February 11, 2019 Arts & Culture Loitering Is Delightful By Ross Gay Ross Gay. Photo: Natasha Komoda. I’m sitting at a café in Detroit where in the door window is the sign with the commands NO SOLICITING NO LOITERING stacked like an anvil. I have a fiscal relationship with this establishment, which I developed by buying a coffee and which makes me a patron. And so even though I subtly dozed in the late afternoon sun pouring in under the awning, the two bucks spent protects me, at least temporarily, from the designation of loiterer, though the dozing, if done long enough, or ostentatiously enough, or with enough delight, might transgress me over. Loitering, as you know, means fucking off, or doing jack shit, or jacking off, and given that two of those three terms have sexual connotations, it’s no great imaginative leap to know that it is a repressed and repressive (sexual and otherwise) culture, at least, that invented and criminalized the concept. Someone reading this might very well keel over considering loitering a concept and not a fact. Such are the gales of delight. The Webster’s definition of loiter reads thus: “to stand or wait around idly without apparent purpose,” and “to travel indolently with frequent pauses.” Among the synonyms for this behavior are linger, loaf, laze, lounge, lollygag, dawdle, amble, saunter, meander, putter, dillydally, and mosey. Any one of these words, in the wrong frame of mind, might be considered a critique or, when nouned, an epithet (“Lollygagger!” or “Loafer!”). Indeed, lollygag was one of the words my mom would use to cajole us while jingling her keys when she was waiting on us, which, judging from the visceral response I had while writing that memory, must’ve been not quite infrequent. All of these words to me imply having a nice day. They imply having the best day. They also imply being unproductive. Which leads to being, even if only temporarily, nonconsumptive, and this is a crime in America, and more explicitly criminal depending upon any number of quickly apprehended visual cues. Read More
February 8, 2019 Arts & Culture Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction By Mairead Small Staid Johan Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, Laesende lille pige, 1900 “I read books to read myself,” Sven Birkerts wrote in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Birkerts’s book, which turns twenty-five this year, is composed of fifteen essays on reading, the self, the convergence of the two, and the ways both are threatened by the encroachment of modern technology. As the culture around him underwent the sea change of the internet’s arrival, Birkerts feared that qualities long safeguarded and elevated by print were in danger of erosion: among them privacy, the valuation of individual consciousness, and an awareness of history—not merely the facts of it, but a sense of its continuity, of our place among the centuries and cosmos. “Literature holds meaning not as a content that can be abstracted and summarized, but as experience,” he wrote. “It is a participatory arena. Through the process of reading we slip out of our customary time orientation, marked by distractedness and surficiality, into the realm of duration.” Writing in 1994, Birkerts worried that distractedness and surficiality would win out. The “duration state” we enter through a turned page would be lost in a world of increasing speed and relentless connectivity, and with it our ability to make meaning out of narratives, both fictional and lived. The diminishment of literature—of sustained reading, of writing as the product of a single focused mind—would diminish the self in turn, rendering us less and less able to grasp both the breadth of our world and the depth of our own consciousness. For Birkerts, as for many a reader, the thought of such a loss devastates. So while he could imagine this bleak near-future, he (mostly) resisted the masochistic urge to envision it too concretely, focusing instead on the present, in which—for a little while longer, at least—he reads, and he writes. His collection, despite its title, resembles less an elegy for literature than an attempt to stave off its death: by writing eloquently about his own reading life and electronic resistance, Birkerts reminds us that such a life is worthwhile, desirable, and, most importantly, still possible. In the face of what we stand to lose, he privileges what we might yet gain. Read More
