March 27, 2019 Arts & Culture Beyond the Narrative Arc By Jane Alison Photo: Just chaos (CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)) In 1926, an Irish designer named Eileen Gray built a shiplike villa on the south coast of France that drove the famed architect Le Corbusier wild. Corbu had declared that a house was “a machine to live in,” but Gray thought, No: a house is a person’s shell, a skin, and should respond to how she lives. To start designing, she studied how she and her housekeeper moved through the day and made diagrams of their motions and those of the sun to reveal natural patterns—loops in the kitchen, deep lines by the windows, meanders through the living room. The house she then built on rocks by the sea expressed this organic choreography. A mouthlike entry pulled you in; screens and mirrors unfolded from walls; windows and shutters opened in all directions for the right air, light, or view. On plans she drew lines showing how you could move, look, and live in this house: natural pathways transformed to design. I love how Gray made this house, and really love how much it maddened bombastic Corbu. Gray’s way of working from life to art could also describe writing: writers go about their observing, imagining lives, moving onward day by day but always alert to patterns—ways in which experiences shape themselves, ways we can replicate these shapes with words. We then create passages for a reader to move through, seeing and sensing what we devise on the way. And when a reader’s done—levitation! She looks down and sees how she’s traveled, the pattern of the whole. I’m saying see because we often think of narrative as a temporal art, experienced in time like music, but it’s visual, too; a story’s as much garden as song. Northrop Frye puts it this way: “We hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer’s total pattern we ‘see’ what he means.” John Berger atomizes further: “Seeing comes before words.” We first apprehend text as texture—blurry or dense, black on white—and perceive each word as a picture (the part of our brain that recognizes words has a twin that recognizes faces). Then we pass through the words’ looks and into their meanings, absorbing a stream of visual images conjured by the language. Next we might develop another layer of “vision,” sensing elements that give the story structure: a late scene mirrors an earlier one, or a subtle use of color tints the whole. And as we read, we travel not just through places portrayed in the story but through the narrative itself. It might feel like gliding in a bayou, pacing a labyrinth, hopping from block to block: neuroscientists have recorded the inner sensations of reading as “a felt motionless movement through space.” Once you’ve finished reading, that motionless movement leaves in your mind a numinous shape of the path you traveled. Read More
March 27, 2019 Arts & Culture Nothing Is Like Anything Else: On Amy Hempel By Alice Blackhurst This week marks the release of Amy Hempel’s Sing to It, her first book in over a decade. In the first story I submitted to a writing workshop, I included, in my naive twenty-something state, a scene in which a male and female character get close following a party. The manuscript was a mess of overly florid metaphors, and it included the following sentence: “He touched her arm lightly.” The class’s teacher, the short-fiction writer Amy Hempel, gave it back to me swimming in black ink and annotations. “Touching isn’t cheap,” she offered gently, in response to my clunky familiarities. On the question of the metaphors she was bolder: “Nothing’s like anything else,” she suggested to the group. Nothing’s like anything else. Hempel’s prose is so blanched of needless embellishment that it can take on the corrosive sting of disinfectant. It refuses to accommodate comfort, or the familiar narratives we use to buffer our existences—“the stories we tell ourselves in order to live.” And yet, not cold, it brims with earthy, prosaic humor. Hempel’s comedy is the kind derived from finding typos on hospital menus or taking detours to IKEA stores. Read More
March 26, 2019 Arts & Culture At Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Hundredth Birthday Party By Nina Sparling Read our Art of Poetry interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti in our current issue. City Lights Bookstore I hear the party at City Lights Books before I see it. The Beats, and their twenty-first-century torchbearers, are neither quiet nor sober. The bookstore is celebrating Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s hundredth birthday in an event open to all of San Francisco. A man with shoulder-length gray hair sits cross-legged on Columbus Avenue drinking Squirt and reading Mark Twain to himself. People step around him. Men with glasses sport boots that will never be polished. The air is thick with a blend of smoke from cigarettes and joints—there are no e-cigarettes, no vape pens in sight. Poet Guillermo Gómez-Peña tells the assembled crowd that the hijos y nietos de Ferlinghetti have gathered to celebrate his century-old cumpleaños. The artist recounts first meeting Ferlinghetti, who was wearing huaraches and a bolo tie, in Mexico City. “It was 1975, mas o menos, and it was Mexico City, capital of the continental crisis,” Gómez-Peña says. In the following speeches we learn that Lawrence Ferlinghetti was everywhere: Nagasaki in ‘45, Havana in ‘59, Paris in May ‘68, and San Francisco before, during, and after. He stayed home on the first annual Ferlinghetti Day in San Francisco, but the streets filled in his honor. Tucked between the stacks in the fiction section a graying gentleman in round glasses drinks from a flask. A layer of dust covers his fedora and a thin book of poems peeks out from the pocket of his army-green jacket. He snaps his fingers as Gómez-Peña reads: “Poetry is news / from the frontiers of consciousness.” It’s a rare crisp and sunny San Francisco afternoon and City Lights has brought the Beats back to North Beach. The celebration meanders. Inside, the audience crowds together as poets read favorite Ferlinghetti poems. The PA system crackles. The poets stand on the mezzanine level; the people wind among the stacks. The crowd bends their necks trying to see the poets’ mouths move. The microphone fries Ishmael Reed’s baritone as he reads from “Tentative Description of a Dinner Given to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower.” Read More
