January 10, 2018 Arts & Culture How Do We Bury the Writing of the Dead? By Adin Dobkin For over a hundred thousand years, we’ve buried our dead. Broadly speaking, the act has no functional purpose; according to the World Health Organization, only bodies carrying infectious diseases demand burial. Instead, it offers us, the living, a resolute end: a body in the ground. We cannot always, or even often, give literature that same assurance. If a writer leaves behind unpublished, unfinished works after their death, only the fortunate find that work disposed of according to their wishes. Carrion fowl descend upon the still-warm body, picking at even the smallest scraps of flesh. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. Vultures, though not the most welcome sight, fill an important ecological role. Who are we to let them starve, even if a body wished it otherwise? Many conversations about posthumous publishing center around this question: Which is more important when considering whether to release a work, particularly an incomplete one, posthumously—authorial intent or obligation to the reader? More often than not, the latter wins the day. Read More
January 10, 2018 Arts & Culture The Man Who Spent Four Decades Interviewing Teen Stars By Susannah Jacob For more than forty years, between 1946 and 1988, Edwin Miller, the entertainment editor at Seventeen Magazine, conducted interviews with actors, musicians, and a few writers. His subjects were often in their teens or early twenties, poised at the cusp of their breakthroughs to fame. Many of them would go on to become the biggest stars of their time: Warren Beatty, Goldie Hawn, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Murphy, Sarah Jessica Parker, Gregory Peck, Sidney Poitier, Meryl Streep, Jimi Hendrix, Madonna, Elvis Presley, and the Rolling Stones. Miller died in 2004, but his archives at the New York Public Library opened in 2017. The collection includes forty boxes of transcripts and recordings from his interviews with young stars, long passages of which were never published. Read More
January 8, 2018 Arts & Culture Staging Octavia Butler in Abu Dhabi By Deborah Lindsay Williams The Louvre Abu Dhabi The Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by Jean Nouvel, opened in November after years of delay and a cost rumored to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The same weekend as LAD’s grand opening, the NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center hosted the world premiere of Parable of the Sower, an opera composed by the singer/songwriter Toshi Reagon, a queer Brooklyn-based activist, and based on the prophetic novel by Octavia Butler. At first glance, it seems unlikely that a “starchitect” museum in Abu Dhabi, where gas is cheap and water is expensive, would stage an opera about a fiery, drought-ridden apocalypse. And yet, taken together, the museum and the opera initiate a set of conversations—about art and culture and change—that upend stereotypes about the Gulf. The book Parable of the Sower (1993) was intended as the first of a trilogy. It’s set in a world where California is burning, rivers have dried up, and the president sells entire towns to the highest corporate bidder. Violence is everywhere, and not even houses of worship are safe. In the second book, Parable of the Talents (1998), a president is elected who promises to “make America great again.” The third book was never published. Given Butler’s prescience about America’s worst impulses, perhaps it’s best that the third book never came out: Do any of us really want to know how bad things might become? Read More
January 8, 2018 Arts & Culture Revising “The Waste Land”: Black Antipastoral and the End of the World By Joshua Bennett Kea Tawana, The Ark In what I am calling the weather, anti-blackness is pervasive as climate. The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; it is the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies. —Christina Sharpe, The Weather and as I watch your arm/your brown arm just before it moves I know all things are dear that disappear all things are dear that disappear —June Jordan, “On a New Year’s Eve” {1} As of yet, there is no general consensus regarding the finer details of Kea Tawana’s biography. According to an obituary published in the Times Herald-Record immediately following her death on August 4, 2016, she was “born on a … reservation [and] ran away from home at the age of 12.” But by Tawana’s own account of things, the artist was born in Japan in 1935, moved to the United States with her father and two brothers when she was twelve years old (her mother and sister, Tawana claimed, were killed by an air raid during World War II), and eventually settled in Newark, New Jersey. It was there, almost five decades later, that Kea Tawana would assemble her Ark. By all accounts, the Ark project was a wonder to behold in person. The vessel stood over three stories high, spanned eighty-six feet in length, and was constructed from the ground up with wood and scrap metal Tawana gathered, without assistance, from various abandoned locales throughout the city. In his 1987 profile of Tawana’s Ark, Chip Brown of the