February 20, 2018 Arts & Culture The Real Scandal in Academia By EJ Levy Collage of pulp-fiction covers. My first tenure-track job out of grad school was in Washington, D.C., a dozen years ago, when it was common for Washingtonians to claim that D.C. was Hollywood for ugly people (both towns being focused on power, prestige, social ascendance, and its attendant glamour—basically, high school for grown-ups). So I wasn’t surprised to see that the sexual harassment allegations sweeping Hollywood are also common to D.C. More surprising is the relative lack of attention thus far to such harassment in academia, where—to judge by the content of literary fiction—sexual harassment has been a staple for decades. (J. M. Coetzee’s brilliant Disgrace comes to mind, as does Roth’s The Dying Animal, Francine Prose’s Blue Angel, Denis Johnson’s The Name of the World, Malamud’s A New Life, to name a few, and of course Nabokov’s Lolita, whose predatory narrator is a professor of literature, if not preying on a student.) Some of the male writers whose work I most admire are famous both for their books and for their famously bad behavior. My ex-girlfriend grew up with John Gardner’s family—the novelist and mentor to Raymond Carver—and told me stories of climbing trees to watch him fuck his grad students. These used to be war stories that men told with a certain pride. A professor once told me, without irony, that there were undergrads who considered sleeping with a prof part of completing a liberal arts degree. He actually believed this. Read More
February 15, 2018 Arts & Culture Watching ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ in Tehran By Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi Still from The Phantom of the Opera. On the first Friday of every month, a thin mustached man wearing a trench coat and a pair of dark reflective sunglasses came through our door with a shiny black briefcase packed with VHS tapes. He was a man of few words, and our exchanges were brief. He would place his briefcase on our dining table, unclasp it, and ceremoniously spread open its contents with a gesture that said, I lay it all out before you. His voice, normally stiff and remote, expanded into a high-pitched squeal if I requested a movie he had been chasing after but had not yet acquired. It delighted me to provoke him, not out of malice but because each time his toad voice erupted, I pictured him breathlessly trying to outrun his fellow smugglers through the subterranean corridors of the black market, the tails of his trench coat like wings in the wind, clutching the illegally filmed videos of movies screened in foreign theaters, where the shadowy bare heads of female viewers, sharpening their teeth on Red Vines and popcorn, filled the bottom of the screen. Besides, he was in on the joke. It was all a show. I was matching his performance with a false theater of my own. We both knew that deep down, the only thing I wanted was to rent The Phantom of the Opera over and over again. “Again?” my mother would ask, her voice drawn out, thinly disguising her concern. “Again!” I would command, my eyes wild with pleasure. Read More
February 15, 2018 Arts & Culture In Turn Each Woman Thrust Her Head By Kim Todd Poster for The Penelopiad at the Buddies and Bad Times Theater. In the hot attic bedroom in Minneapolis, my twelve-year-old daughter is reading to me from the Odyssey. Curled in the center of the orange paisley chair, she conjures ship-smashing gales, feasts of roast lamb, a mouth full of salt. The words wash over me as I do leg lifts, building strength after breaking a foot, eager to run again. Sweat sticks skin to the polished wood floor. Sparrows chatter and build nests of junk-mail scraps and dryer lint on beams outside, just above the windows. A lock of dark hair hangs in my daughter’s face as she adopts the goddess Athena’s shocked voice. Odysseus has dared to doubt her, and in her wounded pride, she sounds a bit like an aggrieved mother. Your touching faith! Another man would trust Some villainous mortal, with no brains—and what am I? Your goddess-guardian to the end in all your trials. It’s a story we both love, though this is my daughter’s first encounter with Homer’s original. Athena, in particular, is magnetic. We’ve both dressed up as Zeus’s daughter at different times for Halloween. In the seventies, I went door-to-door in a lacy thrift-store dress that led everyone to ask if I was a fairy princess, and me to answer, through clenched teeth, “No. I’m the goddess of wisdom, weaving, and defensive war.” Two years ago, my daughter held a plastic shield from a knight costume on which she pasted a green foam Medusa’s head. Gray eyes, bronze-tipped spear, strategizing mind: there’s no denying Athena’s appeal. To slip into her golden sandals, even if they are just shiny fabric hot glued to flip-flops, is to slip on a measure of power. Read More
