December 13, 2017 Arts & Culture How A Godless Democrat Fell in Love With Cowboy Poetry By Carson Vaughan Image altered from: Frederic Remington, The Cowboy. 1902 You might call me smitten by the whole affair. By the cowboys, of course: their hats, their vests, their boots. Their wry smiles and fat handshakes. By the elderly couples lining up to thank the poets for their verse, to whisper you’re our favorite, to request a John Hancock from a man virtually unheard of outside the room. By the sun punching through ashen clouds above the snow-packed Ruby Mountains. By the crunch of rock salt underfoot. By the volunteer shuttle driver, retired from the gold mines, reclining behind the wheel and waiting for the next show to end. By the casino meals and the spilt whiskey and the faces red with laughter. By singer-songwriter Don Edwards yodeling “And they go hoo yip hoo yip hoo hoo di hoo di yip … ” By calloused hands worn smooth through nostalgia. By the cries of winter at the barroom doors. By the glowing tip of a cigarette in the crystal night sky. By the deluge of doggerel and the fat golden nuggets of a poem that shine long after I’ve left the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. I had dipped my toe in the waters of cowboy poetry for a New Yorker story in 2016. And then I fell in. My friends wonder what happened. Sometimes I do, too. I earned a graduate degree in creative writing. I like good books—I pretend to, anyway. Erin Belieu and John Berendt currently grace my nightstand. Though I dress from the Target clearance rack, Gay Talese is my style icon. I subscribe to Poem-a-Day. I’m not sure about God. I’m a Democrat. Read More
December 12, 2017 Arts & Culture Why Write Fiction in 2017? By Joe Fassler Constantin Alajalov, cover for The Saturday Evening Post, February 12, 1949 Most nights, before I go to bed, I sneak into the room where my infant son sleeps, steal across the floor, and kill the wireless router. The plug pulls away from the wall with a soft, satisfying sound, and on the plastic box a row of twinkling green lights blinks out. I’ve learned I have to do this. Otherwise, in the morning, I’ll succumb to temptation: I’ll rise, open my laptop, and start reading the news. I know that that decision will feel innocuous, even necessary, in the moment. But I also know I want to spend my morning writing as much as I can—and that a working Wi-Fi signal has the power to derail me. Even fifteen minutes of headline-scanning Twitter—if I can limit it to that—leaves me feeling overloaded, angry, panicked, worn out, weirdly high. So instead of flooding my mind with other voices, I back away. My work begins then with an act of disconnection, this physical severing I perform each night before I go to sleep. As much as we carp about the increasing digitization of our lives, this isn’t really a new problem. Writing required cord-cutting long before the computer. It’s an act of refusal, of relinquishment, and of retreat, a decision to turn away from the world and its noise of possibilities, to chase instead a signal down the quiet of a page. That work—the deep, sustained kind that yields poems and essays and fiction—can only happen in solitude, and in silence. And that’s the trouble. Read More
December 11, 2017 Arts & Culture The Rise of Queer Comics By Hillary Chute Gay Comix no. 1, ed. Howard Cruse, cover by Rand Holmes, 1980. The fastest-growing area in comics right now may be, broadly speaking, queer comics—comics that feature in some way the lives, whether real or imagined, of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer) characters. Queer comics are one of the most vibrant areas of contemporary comics, fueled in large part by the runaway success of Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic—the story of a gay girl and her closeted, ultimately suicidal gay father that was adapted to be a Broadway musical of the same title, and went on to win the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015. Gayness used to be a public accusation leveled at comics to discredit the medium: in the 1950s, Batman and Robin, and Wonder Woman, were suspected to be gay, and therefore a negative influence. Dr. Fredric Wertham wrote in his influential book on comics that the former represent “a wish dream of two homosexuals living together,” and for the latter, “the homosexual connotation of the Wonder Woman type of story is psychologically unmistakable … For girls she is a morbid ideal.” The infamous 1954 Comics Code, inspired by Wertham’s study, banned “sex perversion or any inference to same”—a clear reference to homosexuality. But today gay comics are an ever-expanding feature of the field, marking a new era of self-expression. Comics used to be read paranoically as gay code; in contemporary comics queer identity is openly announced. Read More
December 8, 2017 Arts & Culture How Original Are You? By Robert Shore Copyright © Museo Nacional del Prado “The old idea of making things” So there I was, sprawled across the floor of my living room in south London, happily riffling through the newspapers on my iPad (I’m old-fashioned like that). The shortlist for the annual Turner Prize had just been announced, and the broadsheet commentators seemed even more mystified than usual by the list of nominees. It was evident that the judges had done something unusual—unusual even in the context of the prize that had made Tracey Emin’s Bed tabloid fodder—by the reaction in the Guardian, where the super-sober Adrian Searle declared himself baffled. After offering a rundown of the candidates (Duncan Campbell, James Richards, Tris Vonna-Michell, Ciara Phillips), he declared: “It’s all a bit dour, and I take this as deliberate. This year’s judges seem to be intent on delivering an exhibition that not only shakes things up—none of the shortlisted artists are exactly familiar to a wider audience—but also want us to struggle with meaning as much as the artists seem to do … It’s going to be hard work.” Read More
December 7, 2017 Arts & Culture From Eternity to Here: Remembering Pearl Harbor By Alexander Nemerov The USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. Summoning Pearl Harbor is a slim, unique work by the renowned art historian Alexander Nemerov that delves into what it means to recall a significant event—Pearl Harbor—and redefines remembering in the process. How do words make the past appear? In what way does the historian summon bygone events? What is this kind of remembering, and for whom do we recall the dead, or the past? Nemerov raises fundamental questions about how we communicate with each other, and how the past continues in our collective consciousness, not merely as facts but as stories that shape us. Below, an excerpt: When I finally went to Pearl Harbor for the first time, I noticed the most famous fact about being there. From the memorial directly above the submerged USS Arizona and the entombed remains of its crew, I observed that the ship is still leaking oil. Silvery-blue and orange tie-dye pools spread on the water’s surface, floating all around the crusty turrets creaking in the air and the pale patterns of battleship steel shimmering a few feet under. Here was the past still emerging in the present, taking an aquatic form like breath spooling up from below, a psychedelic exhalation as though the state of being dead, and being dead right under a never-ending stream of tourists, required a streak of showmanship, a never-ending colorful wound, extending in a slow ectoplasmic leak, a kind of never-ending guitar solo, that would play out the souls of the chiseled dead in incremental liters until the end of time. Read More
December 6, 2017 Arts & Culture The Literary Prize for the Refusal of Literary Prizes By Ursula K. Le Guin I first learned about the Sartre Prize from “NB,” the reliably enjoyable last page of London’s Times Literary Supplement, signed by J.C. The fame of the award, named for the writer who refused the Nobel in 1964, is or anyhow should be growing fast. As J.C. wrote in the November 23, 2012, issue, “So great is the status of the Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal that writers all over Europe and America are turning down awards in the hope of being nominated for a Sartre.” He adds with modest pride, “The Sartre Prize itself has never been refused.” Newly shortlisted for the Sartre Prize is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who turned down a fifty-thousand-euro poetry award offered by the Hungarian division of PEN. The award is funded in part by the repressive Hungarian government. Ferlinghetti politely suggested that they use the prize money to set up a fund for “the publication of Hungarian authors whose writings support total freedom of speech.” Read More