February 27, 2018 Arts & Culture Willa Cather, Pioneer By Jane Smiley Willa Cather was not a flashy stylist, and though she was ambitious in her work, she did not attach it to a publicity-worthy life like some of her contemporaries, such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cather’s first book of poetry came out in 1903, when she was twenty-nine; her first book of stories followed a couple years later, when she was thirty-one. Her last novel appeared in 1940, and a volume of three more stories was published in 1948, shortly after she died. Forty-five years is a long career for a novelist, but she possessed an intensity of observation and a curiosity about human psychology, especially as it relates to nature, that never waned. My Ántonia is one of her best-loved books, and it displays all the characteristics that make Cather both elusive and fascinating even as it depicts a world that vanished almost as soon as the novel was published. Willa Cather was born in an interesting spot in the mountains of Virginia, near Winchester, on the banks of a tributary of the Potomac, Back Creek. The family properties (one owned by her grandfather, another given to her father by her grandfather) were about ninety miles from Washington, D.C., and fifty miles from prosperous plantation regions like Loudon County. But—perhaps especially after the Civil War—it was difficult to make a living in the mountains and dangerous because of tuberculosis outbreaks, so Cather’s father and mother, Charles and Mary Virginia, took Willa and the other children (eventually there were seven in all) to rural Nebraska. After their first winter in the country, they settled in Red Cloud, a new town six miles north of the Kansas border and about halfway between the northwestern corner of Missouri and the northeastern corner of Colorado. Willa was about to turn ten. In Nebraska, the Cathers, immigrants from Virginia, immediately encountered a huge population of other immigrants from more distant and perhaps more romantic—to Willa—places: Norway, Sweden, France, Bohemia, Mexico. A sense of the world that compelled Cather for the rest of her life began to develop, a sense of the world that is deeply American, simultaneously local and exploratory, rustic and cosmopolitan. Read More
February 26, 2018 Arts & Culture Jo Hopper, Woman in the Sun By Sarah McColl Edward Hopper, Eleven A.M., 1926. Josephine Nivison Hopper Chez Hopper oil on canvas In a 1906 portrait of Josephine Nivison, painted while she was a twenty-two-year-old student at the New York School of Art, her artist’s smock slips from her shoulder like the falling strap of Madame X’s gown. This is teacher Robert Henri’s portrait of the artist as a young woman; one suggestive detail, sure, along with aspects of Jo’s character he can’t help but capture: her steady gaze of steely resolve, the way she holds her brushes like a divining rod. This is when Jo Nivison meets Edward Hopper, though they do not make much of their first meeting, or even their second. When they graduate, Jo keeps herself in cigarettes by selling drawings to places like the New York Tribune, the Evening Post, the Chicago Herald Examiner. In the 1920 New York City Directory, Jo lists herself as an artist, and she is no slouch. She shows her paintings alongside work by Picasso and Man Ray. In that same directory, Edward Hopper calls himself an illustrator. Read More
February 23, 2018 Arts & Culture Portrait of a Friendship By Simon Akam Portrait of Simon Akam, by Moussa David Saleh. When we had to make things right, we went to the French House. The pub stands on Dean Street, in Soho, in central London, near the Algerian Coffee Stores, where the windows are stocked with Hazer Baba Turkish delight, and the sex shop whose window flashes LEATHER RUBBER NEOPRENE. Inside the pub, there are framed cartoons by Michael Heath. They served cidre long before international booze conglomerate Anheuser-Busch InBev ventured into that spelling. That was where, in 2016, I met my friend David for crisis talks. The matter at hand was a painting. The canvas lay four miles to the northeast, unfinished, in a studio in Dalston. Despite its distance, the painting lay between us that night, the crux of our disagreement. Read More
February 22, 2018 Arts & Culture Twelve Illustrated Dust Jackets By The Paris Review From the collection of Martin Salisbury. Photograph: Simon Pask We’ve all been told told not to judge a book by its cover, but what about judging a decade, an artistic moment, or a society? In his latest collection, The Illustrated Dust Jacket: 1920–1970, illustration professor Martin Salisbury traces the history of the book jacket from its origins as a simple dust guard for expensive bound books to its evolution as a promotional tool meant to catch the eye. The middle of the twentieth century marked a high point for the medium, as the period’s leading illustrators brought contemporary visual styles into readers’ hands. A selection of these covers, in chronological order, appears below along with Salisbury’s captions. Aubrey Hammond, 1927. One of the standout dust jackets of the twentieth century, Hammond’s design juxtaposes delicate color harmony with nightmarish vision. Read More
February 21, 2018 Arts & Culture Yvan Alagbé’s “Dyaa” By Yvan Alagbé The French Beninese cartoonist Yvan Alagbé has been an influential player in the French avant-garde comics scene since the early nineties, when he copublished the anthology Le cheval sans tête. In 1994, his first book, Yellow Negroes, became an instant cult classic. It tells the story of the romance between Claire, a white Frenchwoman, and Alain, a Beninese immigrant in the country illegally. Alain lives with his sister Martine, who makes a living doing housework for well-to-do families. In 1997, Alagbé released “Dyaa,” a short story exploring Martine’s tragic romantic involvement with another immigrant. The story is published in full below. In 2012, in France, the two stories were collected, along with other work, into a single volume. This April, they will be released for the first time in English, under the title Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures. Read More
February 21, 2018 Arts & Culture The Night in My Hair: Henna, Syria, and the Muslim Ban By Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar The night the United States launches fifty Tomahawk missiles on the Syrian Shayrat airbase near Homs, I am washing henna and indigo out of my hair. The tub is splashed with tourmaline blue, speckled like the delicate markings on a sparrow’s egg, and from the living room I can hear the newscasters referring to margin of error, airpower, and the “perils of the region.” The water runs down the drain. When I was little, I used to pore over the photo albums of my parents’ wedding and their honeymoon in Syria, tracing the shots of my cousins and aunts and great-grandparents lined up in the courtyard for family photos, dozens of demitasses of Turkish coffee and laughter over backgammon. How young and strong my father still looked in the eighties, fifteen years before the doctors saw a constellation of powdered glass strewn across the wide basin of his lungs. The reporter drones on, and the night bursts open on the other side of the world. I squeeze the last of the muddy water from my hair, riming my fingernails with blue. Read More