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Category Archives: Arts & Culture

September 5, 2018
Arts & Culture

For the Ugly Ones: The Spiky Feminist Anger of Virginie Despentes

By Lauren Elkin
Virginie Despentes. Photo: Jean-François Paga.

Three things were made to fit in the palm of your hand: a gun, a bottle, and a dick. —Virginie Despentes, Baise-moi

For a long time, whenever I opened a book by Virginie Despentes, I would feel that instead of me reading it, it was reading me. I would squirm under its gaze and soon close it. I smiled weakly whenever she was mentioned. I was ashamed; I worried my discomfort meant I was not as radical a feminist as I fancied myself.

Despentes is a legend in France, especially among young women. Much of this reputation rests on her first novel, Baise-moi (1994), a taboo-shattering book about a pair of young women, Nadine and Manu, who go on a killing spree across France. One has worked as a prostitute, the other as a porn actress; in between murders, they have graphically described sex in hotel rooms with a series of men. In 2000, Despentes codirected a film adaptation with Coralie Trinh Thi that starred Karen Bach and Raffaëla Anderson, all three former porn actresses; because the sex scenes were unsimulated, the film was hotly controversial and was initially banned in France.

But it wasn’t the violence or the graphic sex that stopped me from reading her work. In Baise-moi, I got as far as this description of Nadine’s roommate, Séverine: Read More
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September 4, 2018
Arts & Culture

Because the Story Was Mine

By Thea Lim

I can’t remember the first time someone asked me what I was. The question has always been a part of my landscape, as common as denim or dirt. Now people ask it of my daughter. The question itself is funny—what are you?—so nonsensical, so naked of etiquette, frenzied to know. Sometimes it’s friendly, a password whispered in front of a door, asking if we are the same. Usually, it’s not. I used to try to play games with the question, beat it. Well, I would say, I have a bachelor’s degree in political science and English literature. Now, made sad and wise by age, I just tell people what they want to know, reeling it off like a rhyme: my mother is white from England; my father is Chinese from Singapore; I was born in Canada. Is there something necessarily humiliating about having to list your race—and your parents’ race and your grandparents’ race—before you can gain entry into conversation? If so, it’s only because we’ve made race something to be ashamed of. This is what I tell myself: you can think your way out of this trouble, this pain.

I never wanted to write fiction that was rooted in where I came from. That where is overexposed, like a stripped nerve. This is a problem for writers of color—or for anyone who knows there’s a narrative attached to their body, a narrative over which they have no control. Telling the truth, just being me, felt like a crude performance. Writing about my life was giving into the lust of the dominant gaze. And there was no way I could write my story and pass it off as pure fiction: I reverse migrated with my family from Canada to my father’s country, Singapore, and then I migrated back to Canada, my birth country, as an adult. This journey was so embarrassingly specific, so convoluted, it could not be masked well enough to be a story of its own, loosed from autobiography.

Instead, I swung hard in the opposite direction. I wrote angry, reactionary work, telling the world all the ways it was wrong. I published a novella of feminist fiction in 2007 because if my writing didn’t have a righteous point to make, how could I justify doing something as bourgeois as writing? An instructor told me that when you write, you have to leave the soapbox behind—you can’t let politics determine the story. Because he was white, I ignored him. Maybe it was easy for him to put aside politics, but mine weren’t something I could take off like a T-shirt. Then, at a workshop for writers of color, another teacher said the same thing, a little differently: if you can’t get past your own morality, you will be judging your story too much to write it. This was a ground-shaking relief. It gave me a choice that wasn’t either turning my cheek or slapping back. It gave me permission to walk away. Read More

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August 30, 2018
Arts & Culture

The Aristocracy of Freakdom: E.E. Cummings on Coney Island

By E.E. Cummings
Although it is true that the inhabitants of the U.S.A. have ample cause for pessimism, thanks to Bad Art, Bootleggery and 26,000 lesser degrees of Bunk, it is also true that said inhabitants are the fortunate possessors of a perfectly genuine panacea. Were not this so, throughout the breadth and length of our fair land mayhem would magnify itself to prodigious proportions, burglary would bulge to deadly dimensions, policemen would populate our most secret sanctuaries and such notable nodes of Kultur as New York City would leap en masse to the celestial regions. Unbelievable as it may appear, there might even come a day when not a single campanulate congressman went to sleep on duty and not a single authentic artist starved at his Corona. In short (and to put it very mildly) anything might happen.

But the panacea is genuine. Crime, accordingly, is kept within quite convenient bounds, murder is monotonously punished, unart and nonliquor exchange visiting cards and the dollar bill waves triumphant o’er the land of the free and the home of the slave—all of which is due to the existence of an otherwise not important island, whose modest name would seem to suggest nothing more obstreperous than the presence of rabbits. No wonder learned people state that we occupy an epoch of miracles!

At the outset, one thing should be understood: it is not owing to sociological, political, or even psychological predilections that the present and unlearned writer partakes of the cure in question. Quite the contrary. Like those millions of other so-called human beings who find relief for their woes, each and every year, at Coney Island, he occupies these miraculous premises with purely personal intentions—or, more explicitly, in order to have a good time. And a good time he has. Only when his last spendable dime has irretrievably disappeared and his face sadly is turned toward his dilatory domicile, does it so much as occur to your humble servant to plumb the significance of his recent experiences. Such being the case, there can be no reasonable doubt as to his intellectual honesty re the isle and its amusements, concerning which (for the benefit of all thoroughly unbenighted persons and an unhappy few who are not accustomed to lose their complexes on The Thunderbolt) he hereby begs to discourse. Read More
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- e.e. cummings
August 29, 2018
Arts & Culture

An Ovidian Taste Test: The Old Verse Translations of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’

By Anthony Madrid
All right, let’s do this as a speed round. Quick in, quick out. No diddling.

