September 16, 2021 Arts & Culture All You Have to Do Is Die By Rowan Hisayo Buchanan Graham Crumb, 2011, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. People were drinking wine out of plastic cups. The chairs were pushed close together. Bags were tucked under feet. I sat on the bookshop stage with two other writers, ready to read our ghost stories. Before we began, the moderator asked, “Do you believe in ghosts?” After a pause, we spoke of doubt. Creepy incidents were related. I found myself saying that perhaps the dead might be watching us. I’ve never seen a soul move through the air. I am not sure that we are anything more than a skin-bag of electrical impulses. But ghosts are different from the other uncanny citizens. They are only one step away from the known. To become a ghost, you don’t have to be bitten by a vampire or receive a curse or encounter a mad scientist or fall under the spell of a full moon. All you have to do is die. Still, I imagine the first days of ghosthood would be tricky. There are so many different hauntings, so many ways to do it. In a way, it reminds me of puberty. The unpredictable shifts. Sudden changes in weight and the way people see you. Unexpected blood. Puberty was a process I did not enjoy and, unluckily for me, it was nothing I could google—or more accurately “Ask Jeeves,” the search engine my IT teacher recommended. It was a time when strange men’s penises appeared in my Hotmail account and were not caught by the junk filter. I didn’t trust the internet. And so I found myself flipping to the back of the magazines my classmates’ mothers bought. The paper was always wrinkled from the girls’ hands that had come before. At the back would be a quiz or a decision tree to tell you what sort of person you were or would become. Sometimes there was the freckle of a biro mark, or an initial to mark the previous reader’s path. It was reassuring. Playing around, I tried to devise one as an introduction to that stage of life yet to come—our ghosthoods. Read More
September 9, 2021 Arts & Culture Fourteenth and Jackson By José Vadi David Corby, The Tribune Building. Oakland California. Taken from the City Center complex, 2006, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. When I talk to people in the city about whether they come to Oakland, be it 2007 or 2019, the answer is a resounding “never,” followed by redundant stories of car break-ins and not wanting to take BART at night. No matter how many East Bay, Marin and Contra Costa County, or Central Valley residents head through the Transbay tunnel or across the Golden Gate or Bay Bridge every day to San Francisco, going to Oakland is a seemingly annual trip for city dwellers, who usually make the pilgrimage for city-sponsored art crawls or like-minded Fox Theater concerts or, at one time, a Warriors game. The lack of streetlights and noticeable foot traffic for years made people fear downtown Oakland compared to the more geographically concentrated city by the bay. Despite the similar amount of crime in the two cities, it’s Oakland where everyone assumes they’ll be shot on sight or that the ghost of Huey Newton will greet them at the Twelfth Street BART with a shotgun and a toll for Whites Only. Downtown Oakland is changing in many ways, but my habits on Fourteenth and Jackson aren’t one of them. A smoke by Lake Merritt and some quarter snacks from the bodega next to the Ruby Room lead to nuggets from the fast-food dispensary next to my old building, Peralta Apartments on Thirteenth and Jackson. Eating and smoking under the ground-floor tree, three floors below the apartment that housed me, my books, my desk, my box spring, and mattress twice the box spring’s size beginning in June 2007, a year after I graduated from UC Berkeley a few BART stops away. Downtown was feared when I first moved to the East Bay in 2002. It was the small businesses of Seventeenth Street’s previously tree-lined lane between Franklin and Webster and Chinatown that held up downtown for years, most of the money leaving around 2 P.M. when the business class went home early. Vacant lots and dilapidated car repair shops dotted Telegraph across from the Oakland Black Box, where I first performed poetry in the Town as a teenager. Read More
September 8, 2021 Arts & Culture Tolstoy’s Uncommon Sense and Common Nonsense By Yiyun Li Aleksey Kivshenko, watercolor illustration of Alexander I and Napoleon meeting in Tilsit in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, 1893. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Once upon a time, five people with strong opinions were invited to view an old tree and offer their thoughts. The first one said: “I’m a big-picture person. At first glance, I can say this tree is too big for its own good. We need to lop some limbs off.” The second one said: “It’s not the architecture of the tree that bothers me but the parts that make up the whole. Anywhere I direct my attention, I can see ten or twenty imperfect leaves.” The third one said: “This tree is much too old to be relevant. Its life began when the world was wrong in many ways: patriarchal, despotic, undemocratic. Why should we care about something growing out of that history?” The fourth one said: “The world is still wrong in many ways. A tree like this does little to solve the political, socioeconomic, and environmental issues of today.” The fifth one said: “I am not a tree person. Roses and nightingales are worthy subjects of my attention, and I consider it an insult to my talent to be asked to look at a tree.” Anytime one talks about War and Peace, one is reminded of the tree’s critics. Fortunately, a majestic tree has no need for a defender. Read More
September 7, 2021 Arts & Culture Jim Jarmusch’s Collages By Lucy Sante From Some Collages, by Jim Jarmusch, published by Anthology Editions. Jim Jarmusch’s small, eerie collages are all about faces. And about the bodies attached to those faces. And about what happens when faces get switched off onto other bodies. You could say that Jarmusch, ever the director, is engaging in exploratory casting. He wants to see Stanley Kubrick in the role of a golfer, and Nico as a Vegas crooner, and Jane Austen winding up on the mound, and Albert Einstein as a rock star, and Bernie Sanders as a dog. Andy Warhol, meanwhile, just goes ahead and casts himself in every role, turning all of them into “Andy Warhol.” Personalities can transfer their qualities to other modes of life, and you are invited to imagine the results of the ensuing cognitive dissonance. When there is little discernible personality, or when parties have abandoned their personalities in favor of a position—political or legal or corporate or academic—they simply become their blather. You imagine that those thumbprints of text, sitting above shoulders, are excerpts from an endless gray ribbon of rhetoric that unspools continuously. And then there are those humans whose heads are empty, the same color as the mount. Since some are villains and some are heroes, that does not seem to carry a moral implication. Maybe they represent all those who suffer from stomach troubles. Read More
