Photo: Frank Vincentz (CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)). Via Wikimedia Commons.

From inside a circle made of shards of glass in front of Porto Alegre’s Public Market, a scrawny man, little more than a twig of skin, fired a bottomless question at me point blank:

“Miss, tell me something. Do you think I should keep on eating glass or give it up, go back home, and put in some crops?”

I remained stock-still, not knowing what to say, utterly mute. Should he continue eating glass or not? It was a question and a half. Then I understood. Jorge Luiz Santos de Oliveira, thus christened thirty-five years ago, had a dream, the dream of making a living by eating glass. Because eating glass is Jorge Luiz’s art. From early on, it was what set Jorge Luiz apart from the sad hordes of all the Jorges, from the long line of country people from São Jerônimo, his land, coal land, dark and pungent. By masticating his rocky ground, Jorge Luiz discovered he is a unique being in the world, despite the sameness of his melancholy face, of skin stretched over bones. By gnawing on stones to frighten off the worms crawling around his insides, he blazed the trail of his art. For someone who regurgitated stones, glass wasn’t scary. Read More

Alice Mattison reckons with the impacts of macular degeneration …

Rembrandt, self-portrait, 1660 (modified)

My mother thought children should visit museums, and back in the fifties, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was free. The Egyptian tomb was satisfyingly frightening if I pretended it was large enough to get lost in; a knight on a horse pointed a huge lance straight at me. I didn’t exactly get interested in art, but I picked up the notion that looking at it is something people do, something I could do. When I was old enough to take the subway from Brooklyn by myself, I went to museums alone. They were conducive to fantasy life. Or I went with friends. We knew museums had a snobbish distinction. I liked being someone who didn’t travel to Manhattan only to shop.

As a college student, I continued to live with my parents and sister in an apartment not big enough for everyone’s opinions. In museums, I could think alone in a warm place. I found the Frick Collection, also free. Soon my friends and I owned that imposing nineteenth-century mansion, and were annoyed when a painting was moved. We once walked through with our backs to the art, holding up the hand mirror I used to put on lipstick. We wanted to see how the paintings looked when seen backward. Not as good.

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Olga Tokarczuk. Photo: © K. Dubiel.

I’ve been saying it for years! Every fall, the big night would come and I would set my alarm for four or six or eight in the morning, depending on my time zone, and then not sleep because I was sure Olga Tokarczuk would win the Nobel Prize in Literature. This year it happened! At 4 A.M.

High time, and perfect time. Olga has been charting her own course since the first. She has gone boldly wherever her curiosity led, never daunted by boundaries, be they constraints of genre—as in the case of Flights (first published in Poland in 2007), a “constellation novel,” to use Olga’s own term, that might not be a novel at all—or political and linguistic—as in the case of The Books of Jacob (2014), Olga’s twelfth and latest novel, which I am translating right now. It is this intrepid methodology, combined with her firm commitment to the reader’s engagement and enjoyment, that has brought her in line with some of the world’s most pressing current concerns.

The Books of Jacob is a monumental novel that delves into the life and times of the controversial historical figure Jacob Frank, leader of a heretical Jewish splinter group that ranged the Habsburg and Ottoman empires and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth seeking basic safety as well as transcendence. Considered by many to be her masterpiece, The Books of Jacob is also a suspenseful and entertaining novel that remained a national best seller for nearly a year after its release. Read More

On the glory and depravity of hair metal.

Still from The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years

The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years is a documentary that often feels like a mockumentary—in part because of the inherent absurdity of the LA metal scene in the late eighties, in part because of Penelope Spheeris’s directorial choices. Spheeris, of Wayne’s World fame, let her subjects decide how they wanted to be filmed. Gene Simmons of Kiss did his interview in a lingerie store—“I don’t want to do anything tacky,” he’d told her. Simmons’s bandmate Paul Stanley suggested, “How about in bed with a bunch of women?” His segments were filmed from above, with lingerie models absentmindedly stroking his spandex pants. Chris Holmes, the lead guitarist from W.A.S.P., suggested, “How about drowning in a pool with my mother watching?”

In what is probably the film’s best-known scene, Holmes floats in a pool chair, wearing black leather pants, and tells Spheeris he’s a “full-blown alcoholic.” To prove it, he pours vodka from a liter of Smirnoff down his throat and all over his face for almost ten seconds. His mother, Sandy Holmes, who has strong June Cleaver vibes, is indeed there watching from the side of the pool, looking disappointed but resigned. He says, “I’m a happy camper.” Spheeris asks him if he wishes he was a bigger star. “I wish I was a smaller star,” he answers. “I don’t dig being the person I am.” Later, after we’ve seen several musicians say that metal is better than sex, Spheeris cuts back to Holmes in the pool making a jerking off motion and saying, “It’s like this, I love it, it’s great,” with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. We hear Spheeris off camera: “It’s like beating off?” “It’s worse than that,” he says. (I can’t explain why, but I love him.) Simmons, back in the lingerie store, says that anyone who claims “it’s lonely at the top” is “full of it”: “It’s the best.” Back to Holmes in the pool: “I would rather be broke and happy than rich and sad.” If only we were given that choice.

