March 11, 2021 Arts & Culture The Trouble with Charlotte Perkins Gilman By Halle Butler Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ca. 1900. Photo: C. F. Lummis. Restoration by Adam Cuerden. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. When I first read “The Yellow Wall-Paper” years ago, before I knew anything about its author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, I loved it. I loved the unnerving, sarcastic tone, the creepy ending, the clarity of its critique of the popular nineteenth-century “rest cure”—essentially an extended time-out for depressed women. The story had irony, urgency, anger. On the last day of the treatment, the narrator is completely mad. She thinks she’s a creature who has emerged from the wallpaper. The rest cure caused the illness it claimed to eliminate. Beautifully clear. The unnamed first-person narrator goes through a mental dance I knew well—the circularity and claustrophobia of an increasing depression, the sinking feeling that something wasn’t being told straight. Reading “The Yellow Wall-Paper” felt like a mix of voyeurism and recognition, morphing into horror. It was genuinely chilling. It felt haunted. The story is based on Gilman’s experiences with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, late-nineteenth-century physician to the stars. Mitchell administered this cure of extended bed rest and isolation to intellectual, active white women of high social standing. Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Jane Addams all took the cure, which could last for weeks, sometimes months. Gilman was clearly disgusted with her experience, and her disgust is palpable. Read More
February 25, 2021 Arts & Culture The Charms of Tom Stoppard By Hermione Lee In the following excerpt from her landmark biography of Tom Stoppard, Hermione Lee explores the background of one of his most personal works to date, the 2020 play Leopoldstadt. Tom Stoppard. Photo: Gorup de Besanez. Time and again Tom Stoppard had talked about his good luck. He told people that he had had a charmed life and a happy childhood, even though he was taken from his home as a baby in wartime, his father was killed, and many members of his family, as he later discovered, were murdered by the Nazis. This narrative had become part of his performance, his built-in way of thinking and talking about himself. And that story of a charmed life was profoundly connected to his sense of luck in having become English. A patriotic gratitude, and a pleasure in belonging to his adoptive country, which, in contrast to many other places, was a free country, was the lifelong outcome of his childhood luck. A charmed life seems a highly appropriate phrase for Stoppard, too—not that he would put it like this—because of his own charm. Charm is a difficult word. It usually makes a person sound shady: glib, superficial, manipulative. If it’s possible to redeem the word, you’d want, in his case, to talk about “deep” charm: a charm that comes from attention, kindness, intelligence, humor, physical charisma—as well as glamour. And, also, charm as a form of concealment. Stoppard’s charm is not a barrier to the extent of the worldly, famous novelist Felix Abravanel in Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, whose “charm was like a moat so oceanic that you could not even see the great turreted and buttressed thing it had been dug to protect. You couldn’t even find the drawbridge.” But it does work as a form of defense and a means of persuasion. He knows what effect he has on people. Charm is also a vital characteristic of his work: the 2017 production of Travesties shows that off perfectly. And “charm” in its sense of spell or enchantment—like the “charms” that Prospero says goodbye to, having set Ariel free, at the end of The Tempest—is the secret of Stoppard’s profession, the magical thing that happens in the theater, hard to say quite how or why: “It’s a mystery.” Read More
February 24, 2021 Arts & Culture Farewell to Ferlinghetti By John Freeman City Lights Books/Twitter We didn’t drive in over the bridge. That was one surprise. I remember thinking we’d see the Transamerica Pyramid piercing the fog, or the bay sparkling in the distance. Instead, when I first visited San Francisco in the eighties, we arrived by tunnel. The BART train from Berkeley spat us out into the noisy, echoing heart of downtown. This was 1984, the city in near collapse, AIDS a full-blown crisis—the Reagan administration mocking its sufferers. As my family trudged up Kearny Street, we were stopped every few paces. Men whose clothes were in tatters asked us for money, food, anything. You’ll still encounter destitution in the city today; tech wealth merely rivers around it. To my child’s eye, it seemed apocalyptic then. How could a city pretend it wasn’t collapsing? By midday we stumbled into a bookstore. Perched on the corner of Columbus and Broadway, City Lights emerged like an oasis. Stepping into the shop, I recall thinking it had a very different idea of what we all needed to drink. Books about revolution, the theft of the North American continent, and community action sprawled over several levels. Poetry had an entire floor. I may have been ten, but my parents were radicals; I could recognize the tribal markings of left-wing thought. Everywhere you looked, there were the city’s