzard tells us, the weather whipping up her prose, into the frame from the left-hand corner, assuming his place in the landscape “under a branch of lightning.” I am not the only reader who has read those lines under the impression that Hazzard was riffing on another tempest, one painted in the early sixteenth century by Giorgione. She is that kind of writer. Read More
May 2, 2018 Arts & Culture Black and White and Black: On the Comics of Chris Reynolds By Ed Park Around the start of the first millennium, a territory on the northern coast of Africa fell under control of the Romans, who dubbed it “Mauretania,” possibly derived from a native word or from the Greek for “dark” (or “obscure”)—the root that eventually informed the term Moor. Centuries later, the Cunard Line affixed the name to a giant ship, built in Newcastle and launched in 1906, which for several years enjoyed distinction as both the world’s fastest and largest ocean liner, beloved by many, though called by Kipling “the monstrous nine-decked city.” It was scrapped between 1935 and 1937, and parts of the interior found a home in a pub in Bristol. Eight decades after the RMS Mauretania’s maiden voyage, Chris Reynolds, a Welsh-born artist in his mid twenties, embarked on what would be his life’s work, a beguiling series of loosely connected stories that he called Mauretania Comics. The work had nothing to do with that remote place or with seafaring vessels of yore, and the name was just one of its many elusive mysteries. The stories were and are easy to consume but tantalizingly difficult to characterize. Droll dialogue gives way to utterly melancholy voiceover; locales like “The Lighted Cities” and “Mouth City” are mapped on the same imaginative terrain as some version of England, one where a blasted figure out of J. G. Ballard might run across Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Monitor, Mauretania’s signature character, always dons a helmet with a striplike visor masking his eyes. (Today he wouldn’t look so out of place: it resembles nothing so much as a virtual-reality headpiece.) The architecture alone is worth the trip: lipstick-shaped temples of music, a house like a geodesic dome crossed with a web made by a spider on acid. Read More
April 30, 2018 Arts & Culture On Beyoncé, Beychella, and Hairography By Lauren Michele Jackson Hair is a large part of the wonderment—and objection—Beyoncé courts each time she holds a mic. As the critic madison moore writes of her “haircrobatics” in 2014, hairography is “the special genius of Beyoncé’s stagecraft” and “punctuates everything else happening on stage: the lights, the dance moves, the glitter, the sequins, the music.” Hair for black cultures at large is often a vehicle for small acts of daring, for everyday articulations. But the newest iteration of the natural-hair movement does not welcome all black hair equally. The natural-hair revolution, a public-facing campaign corroborated by name-brand moisture treatments, the YouTube “hair journey,” and op-eds in the New York Times, embraces the kinky, the nappy, and all manners of patterns and styles still dubbed “unruly” by the nonblack population—or so natural-hair enthusiasts claim. But the natural-hair movement puts forth a false consensus of what black representation should look like that accommodates the standards of nonblack bystanders. Andre Walker’s trademarked typing system, the taxonomy of four hair types upon which the natural-hair movement relies, has failed to yield textural egalitarianism—as my fellow lowly type-4 girls can attest. There is a tendency to map our hair on a spectrum from weave to Afro as a stand-in for anti- to pro-black politics. If she, he, or they wear their hair straight, they are lost, some say. If it is long, this person is lost—unless of course it is natural and long, in which case it is revered above the teeny-weeny Afro. No matter if Miss Thing takes their black behind to a black-ass beauty shop in a black-ass neighborhood to hand over their black-ass bottom dollar to a black hairdresser who, like a chemist, wields oil, water, paste, and heat to transformative results—if they walk out with something pressed, bumped, sewn, or curled, they are lost. Read More
April 30, 2018 Arts & Culture The #MeToo Poem That Brought Down Korea’s Most Revered Poet By Bo Seo Choi Young-mi (left) and Ko Un (right). The accusation came in the form of a poem. Six stanzas. Twenty-seven lines. Don’t sit next to En The poet ‘K’ advised me, a literary novice He touches young women whenever he sees one Choi Young-mi wrote the poem in Korean, her native tongue. It is a language that tends first to cool its emotions, then to assimilate them; unruly drama and dialogue, in their retelling, take on the muted affect of melancholy. This poem, largely unbroken by punctuation and carried by winding lines, swirls like a river. A handful of English characters litter the poem and stand out like islands, insistent and unyielding. They are mostly names: ‘K,’ who warns the young poet about En, an older poet some thirty years her senior, who gropes the young poet and women like her. There is one English phrase, too, isolated on its own line in the poem’s second stanza: “Me too.” Forgot K’s advice and sat next to En Me too The silk blouse borrowed from my sister got rumpled When Choi Young-mi published these lines under the title “Monster” in December 2017, the #MeToo movement had already toppled Harvey Weinstein and rippled through the centers of American power. In Korea, it had barely registered a presence. For a couple of months after its publication, Choi’s poem seemed fated to inconsequence. The newspapers carried an anonymized and qualified apology from “the elder poet identified as En” and moved on. Read More
April 26, 2018 Arts & Culture Writing the Lives of Forgotten Women By Rachel Kadish Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, 1610. When you need to tell the truth, sometimes nothing will do but lies. Thanks to the labor of women of all backgrounds who have raised their voices in the face of indifference or opposition, some of the silences in our culture’s narratives are now getting long-overdue attention. The labor of filling the gaps is under way in venues large and small—only last month, the New York Times launched Overlooked, its series of obituaries for unsung women. Yet while retrieving the facts of willfully forgotten lives is essential, some of the most necessary work of repair ultimately can be accomplished only by our culture’s most scrupulous liars: writers of historical fiction. This may sound like an endorsement of fake news, but in fact, it’s the opposite. Any history that doesn’t include women, and doesn’t make ample space for the lives of women of color, is itself fake news. The question, then, is how to correct our collective understanding of reality. And while the meticulously verified works of historians and journalists are essential to that goal, if we don’t set well-researched fiction by Louise Erdrich or Geraldine Brooks prominently by their side, we’ll miss one of the surest paths to repair. Read More