March 26, 2019 Arts & Culture On Cussing By Katherine Dunn So. We cuss. Some of us cuss by saying mercy me or suffering succotash. I like to say shooty-pooty, which I learned from a nice Baltimore boy back in 1963. It’s a Cub Scout version of shitty-pity, which is a cutesy diminutive for just plain shit. This kind of substitution for a cuss word is what linguists call an amelioration. It softens the blow while still addressing the topic. This is not the same as a euphemism, by the way, which tries to evade or screen the subject. Americans are big on substitute amelioration. We invent thousands of them daily, it seems. Darn for damn, gosh for God. They often sound as though we started to say the taboo word but caught ourselves. Almost all of us have darker vocabularies if we’re pushed. We all have strong vocal reactions to pain and surprise, to anger or fear. We often use the same language in response to the strong positive stimulus of pleasure or awe or humor. Cuss words and phrases, whatever they may be in our individual vocabularies, are the most potent words we have for expressing emotion. However, as writers, we now face a loss of power in the classic obscenities—the draining of shock value, the depletion of such terms’ ability to offend. Our challenge is to revive the language with vivid reinvention. Case in point: I was out on my balcony a while ago as two young men walked by on the sidewalk and one of them was telling a story in which every other word was fucking. It went along the lines of, “So I fucking told the fucking guy that it wasn’t my fucking beer, I’m just fucking here for fucking apples… ” And so on. Now this made me sad. Here is this potent word being drained of all its juice and snap by overuse. We often call such cuss words expletives. Technically an expletive is any word or phrase that adds nothing to the meaning of the sentence. A few years ago, for instance, TV reporters took to sticking in the phrase “if you will” in the most inane way. That was a smarmy, Uriah Heep–style expletive. For the guy under the balcony, the word fuck was an expletive. It had no more weight or meaning than like for the proverbial Valley Girl or um for the tongue-tied. It’s superfluous filler. It isn’t shocking. It isn’t vivid or engaging. It’s simply monotonous. He was boring and his story was unintelligible. Read More
March 25, 2019 Arts & Culture A Tortoise Stakeout with Patricia Lockwood By Richard Cooke Patricia Lockwood. Photo: Grep Hoax. © Grep Hoax. I have a mildly confessional face, which means that strangers often feel compelled to tell me things. My natural mode of small talk is inquisitive, like the good cop in an interrogation, and I attract oddballs (although not as many as I used to). These factors together mean the occasional reception of terrible secrets. Once, a man I asked for directions confessed to an unprosecuted murder (in fact, a double murder); in a bar, a woman blurted out a cancer diagnosis nobody else knew about. A confessional face can be useful for a writer, although its consequences are sometimes unwelcome. I mention this only because it means I can recognize a related quality, a much rarer one, which is the ability not just to encounter this strangeness and revelation, but to manifest it. It’s the difference between being a weirdo magnet and being Weirdo Magneto. So it is not blurb-speak to call Patricia Lockwood a writer of “rare power”: she has a confessional face, and also a self-confessional face, and emanates a humorous and apparently limitless energy that blends and blurs the reality around her. She attracts eccentrics the way hunting deities are depicted attracting beasts, and her chosen habitat of Savannah, Georgia, is teeming with them. She moved to Savannah almost on sight, because it is so beautiful and so strange, and a reader encountering her work for the first time could trip over this influence, mistaking her poetry as Southern gothic played for laughs, everything made supernaturally lush and fervent by marsh air. But she was born in the Midwest—living in “all the worst cities of the Midwest,” places such as Cincinnati, Ohio, and Fort Wayne, Indiana—and they honed her style like whetstones. She is also part of that first generation of writers to be shaped by the internet, from a time when it was still called the “information superhighway.” I suppose it’s odd, to think about Weird Twitter and Something Awful being influential the way that Encounter or The Criterion once were. But without that lineage—first coders, then jokers, then journalists who picked up what she calls the “crisp new style,” recognizable immediately—the elements in her work that might be termed “insanely online” will be missed. Read More
March 25, 2019 Arts & Culture White People Must Save Themselves from Whiteness By Venita Blackburn Toni Morrison, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Baldwin There is a neurological condition that causes brief paralysis after sleep. In my family we call it the witch’s wake, a lovely, macabre title for a terrifying predicament. This happened to me a few times as a teenager: I rose to consciousness out of a dream, out of normal sleep, only to be locked in an unresponsive body. This was as close to death as I could fathom then, as close to being buried alive, which may not be in the top five on my list of worst fears, but it’s on there. The whole body becomes a tomb and the mind is a ghost, skimming the space between the living and everything else. I remember screaming when it happened, hard, loud, in tears, and yet I was silent. I say this because it is the nearest analogy for explaining not just the black experience in America, but the white experience as well. There is a seam between consciousness and sleep, between the wreckage of the body and being able to see the forces that attack it. The black American is born on that seam, that fragile space of knowing your physical self is in peril and being unable to act. We watch our bodies wrecked for the economic and sadistic benefit of whiteness and our screams are silenced through disbelief. Remember that whiteness is not personal, a white person is not whiteness itself; whiteness is institutional, it is what James Baldwin identified as the price of the ticket, the entry into America. Baldwin noted that the racial caste system is an affront to humanity, saying, “I am a man and so are you. As long as you think I’m a problem you’re demeaning your own manhood.” As obvious as it is, even a generation later, little is being done to curb that artificial construct. Read More