September 3, 2021 Arts & Culture Walking with Simone de Beauvoir By Annabel Abbs Simone de Beauvoir, via Wikimedia Commons. Such an odd thing, packing a rucksack. It’s an act of austerity that liberates even as it frustrates. For every item to earn its place on my puny shoulders, it must be life-preserving in some way. I limit myself to 26.5 pounds, casting out the frivolous, the inessential. I check weather forecasts, tear spines from books, put things in—paints, camera lenses, walnuts—then throw them out. Every time I toss away an item, I feel a swift stab of anxiety followed by a ripple of lightness. So that even as I shunt the pack onto my back, I experience a sense of weightlessness. I have become disencumbered. Free. My life whittled down to the bone. * Simone de Beauvoir’s rucksack invariably contained a candle, an alarm clock, a copy of the local Guide Bleu, a Michelin map, and a felt-covered water bottle filled with red wine. She hadn’t always walked with a rucksack: when she arrived in Marseilles, age twenty-three, to take up her first teaching post, she’d walked with a basket. It was here, among the mountains, valleys, and cliffs of Provence, that a passion for solitary rambles and “communion with nature” first took hold of her. “I derived a satisfaction I had never known in all the rush and bustle of my Paris life,” she wrote in her memoir. But the funny thing is, no one thinks of Beauvoir as a backpacking hillwalker. We think of her sitting in smoky Paris cafes, a string of pearls at her neck, a chic turban wrapped around her head, Jean-Paul Sartre philosophizing at her side. This is not my Simone de Beauvoir. My Beauvoir—the version I unearth from her letters, memoirs, journals, and books, and in whose footsteps I walk—is a compelling, courageous, often reckless hiker. A lover of bare hills, forests, mountain ranges. A woman who walks as audaciously and rigorously as she thinks. A woman who shows us how walking can return us to our bodies. A woman who is nothing to do with Jean-Paul Sartre. Read More
August 25, 2021 Arts & Culture A Swift Arrow’s Flight By Susan Choi Sigrid Nunez. Photo: © Marion Ettlinger. Certain books—the best ones—feel ordained, their creation inevitable, their nonexistence unimaginable. If the path to that existence was imperiled, the inevitable quality is only enhanced: the indispensable book exists not despite but because of those obstacles. Sigrid Nunez’s 1995 debut, A Feather on the Breath of God, suggests, with its title, haphazard travel, and in fact the book did follow a halting and elliptical path to existence. But the book is no feather. It sails to its mark like an arrow, laying bare an untold past at the same time as it lays out a suddenly imaginable future. The book is both arrival and departure, for both author and readers. Sigrid Nunez is the sort of writer who is always going to say it better than the rest of us; better than me, at least. Already I find that, at the end of many months’ rumination and many hours’ active struggle I have, with my very first complete paragraph above on the subject of Sigrid Nunez, plagiarized her. Rummaging the drawers of expression in hopes of finding something adequate to the immediacy and power that so startled me the first time I ever encountered her work, I’ve grabbed hold of what turns out to be secondhand Sigrid, not even an accurate theft. In the fourth section, titled “Immigrant Love,” of this four-section book, Nunez writes: The wish to be all body, the dream of a language of movement, pure in a way that speech (“the foe of mystery”—Mann) can never be pure—I would not have been the same lover if I had not danced. And it has been a real ambition of mine, thwarting other ambitions, coming between me and all other goals: to be a woman in love. In love lies the possibility not only of fulfillment but of adventure and risk, and for once I was not afraid—either to suffer or to make suffer. In more than one language the words for love and suffering are the same, and I have flung myself from cliffs, I have hurled myself at men’s hearts like a javelin. [final emphasis mine] At readers’ hearts, too, she has flung herself like a javelin. Now it’s all too clear to me that my derivative arrow sentence betrays the marks, or perhaps the puncture wounds, her work has made on me. It’s all there in the paragraph I’ve quoted: the incantatory rhythms making deft use of repetition and variation; the virtuosic accumulation of tension—the staccato interruptions of the em dash—that deft turn from the prepositional “woman in love” to the declarative “In love lies … ”; the refusal to so much as signal what might arrive next and the sly subversion of our stubbornly formed expectations; at last, the dazzling blow of revelation. “For once I was not afraid—either to suffer or to make suffer”—When has this person ever been afraid? we cry in a protest Nunez promptly meets, with the effect that our shock is redoubled for having been anticipated: “The words for love and suffering are the same, and I have flung myself from cliffs, I have hurled myself at men’s hearts like a javelin.” That “wish to be all body,” that “dream of a language of movement,” which is pure in the way that speech “can never be,” has in fact been realized in the very passage that declares such realization impossible. To the extent that the dazzling unpredictability of Nunez’s prose can ever be mapped—hence predicted—here is one facet: this realization, in language, of contradiction. Nunez’s sentences are very like the ballet she describes with such breathtaking, almost cruel fidelity: sentences that press tension on tension until they prize themselves open, while still maintaining such a purity of form as to seem at once both ravaged and intact. “Straining beauty,” her narrator thinks, on observing a bouquet of peonies in a state of “overbloom”: “They have turned themselves practically inside out … There seems to me something almost generous about this.” A better description of her writing won’t be found anywhere else. Read More