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

Eve Babitz. Photo: Mirandi Babitz. © Mirandi Babitz.

And because we were in Southern California—in Hollywood even—there was no history for us. There were no books or traditions telling us how we could turn out or what anything meant.

—Eve Babitz

My god, isn’t it fun to read Eve Babitz? Just holding one of her books in your hand is like being in on a good secret. Babitz knows all the good secrets—about Los Angeles, charismatic men, and supposedly glamorous industries like film, music, and magazines. Cool beyond belief but friendly and unintimidating, Babitz hung out with all the best rock stars, directors, and artists of several decades. And she wrote just as lovingly about the rest of LA—the broad world that exists outside the bubble of “the Industry.” Thanks to New York Review Books putting together a collection of this work, we are lucky enough to have more of Babitz’s writing to read.

Alongside the Thelemic occultist Marjorie Cameron (whose husband, Jack Parsons, cofounded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and the Bay Area Beat painter Jay DeFeo (Babitz’s romantic rival), Babitz was one of a handful of female artists associated with LA’s landmark Ferus Gallery, which showed local contemporary artists and launched the careers of people like Ed Ruscha and Ed Kienholz. Babitz knew (and dated) many of the Ferus personalities; she was a mainstay at their hangout, Barney’s Beanery. As she details in “I Was a Naked Pawn for Art,” the famous photo of a nude Eve playing chess with Marcel Duchamp was the result of her trying to make her married boyfriend, the Ferus Gallery founder, Walter Hopps, jealous.

A bridge between the Beat movement and burgeoning sixties psychedelic culture, the Ferus group rejected all prescribed rules of art to follow a strict internal code of its own, dictated only by individual interests. What her boyfriend Paul Ruscha’s brother Ed did with paintings, Babitz did with essays. Reading her is like looking at Ed Ruscha’s gas station paintings. She makes you reconsider things you might have dismissed as ugly, strange, or even boring, and look at them as if for the first time to find that they are in fact the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen in your life. Everything Babitz writes is both pop and intellectual, shiny but deep, like an artificial-snow-flocked Christmas tree, every bit as real and sentimental for a Tinseltowner as a Douglas fir. She makes sure you are stimulated, and when she occasionally does say something portentous, you’re never far from a punch line. She always writes with an eye toward entertaining the reader because, well, Hollywood. Women are automatically dealt low culture; Babitz doubles down, writing about Archie comics, ballroom dancing, what it’s like to have big tits. She doesn’t care about being high art because high art is humorless. Read More

Left: Giorgio de Chirico, The Soothsayer’s Recompense, 1913 Right: De Cherico in 1936, photographed by Carl Van Vechten

Despite living in New York City for more than five decades, my ninety-three-year-old grandfather still doesn’t speak English. No, that’s not quite right. During my childhood, his language did have some English in it. He used a relatively common, if idiosyncratic, commixture of words from his native and adopted tongues. Linguists have studied this pidgin: the way it grafts Italian endings onto English building blocks, the inflection and pronunciation that come from the speaker’s more intimate regional dialect. For him it was Roccolano, the near-extinct language from his small town in Italy’s Molise region. “R’abbassamend’,” my grandfather calls the basement he never had before New York; that opening “r” is Roccolano’s masculine article replacing both “il” and “the,” the following “a” maybe a logical connection to Italian’s “abbassare” (“to lower”). This kind of language is a historical phenomenon—the product of migration patterns and economics, schooling and lack thereof. It is born from necessity: urgent speech with a social services provider, with a bus driver, with a recalcitrant young grandchild seemingly deaf to the Italian reprimand she very well understands.

Of course, it spreads beyond these contours. I vividly remember my confusion and embarrassment when he used this pidgin in Italy, with Italian strangers, family, and friends. Each of his marked words represented both communication and the limits of communication; they spoke volumes about him, what he had achieved, what he had given up.

My siblings and I also spoke a hybrid language, but it had none of the urgency of my grandfather’s. Ours was playfully combinatory and private. We would squeeze Italian roots through the more blunt frames of English structure and sound. It was especially pleasing if the word contained an “r,” the consonant in which Italian and English most diverge. We’d dull our rolls and trills with glee: “Put on your scarps!,” we’d command, instead of shoes. We’d use the “s” prefix that makes a negative of Italian words and introduce it willy-nilly to English ones: the plausible “sfortune” for “sfortuna/misfortune,” the further afield “swalk!” for “stop walking.” But ours wasn’t the Italian-American “gabagool,” because it was important to us that we knew better than that.We could speak real Italian if we wanted to. We always said “capicola.”

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Imani Perry photo: Sameer Khan.

Sons—

You have been running away from lies since you were born. But the truth is we do not simply run away from something; we run to something. I do not think you fully believe me, but I am not a mother who yearns for you to be a president or captain of industry. I will not brag about your famous friends or fancy cars, and I will not hang my head in shame if you possess neither. I am practical, to a certain extent. I want you to be able to eat, to keep a roof over your head, to have some leisure time, to not struggle to survive. I want you to be appreciated for your labors and gifts. But what I hope for you is nothing as small as prestige. I hope for a living passion, profound human intimacy and connection, beauty and excellence. The greatness that you achieve, the hope I have for it, for you, is a historic sort, not measured in prominence.

It is a kind rooted in the imagination. Imagination has always been our gift. That is what makes formulations like “Black people are naturally good at dancing” so offensive. Years of discipline that turn into improvisation, a mastery of grammar and an idea that turns into a movement that hadn’t been precisely like that before—that is imagination, not instinct. Imagination doesn’t erase nightmares, but it can repurpose them with an elaborate sense-making or troublemaking. This is what I take to be the point of the idea in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: “Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” Flight is a way of transcending the material given in favor of the heretofore unseen.

Here is a confession: Recently, I have wondered if white people are irredeemable. Again, I have to issue a caveat for the sensitive. No, I do not mean individuals. Individuals are the precious bulwark against total desperation—in them we find the persistence of possibility. Of course a single person can be someone’s hell. But a single person can be a heaven, too. Or a friend. Read More