January 3, 2018 Arts & Culture Puerto Rico Sketchbook: The Elders of the Island 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. All images © Molly Crabapple. Puerto Rico is an elderly island. A quarter of its population is over sixty-five. This is due to the last of a series of great migrations. Poverty, gifted to the island by Spain and then exacerbated by American colonization, sent able bodies abroad. First, in the early twentieth century, they went to roll cigars in Ybor City, Florida, and to till plantations in Hawaii, then they went to basic training (Puerto Ricans fought and died in both world wars), then, in the fifties, they went to sew garments and get cancer in the factories of New York. These workers kept the island close. Many returned, after decades of labor, to buy their parcela, a bit of land on which to resurrect a half-fictitious childhood on the green and generous earth, but this time with American modernity and the conveniences that was meant to imply. They looked with shame at the outhouse, the well, the mosquito net. In the early twenty-first century, the pattern continued. The island’s bankruptcy, unemployment, and the savage budget cuts imposed by the U.S. financial-control board—la junta—again forced working-age adults to leave the island, and their elderly parents, behind. Read More
January 3, 2018 Arts & Culture Curry Lit: Writing Authentically About India By Naben Ruthnum Cover illustration by Chloe Cushman. Even if the Indian subcontinent was never your home to begin with, it can serve—and has served—as a spiritual home in conversation, books, films, and pilgrimage-like trips. In her 1979 book Karma Cola, Gita Mehta observed these visitors and the industry of fake fakirs who sprang up around them to embrace their curiosity and take their money. As the vivid success of Eat Pray Love and Chip Wilson’s Lululemon empire have proven, the guru era is far from over. There are fraudulent ashrams and cultish inveiglers all over the subcontinent and in the islands where the disapora scattered: everyone has a cousin—or six—who gives 38 percent of their income to a leader who, in exchange, relieves them of their connections to family and friends. In the West, too, gurus proliferate in small local temples, Sai Baba megastructures, and the Bikram Yoga training camp. Karma Cola is history as reportage, a sardonic chronicle of minor vengeance for colonialism: the colonizers who just wouldn’t go away are now a source of capital for the country, a welcome variation on the one-way cash flow of the former empirical relationship. India can sell its wisdom, packaged for consumption by America and Europe’s young and directionless—or old and directionless, for that matter. Read More
December 22, 2017 Arts & Culture Advice on New Year’s Resolutions from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche By John Kaag and Skye C. Cleary It will soon be that time of year where many of us set ourselves up for failure. Make a resolution or don’t make a resolution; you will regret either. Or so the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard might quip. One estimate suggests that almost half of Americans make New Year’s resolutions, and yet less than 10 percent successfully follow through. Maybe we forget about them long before our snow boots dry out. Maybe life takes us on a different path. Maybe we stop caring. Maybe we simply fail. It might be tempting to do away with this farce altogether, but before we commit to being noncommittal about the New Year, it’s worth thinking through some of the options. The tradition of making New Year’s resolutions is at least four thousand years old. The ancient Babylonians celebrated their new year—the rebirth of the sun god Marduk—in spring, to coincide with barley-sowing season. Akitu was a twelve-day festival in which the king would promise to fulfill an extensive list of duties. To seal the king’s commitment, the high priest would slap him hard across the face. The slap had to be firm enough to draw tears: proof of the king’s dedication and a reminder to him to be humble. As part of the festival, other people also pledged their allegiance to the king and the gods and promised to repay their debts. Read More
December 22, 2017 Arts & Culture Puerto Rico Sketchbook: The Comic-Book Artist 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 Rosa Colón sat in the back room of El Local, a San Juan punk club whose walls crawled with hallucinogenic murals and whose main room had now been repurposed as a comedor social, or “collective kitchen.” El Local was Rosa’s place. For the past decade, she’d been a pillar of Puerto Rico’s indie comics scene. She drew comics, self-publishing her work through an imprint, Soda Pop Comics, that she ran with her partner, Carla. She made anthologies, organized art shows, and threw a yearly indie comic con to bring more attention to local art. As we lounged on El Local’s threadbare armchairs, a procession of tattooed young people in razor-altered black clothes shouted greetings in her direction. Read More
December 21, 2017 Arts & Culture Close Readings of the Police Blotter By Sophie Haigney If you read police blotters enough, you start to notice the colors: Pink bike. A yellow color backpack. Silver four-door sedan. Heather-blue uniform pants. A black male wearing a black hat with white lettering, a navy blue coat, and blue jeans. You notice the colors mostly because there aren’t many other details. Place, time, incident description—color of suspect’s clothing or car. Often the color of his or her skin. * I read police blotters because I write about crime, but I also enjoy getting lost in them. I can spend hours scrolling through outdated lists of events that happened places I’ve never visited: Rutherford, New Jersey; Killeen, Texas; Eliot, Maine. Someone told me once—and I’m not sure how he would have known, but I chose to believe him—that police blotters are the most-read pages on local news websites. So perhaps I’m not alone. Blotters vary in content by region. In Lamoille County, Vermont, there were five incidents involving deer between November 13 and 19. Car vs. deer, the log read the first four times, noting the injuries to drivers and deer (the driver was always unharmed). Then, finally, the recording officer became overwhelmed by the casualties: Nov. 17, 6:38 pm, a bad night for deer. The blotters of cities tend to list fewer animals and more violent incidents. Sometimes, though, the suburbs are brutal, too: Wellesley, Massachusetts: Knife flashed in road incident, 4:59 p.m. Read More
December 20, 2017 Arts & Culture Puerto Rico Sketchbook: The Houses Still Standing 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 “We are older than you,” Pepe says, when I meet him on the lemon-yellow striped bridge. The bridge is in Paloma Abajo, a neighborhood in the Comerío municipality that Defend PR is helping to rebuild. He is older than I am, with a neat gray beard and a bandana printed with marijuana leaves wrapped around his hair, but he is speaking not of himself but of our respective countries of birth. Puerto Rico was colonized before the United States, and by the time U.S. gunboats boomed into its harbor in 1898, it had enjoyed its hard-won autonomy from Spain for several months—not that this helped the island in the eyes of its new overlords. In the opinion of many U.S. politicians, Puerto Rico was populated by members of the deficient “Spanish” race, too lazy and primitive to be granted either independence or statehood. How little some attitudes change. I draw Pepe’s house—a wonder of lime green, high amidst the greener hills. “Don’t draw the American flag,” he tells me. “My wife put it up.” Later, he takes me inside the house, whose three squat stories he built with his own hands. He made their walls so thick and strong that even Hurricane Maria could not knock them down. Two black-and-white portraits of Pedro Albizu Campos hang in the living room. Albizu was a brilliant Afro-Caribbean lawyer, the founder of the Partido Nacionalista, and fluent in six languages. In 1921, he graduated valedictorian of his class at Harvard. In the years that came after, he advocated for armed insurrection against U.S. colonialism and spent twenty-six years in prison, where the U.S. (allegedly) experimented on him with radiation. They only let him out to die of the cancer this radiation caused. He is now venerated, by many Puerto Ricans, as a martyr for la patria, a sort of secular saint. “My father was one of Albizu’s soldiers,” Pepe says. The photos were the first objects he hung back up on the walls after the hurricane had passed. Read More