February 8, 2019 Arts & Culture Notes from Kathleen Collins’s Diary By Kathleen Collins When the writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins died in 1988 at age forty-six, her level of fame was disproportionate to the heights of her talent. With a singing, singular voice, she wrote stories of black women in and out of love. The release in 2016 of Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? introduced her pioneering work to twenty-first-century readers. Now, Ecco has released Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary, a delightful grab bag of Collins’s letters, plays, film scripts, journal entries, stories, and chapters of an unfinished novel. Below, Collins revisits her diary and reflects on the nature of writing, loving, and living. Kathleen Collins. Photo: Douglas Collins. November 19 It rained hard today. After lunch I sat in the kitchen sipping a can of beer. The beer made me very sleepy, so I came in to take a nap. It was one of those deep naps, where the wind and the rain conspire to take you into a deep, secure slumber. Every muscle goes limp. You awaken, as you awaken sometimes after really good lovemaking: spent, but incredibly rested and content. February 8 Riding in the car, the day was suddenly dreary, bleak. And life seemed monotonous and sad. I wanted to cry. It seems that I have watched enough winters come in, turned the clocks back enough times, watched the rain turn the world black too many days. Only my children really hold me to life. They give me the patience to wait it out for a new day. January 13 On my desk sits a photograph taken in the ’30s of several young women gathered for some festive occasion. They are all in their twenties, all the daughters of prominent black families. They are smiling, some holding hands. One of them is to become my mother. Another is to become the mother of my first lover … January 23 The extremism, the tenacity in me. I will hold on. I will to hold on. Until all the cards have been played February 24 On the phone with B–— over an hour, about men and women. In the end I am close to tears, recognizing that all the things we take so personally, all the things we suffer over so dreadfully, have so little to do with us. I try to describe to him the terror I feel in the face of a man’s freedom, the boundless arbitrariness of it. How ruthless it can be in pursuit of itself. Men become themselves out of a refusal of certain kinds of limitations, women out of an acceptance of them. Women are bound. They must come to terms with a whole centrifugal force of taboos that they cannot violate without doing severe violence to themselves. We are in bondage to life. A woman’s life is a terrible thing. Make no mistake about it. And I believe in liberation, but I don’t believe it is at all the thing we think it is. March 18 We can’t fight time. We can’t get over anything faster than we’re supposed to. Whatever we have to live through we have to live through until its time is up. I’m saying all this to say that I think my present sense of clarity is not my victory, but time’s. And so it goes. As if the words could weight down the fleetingness and force it to exist in some more physical, more irrevocable way. Read More
February 6, 2019 Arts & Culture Stories That Reclaim the Future By Victor LaValle From Roger Dean’s album cover for Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe. My father and I saw each other only three times before he died. The first was when I was about ten, the second was in my early twenties, and the last doesn’t matter right now. I want to tell you about the second time, when I went up to Syracuse to visit and he tried to make me join the GOP. Let me back up a little and explain that my mother is a black woman from Uganda and my dad was a white man from Syracuse, New York. He and my mother met in New York City in the late sixties, got married, had me, and promptly divorced. My mother and I stayed in Queens while my dad returned to Syracuse. He remarried quickly and had another son with my stepmother. Paul. When I finished college I enrolled in graduate school for writing. I’d paid for undergrad with loans and grants, and debt already loomed over me. I showed up at my dad’s place hoping he’d cosign for my grad-school loans. I felt he owed me since he hadn’t been in my life at all. Also, I felt like I’d been on an epic quest just to reach this point. I got into Cornell University, but boy did I hate being there. Long winters, far from New York City, and the kind of dog-eat-dog atmosphere that would make a Wall Street trader sweat. But I’d graduated. And now I wanted to go back to school. More than that, I wanted to become a writer. Couldn’t my dad see me as a marvel? Couldn’t he support me just this once? Nope. At the time I felt incensed. In hindsight, I see he was a married man with a wife and a teenager to support; he worked as a parole officer, made a decent salary, but the man had never been well-off even once in his life. He wasn’t cruel about it, but he would not help. Read More