Fact: there were, between 1550 and 1750, exactly three supremo-supremo English versions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. They are as follows:

Arthur Golding, The XV Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, translated oute of Latin into English meeter, by Arthur Golding Gentleman, A work very pleasaunt and delectable, 1567.

George Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz’d, and Represented in Figures, 1632.

John Dryden et al., Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Fifteen Books, Translated by the Most Eminent Hands (sometimes called the “Garth” Ovid, after its editor, Sir Samuel Garth), 1717.

Much could be said about each of these. Golding was read and pilfered by Shakespeare. Sandys wrote part of his version in what is now the State of Virginia. Dryden is the father of English criticism. Golding writes in what are called fourteeners. Sandys provides notes (and supplementary essays) like a Victorian eccentric. Dryden wrote “Absalom and Achitophel.” We could spend all day on this kind of thing.

Instead, what I want is to put you in a position to judge between these guys’ versions. We’re just gonna do a simple little comparison. I’ll throw down a couple of judgments, and point out what you might otherwise miss.

You probably know it’s no easy thing, judging between rival verse translations, especially when they were produced before the 19th century. The good news has always been that it hardly matters how hard a task is, when no one’s gonna do it. Easy, hard—comes to the same thing. Yet somebody has to go in there. Somebody born after 1960.

How ’bout you? You don’t have to read the whole Metamorphoses three times; I’ve done it for you. The main thing is you gotta concentrate on the three exhibits presented below. If you read ’em carelessly they will seem more or less the same to you. And here’s the hideous part. They might seem the same to you, even if you concentrate. But at least you’ll know where you stand. You’ll be able to say with conviction “To hell with all of ’em.”
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August 27, 2018
Arts & Culture

Is Literature Dead?

By David L. Ulin
William Michael Harnett, To This Favour, 1879

One evening not long ago, my fifteen-year-old son, Noah, told me that literature was dead. We were at the dinner table, discussing The Great Gatsby, which he was reading for a ninth-grade humanities class. Part of the class structure involved annotation, which Noah detested; it kept pulling him out of the story to stop every few lines and make a note, mark a citation, to demonstrate that he’d been paying attention to what he read. “It would be so much easier if they’d let me read it,” he lamented, and listening to him, I couldn’t help but recall my own classroom experiences, the endless scansion of poetry, the sentence diagramming, the excavation of metaphor and form. I remembered reading, in junior high school, Lord of the Flies—a novel Noah had read (and loved) at summer camp, writing to me in a Facebook message that it was “seriously messed up”—and thinking, as my teacher detailed the symbolic structure, finding hidden nuance in literally every sentence, that what she was saying was impossible. How, I wondered, could William Golding have seeded his narrative so consciously and still have managed to write? How could he have kept track of it all? Even then, I knew I wanted to be a writer, had begun to read with an eye toward how a book or story was built, and if this was what it took, this overriding sense of consciousness, then I would never be smart enough. Read More
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August 23, 2018
Arts & Culture

Vodka for Breakfast: On the Melancholy of Cheever’s Journals

By Dustin Illingworth
Detail from the cover of the Vintage Classics edition of Cheever’s Journals

There is something feckless about a writer’s journals. They are a specialist’s document, and those who parse their pages are like grooming baboons, searching for fleas. Expecting bohemian excess or stoic grace, we discover instead a life reduced to the fungible poetry of soiled clothes and closely mown grass. A writer’s journal is “neither life exactly, nor fiction,” Elizabeth Hardwick suggested, “but like one of those dreams in which dead friends, with their old crumpled smiles and grunts, their themes, meet you turning a corner.”

The themes of John Cheever’s journals—God, sex, guilt, and nature—manage to instill genteel ennui with the anguished moral passion of a Russian novel. Published in 1990, eight years after his death from lung cancer, and decades after he had been enshrined as America’s premiere bourgeois fabulist, the journals shocked in their revelation of the self-lacerating, booze-addled voluptuary hiding in the fine suit of a country squire. “Rarely has a gifted and creative life seemed sadder,” a chastened John Updike wrote upon their publication. But though the gap between Cheever the cultural effigy and Cheever the man was received with surprise and consternation, the ambiguity of his work had always betrayed such a fissure. Cheever’s greatest fiction enacts a kind of doubleness, a yearning for grace darkly marbled with lust and duplicity. The rapturous moments—one thinks of the beautiful early story “Goodbye, My Brother,” with its darkness and iridescence, the naked women walking out of the sea—barely conceal the saturnine streaks. Beneath his character’s charm and taste is a stratum of secret pain, a longing that is somehow shameful. They expect more from life, and this expectation leads them into bafflement and transgression. This is authentic sin, half created, half siphoned from the brackish estuary of Cheever’s soul. The pulse of his magnificent storytelling can be found, vast and inchoate, in the pages of his journals.

Cheever couches his spiritual odyssey in the mundane torment of his domestic life, a kind of Strindbergian drama set in the deep lawns and blue afternoons of Ossining. “In church the Epistle is majestic but my mind wanders,” he writes in a 1959 entry. “Now a clearing wind has sprung out of the Northwest. I will think about Hell and the family.” His difficult marriage possessed an elliptical structure: His desire for physical intimacy, her rejection of that desire, his consolation in alcohol and hers in bitter recriminations. Particular anecdotes pierce with the pain of specificity: “Vodka for breakfast. Mary mentions her mother for the third time in thirty-five years. ‘I wanted a teddy bear for Christmas, and she said I was too old. She pronounced ‘doll’ with the same terribly Massachusetts accent you have.’ So we are people we have never met.” Read More
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