Most everyone in the film ends up looking ridiculous. Some random scenester tells Spheeris, “I don’t work, I can’t stand work.” She asks, “What was the last job you had?” “Uh,” he says, “I’ve never had a job.” Paul Stanley remarks thoughtfully, “Once you have money, you realize that it’s really not important.” In one of my favorite moments, Spheeris goes to the Cathouse, Riki Rachtman’s “big fun sleazy” club a couple miles south of the Strip (Rachtman later went on to host MTV’s Headbangers Ball), and asks some people why they go there. The response is just metal word salad: “Fucking rock!” “Heavy metal!” “Party!” “Drink!” “Guns N’ Roses!” “LA!” In another notorious scene, Spheeris films Ozzy Osbourne making breakfast in a leopard-print robe; there’s a close-up shot of him attempting to pour orange juice into a glass and spilling it all over the counter. Spheeris later admitted in an interview that part was a stunt: “I faked the orange juice spill.” But most of the stupid excess was real—or maybe in the metal years it was hard to distinguish between stunt and reality.

In their tell-all collective memoir The Dirt, the members of Mötley Crüe show the extent of the era’s depravity in great detail. Bassist Nikki Sixx describes a day on tour when Ozzy Osbourne announced he “fancied a bump,” but they’d run out of coke. (Picture broad daylight: “We rolled out of the bus under the heat of the noonday sun and went straight to the bar.”) “Unfazed,” he crouched down on the sidewalk and snorted a line of live ants. Trying to keep up (“we wanted to maintain our reputation as rock’s most cretinous band”), Sixx “whipped out [his] dick in full view of everyone” and pissed on the floor. Ozzy crawled over and licked at the puddle. At that point Sixx had to admit defeat: “From that moment on, we always knew that wherever we were, whatever we were doing, there was someone who was sicker and more disgusting than we were.” Read More

Naja Marie Aidt’s When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back is an account of the first few years after her twenty-five-year-old son Carl died in a tragic accident. The excerpt below is addressed to him.

Photo: Amanda Hill. Credit: the NOAA Weather in Focus Photo Contest 2015.

My first book, a poetry collection, was published in 1991. I wrote it when you were a baby. I wrote it as I nursed you, as I rocked you, as I got to know you, as you learned to crawl and walk. There’s a poem in the book in which I describe a dream I had when you were a year old. A dream about you. In this poem:

I woke
and the dream will not leave me
my son is about to drown
and I can’t save him
his brand-new self
soft as a bear’s snout
sinks in the clear water

Here was my anxiety over losing you. Here was the powerlessness—not being able to save you from death. An anxiety so overwhelming. The worst that could happen: that you’d vanish. Read More

In the late summer of 1866, a black equestrian stuntwoman made her Paris debut and galvanized the city. She was known only as “Sarah the African,” and history has left us few traces of her: just some battered posters, inky clippings, and burlesque scripts. Sarah was, in the words of the men who wrote about her, “the finest horsewoman of the King of Morocco,” “an Ethiopian,” or “a statue of Florentine bronze.” A “negress” who performed as neither slave nor clown, whose name evoked Sarah Baartman, the Khoikhoi woman dissected by Georges Cuvier just a few decades before in Paris, and Selika, the queen heroine of Meyerbeer’s hit posthumous opera, L’Africaine. She was a woman named for a whole continent.

Sarah made her debut at the second Paris Hippodrome: an open-air arena in what is now the Place Victor Hugo, a little less fancy than the elaborate circus buildings then being constructed in the city. Clowns, trained animals, aerialists, and balloonists performed there before an audience of five thousand Parisians of all classes, sharing a lineup with spectacular historical enactments and horse races. The jockeys for some of these races were women—whom Albert Montémont called “frisky amazons”—who rode sidesaddle or drove chariots as they lashed their whips. There were also écuyères or horsewomen who performed dressage or dainty acrobatics involving flower garlands or handkerchiefs. And then there was Sarah, mounted astride, one hand gripping a fistful of mane, pistols in her belt.

On her debut in September she was billed above Méphistophélès the bareback horse, above a race of forty horses all mounted by women, above the rubber horseman, William Meyer, and even above Mlle Adèle, who made her Sidy-Laraby dance with no reins. The indefatigable impresario Pierre-Célestin Arnault was her boss and champion, and he laid it on thick for the press. “Nothing is more extraordinary than this femme sauvage,” he exclaimed. She was the daughter of a king, he said, she was the daughter of many kings!

I apologize that I can’t bring Sarah (or Sara—the journalists who wrote about her weren’t fussy about the spelling) the African to you in her own words, or even in photographic form. You get her filtered, drawn and written by white Frenchmen. But beyond the pidgin lines they attributed to her and their own beard-stroking critiques, we can glimpse a little of the real Sarah and her very real bravery and skill.

In the long oval of the Hippodrome, there was a race with dwarf jockeys. Then Sarah took to the track and began her “infernal exercises.” For six weeks, she galloped devilishly fast around the Hippodrome on her champagne-colored horse, hanging over his side by one foot as he leapt hurdles four feet high. Her cries could be heard above the orchestra as she fired shots from two pistols at imaginary pursuers, her head jerking just above the ground. No one could match the leaps she made or the way she pulled the splits. Sarah would not be caught nor equaled. She shared the runs with no one.

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