March 14, 2019 Arts & Culture The World Association of Ugly People By Rebecca Brill This year’s contestants at the Festival of the Ugly (Photo: Rebecca Brill) In order to become a member of the World Association of Ugly People, you need to be assessed. In the clubhouse of the Association, known by locals as Club dei Brutti, the president, a stocky man named Gianni with a lopsided goatee, produces a card featuring the official Club dei Brutti ugliness rating system: non definita (undefined), insufficiente (insufficient), mediocre, buona (good), ottima (great), straordinaria (extraordinary). Gianni examines my face and body quickly but thoroughly. Then, on a membership card on which he has written my name, he checks off the box marked “insufficiente.” At first, I’m confused by this designation and the ranking system as a whole. I can’t tell whether insufficiente means I am insufficiently attractive (and therefore ugly) or insufficiently ugly (and therefore not eligible to join the organization). As it turns out it’s the latter. Gianni signs my card anyway, thereby designating me the 31,310 member of Club dei Brutti. “Time makes us all ugly,” he explains. I have not really come to Piobbico, a small village between two mountains in central Italy, to join the organization. Rather, I’m here for Club dei Brutti’s annual Festival of the Ugly, where thousands of self-identified ugly people gather in the town square to celebrate ugliness and cast their votes for the club’s president. But it is hard to observe life in Piobbico, whose ties to the hundred-and-fifty-year-old organization are inextricable, without inadvertently becoming a participant. This is in part because Piobbico is small, in terms of both its geography and its population of just under two thousand. But the more time I spend here, the more I attribute this feeling of inherent involvement to something else about the village: a panoptic sense of being watched. The people in Piobbico look at each other: women hanging laundry call out to passersby from flung-open windows; men sit in front of bars in long rows rather than circles, ogling local women as they smoke; children shout “Ciao!” from their bicycles to people they appear not to know. (I realize that all of this sounds too picturesque to be true, but indeed, Piobbico feels like something straight out of an Elena Ferrante novel.) There is nowhere to hide here; no action goes unseen. To be in Piobbico is to be on display, to perform, to be known. I wonder how anyone stands it. Read More
March 13, 2019 Arts & Culture A Poet’s Complaints Against Fiction By Anthony Madrid Leonid Pasternak, The Passion of Creation. 1892 First, a word about the traditional feud between poets and fiction writers. I wish to acknowledge, up front, that that feud does not exist. Not traditionally. Conditions in the wild are very unfavorable to it. To witness episodes of this feud, you have to visit a special kind of mismanaged zoo called an M.F.A. program. Perhaps I needn’t add that it is not my object to prosecute any such feud here. Let me be explicit: I revere the great novelists as much as I revere the great poets. I do not see poetry as the higher form of writing. I do not think poets are better people. If anything, I’m sick to death of poets and poetry in a way I could never be sick of fiction and fiction writers. Poets are my family—with all the opprobrium that implies. Whereas, fiction writers strike me as delightfully removed from any familiar mode of being. They have houses and lifestyles. And they traffic in plots, an inherently good idea. Still, I do “have somewhat against thee,” fiction writers. There are certain abuses, rare enough in poetry, that are commonplace in works of fiction. A person who reads and writes poetry all the time will perhaps see these abuses more clearly than the practitioner of fiction, who is naturally and understandably accustomed to them. Take a moment to reflect on the memorable metaphor that Niccolò Machiavelli deploys on the dedication page (as it were) of Il principe. He says there that a painter, in order to paint the lowlands, must of course go up into the mountains, and in order to paint a mountain, must head to the valley. Analogously, in order to really understand the nature of common citizenship, one must be a prince, and in order to know the real deal regarding princes, one must be an ordinary person like Machiavelli himself. That’s why it’s okay for him to tell you how to rule your kingdom, O Prince. And perhaps it is the same, I am suggesting, with fiction writers and poets. The theory’s a good one. Think of the many times nonpoets have laid down memorable and all-but-devastating criticisms of poetry. Think of the recently dead V. S. Naipaul on poetry: Read More
