November 15, 2018 Arts & Culture In Defense of Puns By James Geary Once upon a time—in 382 C.E., to be exact—Eve bit into an apple. Seeing it was good, she offered the apple to Adam, and he also took a bite. Whereupon Adam and Eve’s eyes were opened, and they realized they were naked. Ashamed at having broken God’s sole commandment not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve hid themselves when He came walking in the garden. And the rest, of course, is history. God in His wrath decreed that henceforth man must earn his daily bread by working the earth and woman must suffer agony in childbirth. As a final punishment, He cast Eve and Adam forever out of Eden. Prior to the fourth century, however, no one knew exactly which forbidden fruit Eve and Adam ate. Genesis records only that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was off limits; it does not specify what edible flower that tree produced. Apples appeared in 382 because that’s when Pope Damasus I asked Saint Jerome to translate the Old Latin Bible into the simpler Latin Vulgate, which became the definitive edition of the text for the next thousand years. In the Vulgate, the adjectival form of evil, malus, is malum, which also happens to be the word for “apple.” The similarity between malum (“evil”) and malum (“apple”) prompted Saint Jerome to pick that word to describe what Eve and Adam ate, thereby ushering sin into the world. The truth is, though, the apple is innocent, and this unjustly maligned fruit’s association with original sin comes down to nothing more than a pun. Puns straddle that happy fault where sound and sense collide, where surface similarities of spelling or pronunciation meet above conflicting seams of meaning. By grafting the idea of evil onto the word for apple, Saint Jerome ensured that every time we recall Adam and Eve’s fateful disobedience in the garden we are reminded of the fruit of a deciduous tree of the rose family. Read More
November 15, 2018 Arts & Culture The Shocking, Subversive Endings of Taeko Kōno’s Stories By Gabe Habash The fiery, beguiling stories in Taeko Kōno’s collection Toddler Hunting and Other Stories, translated by Lucy North, are vertiginous tightrope walks between two planes of reality. Kōno (1926–2015) wrote these stories between 1961 and 1969, when several Japanese women writers were poking holes in the long-held idea that a wife is defined in relation to her husband and is submissive to him. (See also, for instance, the stories “Lingering Affection,” by Jakucho Setouchi, and “Luminous Watch,” by Setsuko Tsumura, both of them excellent.) It wasn’t until 1945 that women in Japan had been granted the right to vote, and not until the new constitution of 1946 that women had been allowed to ask for a divorce and public schools made coeducational. To illustrate what makes Kōno’s stories unforgettable, it’s useful to think about how a story can potentially end. Imagine, for example, a story about a married, childless couple driving across the state for a short weekend vacation in the seaside town where they met. The wife is trying to work up the resolve to tell the husband she doesn’t want to be married anymore; the husband has no idea. The wife knows that the further they get into the trip, the more difficult the situation becomes. In one potential ending, the wife waits until they’re walking on the beach to tell him, and he drives off without her. In another, she doesn’t tell him at all, and they drive home, the husband content and oblivious, listening to classical music on the radio. Both endings are narratively definitive—readers know all they need to know for the story to end (the wife either chooses to voice her feelings or she doesn’t). The first ending is also factually definitive—readers know exactly what’s going to happen plot-wise after the final period (the husband has left her and she must make her way back home). But the second ending isn’t factually definitive: the wife hasn’t articulated how she feels, and the thing is still silently between them, maybe growing, maybe not. Still, in both endings, readers know what the finale means for the reality of the wife. Toddler Hunting, on the other hand, doesn’t let us off this easy. These stories have no interest in closure, not even oblique closure. Like those of many other good short stories, the ending of a Kōno story is narratively definitive. (A story can be ruined by stopping too early or too late; good stories have a sense of exactly when they become narratively definitive.) But somewhere right before the end, the story has taken a sharp, dizzying turn, so that when it finally lands, it is in a place that is not merely surprising and inevitable but on a different plane entirely, one removed from the established reality. The effect is profoundly unsettling. Read More
November 14, 2018 Arts & Culture An Intellectual Love Affair: Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner By Dustin Illingworth Hugh Kenner (left) and Guy Davenport (right) When we read the collected letters of artists we admire, it tends to erode the marble busts we have chiseled of them like strange and abrasive weather. These are, in some ways, revealing documents—Elizabeth Hardwick suggested that in reading letters “we expect to find the charmer at his nap, slumped, open-mouthed, profoundly himself without thought for appearances.” But their disclosures are often merely aspirations in disguise. As a form, the letter encourages gentle self-mythology. Life submits to editing, and if days or weeks produce but one golden aperçu, the letter writer has grown used to treating time with voluptuous contempt. The jittery spontaneity of conversation is slowed down, encased within amber. A glacial, anticipatory pleasure reigns. Letters suggest a dream self, a living fiction, whether bustling and crowded with incident, or possessed of an indolent charm. These emanations that come to resemble their authors’ fears and fantasies make for incomplete but fascinating biography. Read More