Chicago Tribune writes: The ark is an elegy to the lost communities of the Central Ward. Everything but tar paper and nails has been scavenged from the ruins of her environment. She has reused the lumber of demolished homes and bars, columns of churches, pieces of orphanages and synagogues … She figured an at-sea food storage capacity of 120 days and freshwater storage of 1,400 gallons. Her sketches called for a chapel, a library, a museum, a conservatory, a greenhouse, a bakery, a laundry, a sick bay, a stained-glass studio and metal shop. She anticipated a crew of a captain, a first officer, six seamen, a cook and two cats. She also envisioned that the ark would be able to mount a credible defense with an arsenal of six quartz pulsar lasers and four 2.5-inch rocket tubes. Read More
January 4, 2018 Arts & Culture The Reader Over Your Shoulder By Patricia T. O'Conner Robert Graves’s desk in his home in Majorca, where he lived from 1929 until his death. Photo: © Emily Benet An extraordinary book written in extraordinary times, The Reader Over Your Shoulder was begun in the summer of 1940, just after the fall of France and the evacuation of Allied forces at Dunkirk. Europe was now overrun by demagogues. Robert Graves, the celebrated English poet, novelist, and man of letters, had already fled his home in Majorca, ahead of Franco’s troops, and returned to England, a country that now feared for its life. Graves and Alan Hodge, his researcher and collaborator, had just finished writing The Long Week-End, a social history of Britain between the wars. It was an overview of life in the twenties and thirties, and might be summarized as “how the British let their hair down in peacetime.” The authors now felt that a similar laxity had crept into writing, which even at the highest levels had become “loose, confused and ungraceful.” With a new war to be won, the kingdom couldn’t afford careless, sloppy English. Good communication was critical, but Graves and Hodge were afraid that English prose in its current state was not up to the task: “We regard the present crisis as acute enough to excuse this book.” Their proposal, put simply, is that writers should anticipate readers’ questions, then answer them clearly, logically, and with a minimum of fuss. Some assembly is required, but instructions are included. Read More
January 4, 2018 Arts & Culture The Breakdown of Human Communication By Morgan Parker and Adam Valen Levinson Two writers discuss false binaries, litmus tests for dating, and a lack of nuance on the Internet. Adam Valen Levinson and Morgan Parker met many years ago—more than five, almost certainly less than eleven—as undergraduates at Columbia University; neither recalls precisely how they met. Now, as published authors, the two often banter and joke and argue and lament from their respective homes in Harlem and Hollywood. These conversations are imperfect, but rigorously in search of some shared understanding (hope?) for the human capacity to love, to care for, to accept, to amend, to create beauty. These are admittedly risky beliefs for a black American woman and an American Jew to hold. These conversations don’t hold all the answers, but they exist and continue to exist, which seems to be better than everyone just giving up on the messy stuff of the world. Parker’s work deals with ideas of multiplicity—of beliefs, of identity, of histories, of possibilities. Valen Levinson’s work, fueled by his propensity to poke other people and beat up on himself, addresses questions of the heart with a reporter’s commitment to facts. The following interview, conducted over Skype, is the second recorded conversation between Parker and Valen Levinson; the first attempt was lost to a dead cell phone. VALEN LEVINSON I’ve found the switch to texting, and then the many different evolutions and generations that texting has gone through on different platforms, so tough because it’s taken what you can do with bodies and most of what you can do with faces all the way out of it. PARKER Yeah, I mean, you can’t really text well with someone that you don’t know that well. You can relay information, but— VALEN LEVINSON And yet the new generation is meeting their spouses and dog walkers and doctors and therapists that way. PARKER I know. I mean, I feel like it’s a different skill, right? Like, it’s a skill to be able—and I’m saying this as a poet—to communicate your personality and intonation in a text. Most people can’t do that. VALEN LEVINSON Really, though, I think that it’s impossible to do. It’s impossible to ever communicate in a way where there’s no chance of it being taken as entirely the opposite of what you’re saying. Full-body communication is way harder to misinterpret because it taps into biological and social things that go back millions of years. Even orangutans smile at each other. So when you tell somebody, Hey, shut the fuck up, and you’re smiling, our brains are like, Cool, dude, I’m on board, I get what you’re doing there. It takes so much longer to establish trust over text, and I feel like we think we’re just establishing all this trust and communicating, but we’re not. There’s such a narrow range of expressions in text. Read More