March 12, 2019 Arts & Culture The Left Hand of Darkness at Fifty By Charlie Jane Anders Collage. Icy landscape photo: Harley D. Nygren, public domain. Ursula K. Le Guin photo: Marian Wood Kolisch. When I first read The Left Hand of Darkness, it struck me as a guidebook to a place I desperately wanted to visit but had never known how to reach. This novel showed me a reality where storytelling could help me question the ideas about gender and sexuality that had been handed down to all of us, take-it-or-leave-it style, from childhood. But also, Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic novel felt like an invitation to a different kind of storytelling, one based on understanding the inner workings of societies as well as individual people. Of course, The Left Hand of Darkness is literally a guidebook to the fictional world of Gethen, also known as Winter. The book takes the form of a travelogue, roaming around the nations of Karhide and Orgoreyn. And by the time you finish reading, you might actually feel like you’ve been to these places, to the point where you kind of know what their food tastes like and how the people act. But for me, and for a lot of other people, The Left Hand of Darkness also left us with a map that leads to another way of telling stories. I’ve read The Left Hand of Darkness a few times, and each time I come away with a new piece of that map. Le Guin’s writing still surprises me every time. In particular, I’m startled over and over by all the strange details and beautiful quirks she packs into descriptions of her made-up world. I’m also startled by the warmth and generosity of The Left Hand of Darkness, considering how bleak and brutal the actual story is. Somehow, in the midst of a horrifying ordeal, Le Guin finds an incredible sweetness. Read More
March 11, 2019 Arts & Culture How to Look at a Desert Sunset By Bruce Berger Photo: Jessie Eastland (CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)), via Wikimedia Commons. Too much has been made of desert sunsets, particularly in the captions of oversaturated magazine photos. Because desert skies tend to be clear, they can’t match the Midwest for cloud effects or smog-inflamed cities for sheer longevity. But they are inferior only to novices who look, naively, in the direction of the setting sun, for the real desert sunset occurs in that unlikely direction, the east. It is opposite the sun that the last rays, deflected through clear skies, fall on the long, minutely eroded mountain ranges and bathe our eyes with light of decreasing wavelengths and cooling colors—vermilion to salmon to plum—transporting the eastern horizon to islands of pure yearning. Read More
March 8, 2019 Arts & Culture Ana Mendieta, Emotional Artist By Emily LaBarge Ana Mendieta, Creek, 1974 © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. I still have the small piece of green paper, with its dark-blue scrawl, that she handed to me across the table. It is creased now, and worn around the edges, from being turned over in my hands, folded and put in pockets of clothing, carried around, slipped in between the pages of books. It has moved house with me twice; it smells faintly of basil and grapefruit. “I wanted to give you my notes,” she said, the writer who offered me the small, now talismanic piece of green paper. She was in London from New York to act as an examiner for my Ph.D. viva, a piece of work that considered the relationship between the literary-essay form and writing about works of art. “I’m not sure what else I can do, but I can give you my notes.” I thought she was probably a genius and I hung on her every word. The notes were enough. They were more. Her note read: “I’m not interested in the formal qualities of my materials, but their emotional and sensual ones,” says Mendieta. ** You could do more with this. “You could do more with this,” she said, “the emotional and the sensual”; and, “I was at that trial, you know.” Mendieta is, of course, the Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta, and “that trial” is the trial of her husband, the famous Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, who was accused and eventually acquitted of murdering Mendieta, who—in his words—“went out the window” of his thirty-fourth-floor apartment early on the morning of September 8, 1985. A hazy and unconvincing verb: went. But this essay is not about that, though others are. This essay is about different kinds of language, and what convinces, what makes real, when trying to get to the heart—figurative and literal—of artworks that are frequently described as extralinguistic, as uncontainable, as emotional and sensual. “You could do more with this,” the probably genius writer told me, and I have been thinking about it ever since. A proposal, a challenge, a possibility. Read More
March 7, 2019 Arts & Culture James Tate’s Last, Last Poems By Matthew Zapruder JAMES TATE, CA. 1965. PHOTOGRAPH BY ELSA DORFMAN When James Tate died on July 8, 2015, at the age of seventy-one, he left behind more than twenty collections of poetry and prose, including Dome of the Hidden Pavilion, published right around the time of his death. Most of us assumed that this was his final book. But it turned out there were more poems, which have been assembled into a truly final volume, The Government Lake, to be published by Ecco in July of 2019. One of those poems, “Elvis Has Left the House,” appears in The Paris Review’s Spring 2019 issue. Over the course of his career, Tate won every imaginable award available to American poets, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. He was revered by poets of virtually every aesthetic persuasion, from stern formalists to wild experimentalists. He had a legion of poor imitators, whom my friends and I called “lost pilots” after the legendary, eponymous poem of Tate’s first book, which won the most prestigious prize for young poets of its time, the 1967 Yale Series of Younger Poets award. When he wrote that book, he was only twenty-two, a kid from a deeply religious Pentecostal family in Kansas City, who somehow found his way to poetry and then to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The legend goes that he just showed up, showed them his poems, and was admitted on the spot by the director of the program, Donald Justice. If that story’s not true, I don’t want to know. Read More