October 26, 2018 Arts & Culture My Younger Brother Spreads His Palms, Maple Leaves: Yukio Mishima’s Haiku By Hiroaki Sato Yukio Mishima. Many are likely to be surprised to learn that Yukio Mishima—yes, the writer who chose to die by dazzlingly public disembowelment and decapitation in 1970—wrote haiku. When you think of it, though, if you go to school in Japan, you will automatically be asked to compose haiku in grammar school or, at any rate, in junior high school. Also, sometimes, but not often, your parents will meticulously preserve every scrap of your school compositions or the school magazines printing your stuff. Both happened to Mishima. As a result, we have about a hundred eighty of his haiku collected among his complete works. Mishima was a literary prodigy. With haiku, it also helped that his Japanese-language teacher in the Middle Division of the Peers School was Kurō Iwata. Iwata didn’t just encourage his students to write. After the war, he established his reputation as an authority on Edo haikai. He published, among other things, a large compilation of commentaries on all of Bashō’s hokku. One of Mishima’s earliest haiku dates from when he was seven years old, and it reads: おとうとがお手手ひろげてもみじかな Otōto ga o-tete hirogete momiji kana My younger brother spreads his palms, maple leaves The “younger brother” here is Chiyuki, two years old at the time. He went on to become a diplomat, serving as ambassador to Morocco and Portugal. Now in English translations, Mishima may not be known too well as a playwright, despite Donald Keene’s translation of Madame de Sade and Ingmar Bergman’s famous staging of it, my translation of My Friend Hitler and Other Plays, and a few others. But he wrote more than seventy plays, beginning with the ones he wrote in his early teens, and most of them were staged in his lifetime. In fact, as Donald Richie observed, “life was but a stage” to Mishima, his staging of his own seppuku the most meticulous construct he pulled off. Read More
October 26, 2018 Arts & Culture Bad Genre: Annie Ernaux, Autofiction, and Finding a Voice By Lauren Elkin Annie Ernaux “When I was twenty-one,” wrote Zadie Smith at age twenty-five, “I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault.” What is a writer’s voice? Surely, as in life, we all have many voices, different ones for different occasions. For the young Zadie Smith, Kafka’s voice established a norm: this is what literature sounds like. Different genres—fiction, academic articles, general nonfiction—conjure certain expectations. I write differently in all of them. But over the last couple of years, I’ve started to feel the strain of singing so many styles on the page, and I’ve started to wonder: What does my own voice sound like, freed from the mold? Do I even have one? As any classically trained singer or actor can tell you, trying to make your voice sound like someone else’s can do all manner of damage to it. Voicing relies on friction between the breath and the folds of the vocal cords, but the cords can wither or be damaged from being struck too harshly. This can spill out into the body as well, and tension can build in the jaw, neck, shoulders. “Good voice work,” writes Cicely Berry, former RSC voice director, “should always aim to use the voice that is there and stretch it and open up its possibilities.” Read More
October 25, 2018 Arts & Culture The Destabilizing Desire of Julie Doucet By Anne Elizabeth Moore From Dirty Plotte: The Complete Julie Doucet, courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly. It’s impossible to convey, to anyone who didn’t stumble across the stuff on their own, the evanescent but ferocious intensity to be found in the photocopied page of any zine or comic from the late eighties and early nineties. Self-publishing in those days showed you, the reader, a culture being ripped apart, at the seams and straight through the middle, while on fire, the raw guts of oppression and abuse and injustice exposed and left behind to rot while you watched with a beer from a spot near the stage. The French Canadian artist and comics creator Julie Doucet invented a character, named Julie Doucet, who let you tag along as she did exactly that, can in hand, enjoying the show. Starting in 1987 in the pages of the fanzine Dirty Plotte and then continuing on through a comic-book series of the same name as well as several graphic novels, Julie-the-character gallivanted semi-innocently about the club, the city, the country (any country), concerned primarily with her own pleasure as the Berlin Wall crumbled somewhere behind her, a sign that the cultural undoing you felt in your bones had tangible political effects. The daring adventures of Julie Doucet’s smart, hot, disheveled, and sometimes rageful imaginary self just goofing off or engaging in semierotic play with an array of mammalian coconspirators have seared themselves into the minds of a generation of readers. These fanciful images from a world in flux pointed the way for creators seeking inspiration from nocturnal visions and creators with stories to share from their own experiences. Not to mention creators—women and nonbinary ones, in particular—who hadn’t had impetus to imagine themselves in the creative role before coming across Doucet’s work. Among other merits, Doucet’s strips gifted the field of comics with the hope that creators who are not male might eventually see mainstream acceptance. I can’t stress enough how important this is. Yet I admit that when I’m asked about important comics, or the importance of comics, the signature scenes from Doucet’s oeuvre—Julie the man, Julie at a club, Julie hopping into a tub to scrub her cooter, Julie in flagrante with her elephant lover—are not the images that immediately pop into my head. The panel that springs to mind instead is a quiet, domestic scene. Julie-the-character plays a minor role while her various home goods—discarded beer bottles, half-used condiments, an iron, forks, lamps, et cetera—carry the action. The panel comes toward the end of one of her many dream comics, a plethora of narratives in which the renowned creator presumably lays bare the machinations of her subconscious mind. These are often transcribed in gruesome, delightful detail: Julie as a gunslinger dies alone in a saloon. Julie is upset that she can’t find a decent brassiere at a basement warehouse sale (clearly a dream; Julie-the-artist didn’t wear bras at the time). Julie turns into a man overnight and—lucky her—meets up with Micky Dolenz of the Monkees and makes a sex date with him. The very definition of dreamy! Read More