problems, written about in books. On placards. Broadside poems. Slogans sketched right onto the shop walls. The store was promising an escape by showing you how to escape back into social engagement. I’d never been anywhere like it. That was thirty-seven years ago. Now, in the middle of the pandemic, the store is still open and it’s thriving. But yesterday it said goodbye to its eternally hip hundred-and-one-year-old cofounder, the poet, publisher, and community activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti. No one in American letters ever pushed back against power over such a long time as Ferlinghetti. He fought power as a poet, as a bookseller, and as a publisher. His poems in Coney Island of the Mind woke up a generation to the nightmare of the military industrial complex in America. In City Lights, the first all-paperback bookstore in the country, readers found fellow travelers for cheap prices. From City Lights Books, which has published everything from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” to Rebecca Solnit’s first book to a recent title on drone strikes, the question of moral values in the age of empire has been explored more deeply than anywhere else in American publishing. Read More
February 23, 2021 Arts & Culture The Resistance By Eula Biss James McNellis, Wikimedia Commons The problem of resistance was humming in my mind when I passed through an iron gate in France that read NÉCROPOLE DE LA RÉSISTANCE. Here were the graves of men and boys who had lost their lives fighting the Nazi occupation of their country. This cemetery of the resistance was on a plateau above Grenoble, positioned so that an enormous mountain stood beyond the graves like a monument. The sun was high over the mountain, reflecting off the white gravel paths, the white walls, and the rows of white crosses. I stood in that white glare with my son, harboring an inchoate fear and shielding my eyes. If I feared then, in 2017, that resistance in my own country would lead to this, the graves of the young, I also feared that it would not—that it would come to nothing. This was when headlines read: “The Resistance Grows” and “Resistance is Not Enough” and “Resistance is Futile.” Some newspapers put resistance in scare quotes, and some termed it the “so-called resistance.” The news didn’t believe in the resistance. And the question remained of what, exactly, was being resisted. Was it just one politician, or the enormous white shadow behind him? This resistance, some argued, was too multiple and too defuse. It was difficult to locate—it was without a single leader and it didn’t have a platform. It was new and it was not new. It began before the 2016 election, with Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock, and after, with the Women’s Marches and the airport protests of the Muslim ban. It was many resistances. It was everywhere and nowhere. From a distance, the French Resistance of the forties could appear more singular in purpose. It had the solidity of monuments and museums, though it also seemed far away, entombed in history. “This history looms each time the word ‘resistance’ is evoked in the current American political crisis,” Teju Cole wrote in 2018. “It judges the triviality of our responses.” I felt judged, standing among the graves of resistance fighters, and all my responses felt trivial. “The triviality is not in the predicament—so many have died here, and many more will die,” Cole wrote. The triviality, he clarified, was in the public tone. “Cheers to the resistance,” Taylor Swift said, raising a glass of white wine after publicly declaring her support for a Democrat in the midterm elections. This rebranding of political participation as resistance would be easier to dismiss as fad or fashion if the political system itself was not under threat. What constitutes resistance is necessarily different in a democracy than it is under an authoritarian regime or an autocracy. “We still have a democracy, at least on paper,” one of my friends remarked, with some hesitation, after the 2016 election. But we were already uncertain about that. Read More
February 18, 2021 Arts & Culture Najwan Darwish’s Poetry of the Unspeakable By Raúl Zurita Najwan Darwish. Photo: Veronique Vercheval. Courtesy of New York Review Books. If I could come back, I wouldn’t come under any other banner. I’d still embrace you with two severed hands. I don’t want wings in paradise, I just want your graves by the river. I want eternity at the breakfast table with the bread and oil. I want you— earth, my defeated banner. This poem, “My Defeated Banner,” is from the fifth section of the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish’s latest collection, Exhausted on the Cross, and in its devastating beauty, it represents one of the peak moments of his poetry as well as of the writing of our time. As in all of Darwish’s poetry, this defeated banner presents us with a primordial scene, possibly inserted in the depths of what we persist in calling the human, where the feelings of a particular being, that sudden nostalgia that grips us, that desire, that love, crosses over and merges with the nostalgia, passion, and love of all humanity. We understand then that, from Nothing More to Lose and Je me lèverai un jour (I will rise one day) to Exhausted on the Cross, the multifaceted poetry of