January 16, 2018 Arts & Culture “What Does Your Husband Think of Your Novel?” By Jamie Quatro The spring my first book came out—a collection of stories, several of which detailed an erotic but unconsummated emotional affair—I was invited to speak at an all-men’s book club. I was excited such a club existed in my town. I told them I’d love to come. Southern male readers of fiction with serious literary habits! The meeting was held in the home of one of the members. About a dozen men showed up. We milled around and made the usual small talk. We ate good Mexican food and drank good Spanish wine and eventually gathered on sofas and chairs around the coffee table. I gave a brief talk about my “creative process”—something they’d asked me to discuss—and opened it up for questions. No one said anything. Men shifted in leather cushions and flipped through their copies of my book. It was hot out. Someone kept opening and closing the sliding back door in little screechy increments. Maybe no one actually read it, I thought. Finally the man sitting in the chair across from me flung his book onto the coffee table. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll just say it, because we’re all wondering the same thing: What in the hell does your husband think about your work?” Read More
January 15, 2018 Arts & Culture Martin Luther King’s Radical Anticapitalism By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor AP Photo/Horace Cort In a posthumously published essay, Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out that the “black revolution” had gone beyond the “rights of Negroes.” The struggle, he said, is “forcing America to face all of its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.” But it had not started out that way. Over the course of a decade, the black struggle opened up a deeper interrogation of U.S. society, and King’s politics traversed the same course. Indeed, in the early 1960s, the Southern movement coalesced around the clearly defined demands to end Jim Crow segregation and secure the right of African Americans to unfettered access to the franchise. With clear targets and barometers for progress or failure, a broad social movement was able to uproot these systems of oppression. King was lauded as a tactician as well as someone who could articulate the grievances and aspirations of black Southerners. Read More
January 12, 2018 Arts & Culture The Cornel West–Ta-Nehisi Coates Twitter Feud Explained Through Russian Writers By Jennifer Wilson Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates. There’s a phrase I’ve been thinking about a lot recently by the great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He says in his book The Gulag Archipelago, “Wherever the law is, crime can be found.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates Chekhov for me is the great writer of compassion. —Cornel West It was the fall of 2008 and I had just started a Ph.D. program in Russian literature at Princeton University. In retrospect, I don’t know what kind of twenty-two-year-old I was that I would leap so enthusiastically into long days and nights spent reading about serfs, brain fever, and Cossack rebellions, but there I was. I was anxious about keeping up with all the reading, so I eagerly signed up for a course on Anton Chekhov, who once famously said, “Brevity is the sister of talent.” About a month into the class, my already frazzled nerves snapped in two when I learned that our next session would be guest taught by Cornel West. As someone who grew up in a black family, this was bigger news than if Chekhov himself would be joining us. I was, however, a bit surprised; I knew Cornel West as many things: an intellectual and lyrical genius, a spitter of “black prophetic fire,” an extra in my least favorite Matrix film, and even a fashion icon, but back then I did not associate him (or really anyone who’d ever been on TV) with nineteenth-century Russian literature. But, as I would learn that day, West has long loved Russian writers, Chekhov in particular, whom he places at the center of his vision for radical social change. In interviews and public talks, West describes himself a “Chekhovian Christian” (and he seems refreshingly unconcerned that most people don’t have a clue what he means by that). There were only two other students in the class, and we were scheduled to be there for about three hours, so there would be no hiding in the corner; I’d have to talk to Cornel West, most likely more than once. When he arrived, he smiled warmly (revealing his signature gap tooth) and introduced himself to each of us individually. He wore his usual three-piece black suit, and he took care to thank our professor, “Sister Ellen,” as he called her, for inviting him. Read More
January 11, 2018 Arts & Culture A Private Literature By John Vincler Seeing manuscripts after Susan Howe. Robert Walser, Microscript 215, October–November 1928. Courtesy Robert Walser-Zentrum, © Keystone / Robert Walser-Stiftung Bern. “Emerging from an Abyss, and re-entering it that is Life, is it not, Dear?”—a sentence written by Emily Dickinson, most likely in the year before her death, in a letter to her sister-in-law. The sentence also appears in Susan Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives, her ode to archives, rare-book rooms, and research libraries. It appears in a sort of wave: first it is transcribed within Howe’s text, then follows in facsimile; we read the line, then we see it as it was written by Dickinson in her late, confident, sprawling and looping penciled hand. Howe has plucked this from the abyss and put it before us. We do not simply read Howe’s book; we see something of what she has seen. It is as if Howe has sought to take the experience of working in a rare-book room or a research library and enfold that experience into the space of her slim book. * Libraries and museums collect the objects of the past so that they can be brought forward into our present, so that they can be called forth as witness to some future. Perhaps also so that the past can be made more legible. Howe begins Spontaneous Particulars with an image of a single page from William Carlos Williams’s book-length essay-poem Paterson (which remained unfinished at his death). We look upon and read this lone typescript page, heavily marked up with its deletions and emendations made in pencil. No transcription is given. It reads, in part, “To drown the roar, stopped at the library / for peace … for a clue to the resolution of the turmoil.” Further down the single stanza, it continues, “A meaning, a meaning? What do they know / and feel we do not know?” Read More
January 11, 2018 Arts & Culture The Calla Lilies Are in Bloom Again By Lindsay Nordell The calla lilies are in bloom again. Such a strange flower. I carried them on my wedding day, and now I place them here in memory of something that has died. Katharine Hepburn spoke this line for the first time in 1933. She had been cast in a now-forgotten play called The Lake. Jed Harris, the director, was a sadist, and the twenty-six-year-old actress did not flourish in the role. (Dorothy Parker’s famous barb, that Hepburn “ran the gamut of human emotion from A to B,” is said to be about this performance). After previewing several shows to declining ticket sales, tepid reviews and increasingly abusive behavior from Harris, Hepburn was desperate to leave the play. “My dear,” Harris told her, “the only interest I have in you is the money I can make out of you.” She wrote him a check for her life savings and was released from her contract. In her 1991 autobiography, Hepburn writes of this time in her life, “It was a slow walk to the gallows.” Read More
January 10, 2018 Arts & Culture Puerto Rico Sketchbook: The Radical Arts Collective By Molly Crabapple In November, the artist and writer Molly Crabapple spent a week in Puerto Rico documenting grassroots efforts by communities to rebuild after Hurricane Maria. Here are excerpts from her sketchbook. © Molly Crabapple A few weeks after Hurricane Maria, I visited Casa Taller for the first time. I knew about them from the Internet. AgitArte, the radical arts collective that calls Casa Taller home, had crowdfunded tens of thousands of dollars to distribute grassroots aid in the hurricane’s aftermath. Still, their two-story house in Santurce had no sign out front. I hollered upward until a man on the second floor heard me and descended to let me in. Casa Taller was just the sort of iconic, authentic DIY arts space that gentrification had smothered in New York City. Like all of San Juan, its power was off, but it had a luxurious layout—a small garden, wide white rooms filled with papier-mâché masks, Punch-and-Judy-inspired prints on the walls, battered couches on which one could peruse its small collection of books, and teetering piles of manikin heads, arms, alligator maws. Upstairs, an illustrator was designing prints about the government response to Maria. FUCK FEMA AND THE U.S. MILITARY, read the first of the series, which I later saw posted on Instagram. A helicopter, a downed electrical pole, a CCTV camera. Pointed toward them, a brown hand, raising a middle finger. Every tendon in the wrist was taut. Read More