October 24, 2018 Arts & Culture “Why Do You Write Political Stories?” By Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah I was in college when Trayvon Martin was murdered. I created an anonymous pamphlet, an artistic response to the atrocity. His killing deserved our outrage. Late one night, I scattered five hundred copies of the pamphlet around campus. I went to bed expecting unrest, a revival, a conversation, anything. When I got up later that day, nothing happened. That summer, I was at a barbecue in Riverside Park when Trayvon’s murderer was acquitted. I remember getting the notification on my phone. I felt exposed, fragile. I had been partying just a minute before. Years later, writing “The Finkelstein 5,” the story that now opens my first book, Friday Black, I tried to translate the ways in which the justice system is often a cruel joke for black Americans. I wanted to express the feeling of always being perceived as a threat by so many. The completion of this story was the closest I’ve ever come to a breakthrough. It was the second time I felt that I wanted people to read what I’d written, even if my name was not attached. I’m interested in the ways we dehumanize each other. I’m interested in our capacity for good, despite the insidious hatred and fear all around us. All the stories in Friday Black, including “The Finkelstein 5,” were tough to write. And yet, in that space of difficulty and fear, I found necessity and purpose. Read More
October 24, 2018 Arts & Culture Fighting with Czesław Miłosz By Anthony Madrid Czesław Miłosz. It is a blessing for a poet to have a Great Poet to fight with, forever. I don’t mean a Great Poet one merely despises. That’s nothing. It has to be someone you partly love, partly revere, but who lets you down over and over and over and makes you want to scream. The Great Poet has to be one from whom you are continuously learning, even if most of the time what you’re getting is a kind of cautionary tale. He or she has to be someone you can never get rid of. You keep going back. Does everybody remember Ezra Pound’s little epigram about his deal with Walt Whitman? Here, I can do it from memory: A Pact I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman. I have detested you long enough. I come to you like a grown child Who has had a pigheaded father. I am old enough now to make friends. It was you that broke the new wood; Now is a time for carving. We have one sap and one root: Let there be commerce between us. Get it? Pound couldn’t shake Whitman. Whitman got on his nerves, and that was never gonna change. But yer daddy is yer daddy. Maybe he and you can team up, after all, as long as everybody understands the new terms … Read More
October 23, 2018 Arts & Culture Toward Creating a Trans Literary Canon By RL Goldberg This fall, I’m teaching a course titled “Masculinity in Literature.” The small seminar is attended by men, all in their twenties, earning their college degrees while incarcerated. Before we began our discussion of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues—perhaps the only “canonical” trans book, if such a thing as a trans canon can be said to exist—we generated a partial list of gender terminology: transgender, transsexual, agender, two-spirit, trans woman, bigender, trans man, FTM, MTF, boi, femme, soft butch, cisgender. The students already knew, at least in rough contours, how these terms were used. They weren’t contentious. What was contentious: man and woman, and the course’s undergirding premise that reading texts about masculinity that have nothing to do with cisgender, heterosexual, white men can teach us a good deal about masculinities. As the discussion progressed, our collective sense of what determines “masculinity” and “maleness” decalcified. One student grew impatient. “Words have to mean something,” he said. “Being a man means something.” He wasn’t frustrated with the abstract possibilities of fluidity, with the notion that some people are trans, or with the idea that identification is not a given. Rather, his concern was that, if gender identity is mutable for others, then what does that mean for him, an adult man who has never questioned his gender? That is, if we refuse the idea of biological essentialism—if “men” and “women” are more than the sum of genitals, secondary sex characteristics, and chromosomes—what does that do to the definition of his own maleness? On October 21, the New York Times published a piece titled, “‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration.” The thrust of the article: the Trump administration may move toward defining gender as biological, immutable, and essentially determined by genitalia at birth, and transgender people could face a terrifying curtailing of civil protections and recognition as a result. As many people have said, such a move misunderstands the distinctions between gender and sex, and is viciously mean-spirited, a pathetic attempt to shore up support from a base whose hatred of “identity politics” manifests, paradoxically, as the inability to disconnect from them. In some ways, the redefinition under consideration by the Trump administration is what my student was arguing for: a coherent, unswerving, unshakable definition of gender that leaves no room for debate or deviance. You’re either a girl or you’re a boy, and how you feel about that is immaterial. Those words, and those roles, are left unexamined. But that’s not how my conversation with this student ended. He didn’t define me out of his reality, or choose to see the inconvenience of my trans body, my self, as a challenge to him and to the way he has, for the last two decades, understood the world. He tried, instead, to work toward a definition of gender by which our different truths wouldn’t invalidate one another. Lately I’ve been thinking about a corpus of texts that centers on trans writing. I’m apprehensive about the limitations inherent in canonization, mainly canon’s inadequate literary representation of difference as tokenism, and the prohibitive inaccessibility for those who can’t afford education at the highest levels. So it’s not a canon exactly, but a corpus. It’s something more like a body: mutable, evolving, flexible, open, exposed, exposing. It’s the opposite of erasure; it’s an inscription. Here are eleven books that have meant a great deal to me as I’ve tried to learn about both my own transness and experiences less familiar to me. I hope they might be recognized, read, and shared—which is to say, never erased. Read More