February 5, 2019 Arts & Culture The Museum at Auschwitz By Sigrid Rausing A corridor at Auschwitz (Photograph: Sigrid Rausing) “And elsewhere other workers were tearing open the dead”—Charles Reznikoff, Holocaust How ordinary it seemed at first, a museum—the word is important—on the outskirts of the little industrial town of Oświęcim, or Auschwitz in German. Coaches and cars in a parking lot. A modest snack bar, some buildings. The driver showed us where to go. We joined the line of people for the airport-style security, though it felt more casual, pleasantly shabby. We were shepherded through, moved forward, took our headsets and receivers, found ourselves in a group of fifteen or so people, waited for our guide. We got a sticker for our coats, “English.” We could see the entrance; walked toward it and through it. How low it was, the terrible sign over the gate: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. The camp orchestra played there, by the side of one of the barracks. The scale of it is shocking, people say, but I was struck by how small it was, the original Auschwitz, or Auschwitz 1. Mordecai Lichtenstein, a survivor, called it a “show camp” in his testimony to the Jewish Central Information Office in May 1945, and perhaps it was, at one time: tidy rows of two-story brick Polish army barracks, built in the twenties and thirties. Tiled stoves in large rooms. Wooden floors. The prisoners slept on the floor, on straw and coarse canvas. Washrooms. Rows of toilets. The kapo, the block eldest, had his or her own room: a narrow single bed, a chair, a table. Read More
February 4, 2019 Arts & Culture The Reluctant Leader of Spain’s Literary Avant-Garde By Thomas Bunstead Agustín Fernández Mallo. Author photo: Mutari, from Wikimedia Commons. In June 2007, in Seville, Spain, a conference was held under the banner “New Fictioneers: The Spanish Literary Atlas.” Around forty writers and critics came together at the Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art to discuss the conservatism they felt to be suffocating their national literature. United in their belief that the Spanish novel in particular was in a bad state, they pointed to a disregard for the increasing centrality of digital media in people’s lives and a knee-jerk resistance to anything that smacked of formal experimentation. They were mostly of a similar age, born in the twilight of the Franco regime, committed to the DIY punk ethos of the fledgling blogosphere, and more likely to claim lineage to J. G. Ballard or Jean Baudrillard than any garlanded compatriots of their own. Nonetheless, the only true point of agreement on the day was that they were not part of a unified movement. The conference’s inaugural address itself rejected any suggestion of a coherent generation—a critical commonplace familiar in Spain ever since the clumping together, at the end of the nineteenth century, of the Generation of ’98. Within a few weeks, however, an article appeared dubbing these writers “The Nocilla Generation”: the most significant literary phenomenon of Spain’s democratic era now had a label, and it stuck. Perhaps appropriately, the group’s designated leader, Agustín Fernández Mallo, had not been at any of these meetings, and he claimed to have no ties with those who had. His Nocilla Dream, the first book in a trilogy and one part of a wider, philosophically inflected project, had, however, been the surprise literary sensation of the previous twelve months. By “injecting the Novel with a large dose of [the land artist] Robert Smithson, and Situationism, and Dadaism, and poetry, and science, and appropriation (collage and quotes and cut-and-paste), and technology (often anachronistic), and images (almost always pixelated), and comic books,” as Jorge Carrion has written—and perhaps above all because he simply presented compelling new possibilities for the form—Fernández Mallo was deemed the most distinctively representative of these writers in all their anticonventional guises. He was certainly the most widely read. Nocilla Dream was the first Spanish book ever to go viral, a success with readers before its embrace by critics. The enthusiasm of like-minded bloggers propelled it onto spots on national TV and radio, where it was discussed alongside a commemorative edition of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as the defining literary event of 2006. The novelist and critic J. Ernesto Ayala-Dip called it a “shot to the heart of traditional novelistic representation,” and the novelist Ana Pomares Martínez echoed a widespread view among younger writers in saying, “It radically changed my idea of what literature was.” The rights to parts two and three—Nocilla Experience (2007, translation in 2016) and Nocilla Lab (2009, translation in 2019)—were then acquired by Alfaguara, one of Spain’s preeminent publishing houses, clearing the way for Fernández Mallo to become the most discussed Spanish author of the decade to follow. In the words of the poet Pablo García Casado, he “invited in a more daring, less constrained kind of reader, one not afraid to look at the world anew; a reader with new hope.” Read More