February 15, 2018 Arts & Culture The Epic, Neglected Vision of Joan Murray By Farnoosh Fathi The following is adapted from the editor’s introduction to a new collection of Joan Murray’s poems, published last week. Joan Murray. Photo courtesy of Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. “What truth, what mystical awareness can be lived,” Joan Murray wrote in a letter to her mother. Like the young Rimbaud, Murray intended to make herself a seer—what she calls, among other figures, the “Unemployed or universal Architect.” She became this architect-seer not, as Rimbaud proposed, by a total derangement of the senses but by building “the firm reality of a consciousness, consciousness in the never-ending, the great wideness that one must blend withal.” Like Emily Dickinson and Laura Riding before her, Murray belongs to a radical arc of American metaphysical women poets, most of whom still remain unsung. Her untimely death from a congenital heart condition in 1942, at age twenty-four, marked the loss of an extraordinary poet; yet Murray’s poems recalibrate the notion of a life’s work. The tragic facts only underscore the epic achievement of her vision. Five years after her death, out of the blue woodwork of 1947, her first book of poetry was published as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition with the title Poems by Joan Murray: 1917–1942. W. H. Auden, who had been dissatisfied with the manuscripts he had received as a first-year judge, had reached out to Murray’s mother to inquire about the possibility of publishing her daughter’s work posthumously for the prize. Murray had been a student in Auden’s Poetry and Culture course at the New School in 1940, and her mother countered Auden’s invitation with the accusation that he had killed her daughter by inspiring her “poetry fever.” But she was devoted to her daughter’s work and eager to see it published, so agreed to the Yale edition with the condition that her friend Grant Code—a poet, Harvard lecturer, and dance and theater critic—edit the collection. Read More
February 14, 2018 Arts & Culture The Soul of W. E. B. Du Bois By Ibram X. Kendi W. E. B. Du Bois The dispute lasted for more than a year between itinerant black farmer Sam Hose and his wealthy white employer, Alfred Cranford. Hose requesting his wages. Cranford refusing to pay up. The dispute grew like the crops on Cranford’s farm outside of Atlanta, in Coweta County. On April 12, 1899, Cranford aimed murderous threats and his loaded gun at Hose. Hose grabbed a nearby ax, threw it at Cranford, and ran into the Georgia wilderness. Newspapers got wind of the incident and started blaring sensational details of the murderous Hose who raped Cranford’s wife as Cranford lay dying. Read More
February 14, 2018 Arts & Culture Advice on Love from Nietzsche and Sartre By Skye C. Cleary A couple in front of the love locks in Paris. Locking lips and interlocking fingers are harmless enough, but locking into love is seductively dangerous—both figuratively and literally. Twenty-first-century lovers have become so captivated by the metaphor that, in 2015, the pont des arts in Paris had to be released from the crushing weight of forty-five tons of padlocks that lovers had secured to it. Keys, tossed over the rails, litter the Seine. While the Parisian love locks were auctioned to raise money for charities, padlocks still smother memorials around the world—from other bridges in Paris, to the Brooklyn Bridge, to fences in Hawaii and Australia. Urban planners have now become accidental heroes in the crusade against the obsession, although the phenomenon persists despite their best efforts to thwart it. On a Valentine’s Day that comes hot on the heels of #MeToo, it’s worth reflecting on some of our rituals and symbols of love. For example, while I hope chastity belts are a relic of the past, ironmongery such as wedding bands are still among our ultimate signifiers of commitment—perhaps even more so than the marriage certificate that binds us legally. In some ways, this makes sense. Steely icons are strong, stable, and durable. Metallic tokens outlive us to such an extent that they remind us of the possibility of everlasting love. Most of us want love, and we want it to stay, so no wonder we’re tempted to fetter it in chains. However, these exalted symbols are deeply troubling in other ways. Not only are they cold and hard and inflexible, but they’re also relics of a long tradition of possessiveness: wedding rings are a vestige of dowry traditions and signify being owned. Read More