November 14, 2018 Arts & Culture Leonard Michaels Was a Cat Person By Sigrid Nunez Probably there are as many writers who are dog people as those who are cat people, but the idea of cats as the foremost literary familiar has long been entrenched and seems unlikely to be dislodged any time soon. (I have a friend who insists that if a person hates cats that person can’t be a writer.) Cat books are known to outsell dog books, and the average well-read person can rattle off a list of cat-besotted authors, from Mark Twain to William S. Burroughs to Patricia Highsmith. Conjure up an image of, say, Hemingway or Colette, and you may find that a cat has sneaked into the frame. In 1995, when A Cat was first published, I didn’t know the author well enough to know how he felt about my favorite animal. I do remember being surprised, though. The last thing I would have expected from Leonard Michaels was a cat book. I had met him about twenty years before, when I accompanied a friend to the Berkeley campus of the University of California, where she had been invited to teach at a weeklong writers’ conference and Michaels, the conference organizer, was on the faculty. I was excited to meet him. I had read the brilliant, nervy, exquisitely written stories in his two collections, Going Places and I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, and I was a fan. He was forty-three, as handsome as his author photo, with luxurious dark hair, Mr. Rochester’s great, dark eyes, and a moody-looking, at times sullen, expression. His voice was also dark, the voice of a tough guy (I could have said thug), a voice you would not have wanted to hear raised at you, especially since it was obvious that beneath a gentle and self-deprecating surface was a very angry man. From his stories I knew that he had a natural dry wit and a wicked sense of humor, but that week brought out little of that side of him. I was shocked at how openly miserable he was. Though, like his first book, his recently published second one had been widely praised, including on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, it had also been subject to a cruel and blockheaded attack by an unfortunately highly regarded critic in the New York Review of Books. Michaels made no secret of how much that review had enraged him, or how depressing he found the life of a writer. But in fact, much of the conversation I heard that week at the faculty club was in the same vein. The cheapskate publishers, the egotistical editors, the philistine readers, the lazy or malicious critics. You publish a book, said one writer, and it’s like you become a fire hydrant, there to be pissed on by any dog that comes along. Cats, as I recall, were never mentioned. Read More
November 13, 2018 Arts & Culture The Irreplaceable Ingrid Sischy By Laurie Anderson Ingrid Sischy. I’m thinking of a summer evening in Venice in 1982. The Biennale was on, and Ingrid and I were standing outside a palazzo where a loud party was in full swing. Ingrid was expected at the party, and so we walked over to the girls with the clipboards standing at the door. Slicked-back ponytails, pale and sleek in identical black dresses, they had perfected the “Do I know you?” look. They were checking off the names on the guest list. Ingrid said: “Hi. I’m Ingrid Sischy, editor of Artforum.” They raised their eyebrows. “Oh? And do you have ID?” She did not, and since she looked approximately nine years old, it was hard to imagine she was an editor of an art magazine or that she even knew what an art magazine was. Ingrid said, “That’s okay.” Her eyes lit up, followed by a quick sideways glance and half smile. Her friends had seen this sequence many times—her eyes darting back and forth as if she were rapidly scanning the pros and cons of something she was about to say or do, running the alternatives and consequences. Laptop fast. We were familiar with this because Ingrid was one of the rare people who allowed you to see her think. “Okay!” she said. “Let’s go around the back and climb in the window.” So we went around the back of the villa, pried open a first-story window, and jumped into the party we didn’t really even want to be at. Once inside, Ingrid did some brisk and intense networking. She stood right in front of the people she was talking to, leaning toward them and giving them her complete attention. We left by the front door, which was pretty much the way she did a whole lot of things—coming in the back way and leaving by the front. Read More
November 13, 2018 Arts & Culture James Baldwin’s Optimism By Gabrielle Bellot From the poster for Barry Jenkins’s 2018 film adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk In November 1970, in the wake of the controversial arrest of the black activist and UCLA professor Angela Yvonne Davis, James Baldwin reflected on the acrid irony of seeing a dark-skinned woman harassed and manacled by white Americans. “One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles,” he wrote in an open letter to Davis. “But no,” he lamented, “they appear to glory in their chains; now, more than ever, they appear to measure their safety in chains and corpses.” Read More