October 4, 2018 Arts & Culture Five Hundred Faces of Mass Incarceration By Maurice Chammah Before he went to prison, Mark Loughney used watercolors and acrylics to create bright, playful portraits of his favorite musicians. His early work features Trey Anastasio and Grace Potter and Snoop Dogg, all smiling and content, deep into their guitars and joints. But then Loughney committed a crime that even now, years later, he can barely explain. In 2012, when he was thirty-five and struggling to make it as an artist, Loughney got into a fight with residents of an apartment building. According to the police, he returned with a gasoline container and set the building on fire, sending multiple people to the hospital. It was big news in Dunmore, Pennsylvania, where Loughney was raised and where his father was serving a term as mayor. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a minimum of ten years in prison. At sentencing, his lawyer brought up the role of alcohol. But Loughney still has difficulty comprehending his own actions. “It wasn’t as if I was in the midst of an addiction or dealing with clinical anger … It was a fight gone bad,” he wrote in a recent message from the State Correctional Institution at Dallas, thirty miles southwest of his hometown. “The main point I hope you can make for me is that I am very remorseful and contrite for what I did. I don’t often get the opportunity to express my remorse or apologies and I would really like to be able to do that in a public forum.” After Loughney entered prison, his partner left him, and at times he felt catatonic. But listening to an interview with the Australian painter Johnny Romeo on the radio inspired him to return to his passion. “By the end of his interview, I was on my feet, in my cell, working,” he wrote. “I’m able now to actually understand how fragile and fleeting life is.” To make sense of his new surroundings, he began to draw what was around him, but instead of depicting the bars and razor wire, he focused on the people. Read More
October 4, 2018 Arts & Culture The Silence of Sexual Assault in Literature By Idra Novey Detail from the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony last week opened a desperately needed national conversation about the nature of silence in the aftermath of trauma. Why didn’t Blasey Ford tell her “loving parents,” Donald Trump discharged on Twitter. The hashtag #WhyIDidntReport generated thousands of testimonies about the societal forces that push victims into silence in the aftermath of assault. That silence, unheard by anyone else but shatteringly loud inside one’s head, is an open secret in American life. It is also an open secret in American literature, especially in the works of women writers. Brett Kavanaugh’s description of his daughter’s prayers at dinner brought to mind the theatrical piety of the Bible salesman in Flannery O’Connor’s story “Good Country People.” That Bible salesman comes off as earnest—at first—as he scopes out a family’s front parlor and decries the absence of the Bible that “good Chrustians” would certainly display there. Once he gets beyond the front parlor and has Hulga, the adult daughter of the household, to himself, he doesn’t bring up anything more about “Chrustian service.” Watching Kavanaugh lose control of his “good country folk” performance and become increasingly overcome with rage, I thought of O’Connor’s salesman absurdly repeating the word “Chrustian,” of the terrible theatrics of our politics. Read More
October 3, 2018 Arts & Culture Obligatory Readings By Alejandro Zambra I still remember the day when the teacher turned to the chalkboard and wrote the words test, next, Friday, Madame, Bovary, Gustave, Flaubert, French. With each word, the silence grew, and by the end, the only sound was the sad squeaking of the chalk. By that point, we had already read long novels, almost as long as Madame Bovary, but this time, the deadline was impossible: barely a week to get through a four-hundred-page book. We were starting to get used to those surprises, though: we had just entered the National Institute, we were twelve or thirteen years old, and we knew that from then on, all the books would be long. That’s how they taught us to read: by beating it into us. I feel sure that those teachers didn’t want to inspire enthusiasm for books but rather to deter us from them, to put us off books forever. They didn’t waste their spit extolling the joys of reading, perhaps because they had lost that joy or had never really felt it. Supposedly they were good teachers, but back then, being good meant little more than knowing the textbook. As Nicanor Parra might say, “Our teachers drove us nuts / with their pointless questions.” But we soon learned their tricks or developed ones of our own. On all the tests, for example, there was a section of character identification, and it included nothing but secondary characters: the more secondary the character, the more likely we would be asked about them. We resigned ourselves to memorizing the names, though with the pleasure of guaranteed points. Read More