Najwan Darwish puts us again and again in front of the contours of something immemorial, almost unspeakable. It tells us that above all else poetry is solidarity and compassion for every detail of the world: for that specific bread and oil, for that eternity at the breakfast table, for that land with its “graves by the river.” The poem shows us those graves, it explicitly tells us that they are there, by the river; and for a second we see that if that image moves us, it is because—whatever our countries, origins, and histories, and even whatever languages we speak and, beyond that, whatever times we have lived and died in—we have all been buried in those graves and, at the same time, we have all wept over them. The characters who move through the seven sections that make up Exhausted on the Cross are exhausted, exhausted on an infinity of crosses that rise in an infinity of places. Expelled from their ancestral land, permanently besieged and persecuted, women who have lost everything—their houses, their neighborhoods, their children—make present to others, to me, to you, to the reader, that in this land of victims and perpetrators, displaced and disappeared, all the rest of us are survivors. And if we can affirm that we are facing political poetry, it is because we do it as survivors of an unfinished war. Far removed from any pathos or self-pity and, on the contrary, endowed with a stirring familiarity with everything it names, a familiarity that often resorts to irony and humor, Najwan Darwish’s poetry travels through the villages, landscapes, neighborhoods, cities, and towns of a history that is three millennia old, one that, in each of its corners, preserves the remains of a permanently shattered eternity, as if there were an underlying god, not named, who took pleasure in weaving together suffering and misfortune. Read More
February 16, 2021 Arts & Culture Searching for Gwendolyn Brooks By Bernard Ferguson Gwendolyn Brooks at her typewriter. Often, when I look back at the poems that have found their sudden ways to me—the ones that have chosen me in particular, to move through me and onto the page—it is hard to imagine they are related to one another. It is hard to believe the poems that sprawl wide, the poems that play their tricks, the poems that exhume and resurrect, that breathe strange and speak with different tongues, all share a common denominator. It is hard to believe all the differently hued poems I’ve written have come from my own throat, born of the same place but perhaps of a different season, fruit of the same tree perched on a different branch. How is one of my poems that sounds like “How Great,” by Chance the Rapper—a song that I love—related to another poem that I would not have written without reading Eve Ewing’s Electric Arches? How is a poem I wrote about my late father’s gold chain related to a poem I only fairly recently discovered? This is the natural order of being descended from one common lineage, so much of the work I love the poetic offshoot of one common ancestor. Those that have taught me my best lessons have all learned from Gwendolyn Brooks, or have learned from someone who had learned from Brooks. Today, if I squint hard enough, if I ask the right questions, it seems everything—the poems, the music, the seasons—points me back to her. * My poetic lineage is constructed, as I see it, via the long list of all the poems, visions, music, stories, and every syllable of any bit of good language that I’ve encountered in my life. What becomes cardinal in that lineage is the bits that manage to sear my inner skull with their light and bring me new ways of seeing. One entry point into my lineage can be found in the poetry of Ross Gay, and more specifically, his poem, “Sorrow Is Not My Name,” and, even more specific still, his line, “My color’s green. I’m Spring.” I was first assigned Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude while in an undergrad workshop, and I consumed it so quickly I made small gusts of wind as I turned the pages. Gay’s ability to wield the hues of joy made me hunger. His poems taught me how I myself might enter language through the wide threshold of rapture. Gay is known to enter delight through many different doors, but in “Sorrow Is Not My Name,” Gay decided the door would be death itself. Death and the many tools it has sharpened and dipped into fire. Death and its claws tapping through the frost on our bedroom windows. I have been in close proximity to the reaper and his wide blade, and so it feels familiar to watch Gay’s speaker name death as it appears throughout the landscape: just this morning a vulture nodded his red, grizzled head at me He names it again as he finds death even closer: the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me on the bus taking notes And yet, there is delight. There is a sense that Gay’s speaker will surely perish eventually, maybe even soon, but certainly not today, not in this particular poem. Today, Gay’s speaker feels only delight rupturing through his body. …yeah, yeah. But look; my niece is running through a field calling my name. The speaker remembers, almost like a prayer, that their name is not endued with sorrow. And thus, the poem ends with a line that has clogged the cogs of my thinking; clogged them with glee: I remember. My color’s green. I’m spring. Read More