October 2, 2018 Arts & Culture My Mother and Me (and J. M. Coetzee) By Ceridwen Dovey I was born the year J. M. Coetzee published his third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians. My mother read this dark, disturbing novel, with its many scenes of torture, as she breastfed me at night, while my older sister slept and the house was quiet. It was 1980. The apartheid government had declared a state of emergency in the face of growing internal revolt, and my parents were thinking of leaving South Africa again. My mother nursed me in the spare room so the lamplight wouldn’t wake my father, and as she read, her somatic response to the words on the page would have coursed through her into me: elation and despair, trepidation and longing. I feel I’m still marked by that embodied encounter with Coetzee’s writing, via my mother, as a newborn. Coetzee, who anticipates everything, would say I am inhabiting action in imagining my way back to my neonate self, though even he allows for the possibility of flickerings of insight into other selves or our own younger selves. Several years later, when I was no longer a baby and my mother was on her way to becoming the first scholar to publish a book on Coetzee’s work, I formed one of my earliest visual memories. It is of the striking cover of this same novel, which lay on the kitchen table in our home in Melbourne, Australia, surrounded by the detritus of a midday meal: half-eaten sandwiches, apple cores. A picture of a white man on his knees, washing a pair of jagged black feet that have been sawed off at the ankles. Read More
October 1, 2018 Arts & Culture Schiele, Shoes, and Kavanaugh By Larissa Pham “Old World Bootie” for sale at Modcloth If you arrived at your formation of taste in the late aughts to the early teens—right around the time that hipster became a social category and twee was a kind of music and it was conceivable that an attractive stranger might ask whether you wanted to come back to their place and listen to their records—then you might know this shoe, if you don’t already have a pair lying around. Surely you have seen it on the feet of models or mannequins in Anthropologie, Modcloth, or any other retro-leaning, trendy store. Black or brown leather, with a tidy, stacked heel, fastened up with buttons or more often tightly laced in a neat bow, these boots—booties, in cutesy copywriter parlance—hug the shape of the foot, making for a pretty, petite, old-fashioned silhouette. Sometimes known as an Oxford heel, they’re self-consciously vintage yet contemporarily ordinary—not out of place in 2010, 2014, 2018, though they might strike some as a little … twee, these days. They’re Wes Anderson boots. Indie-pop boots. You-used-to-buy-graphic-tees boots. Imagine my surprise, then, while visiting the Met Breuer’s latest drawing show—“Obsession,” an exhibition of nudes by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Pablo Picasso, closing October 7—to see these very shoes preserved in time, in their first incarnation, an instant of fashion history trapped in amber. Though the show ostensibly features three artists, all household names, it’s Schiele who steals the show, taking up most of the exhibition’s wall space as he links Klimt—albeit tenuously, and really only chronologically—to Picasso, who’s shunted to the exhibition’s last room. The show, intended to showcase the collection of the aesthete Scofield Thayer, tracks a loose narrative of figurative drawing and, within its selection, the entirety of Schiele’s blazing, short career. Read More
October 1, 2018 Arts & Culture The Surprising Story of Eartha Kitt in Istanbul By Hilal Isler Eartha Kitt in Istanbul, 1949 One month into their marriage, my parents leave Turkey for good. It’s my mom’s first time on a plane. They fly from Ankara to Brisbane, an Australian city where they don’t know anyone. The trip takes two days. Their tickets are one way, paid for in cash. The year is 1975, and Australia has recently rescinded its White Australia policy. My parents are among the first nonwhite immigrants allowed into the country. British Airways tells them they can bring up to forty kilograms’ worth of things. When they pack, my parents are more strategic than sentimental. They pack clothes, bedding, albums—but only a few, because photo albums are strangely heavy, and the other kind, the kind on vinyl, too fragile to make the trip. The first record my parents purchase in Australia has a picture of a black woman on the cover: just her face, a hint of cleavage, painted lips but no smile. Her hair is pulled back, coiled against the nape of her neck, and she’s looking away from the camera, wistful. I am five, maybe six years old, and I enjoy staring at that album cover. I believe the wistful woman is Turkish. She sings in Turkish. She sings this one song,“Üsküdar’a Gider İken” or, as the track is listed incorrectly on the front, “Uska Dara.” It’s an old Turkish/Macedonian folk song. At the time, I don’t wonder why Eartha Kitt, who was born into extreme poverty on a plantation in South Carolina, is singing about sailing up and down the Bosphorus with her male secretary. I just know that those nights on which my parents, tipsy off cheap Australian red, dance to her voice in our apartment are the best kind. Read More