September 24, 2018 Arts & Culture A Responsible Freedom: Patti Smith on ‘Little Women’ By Patti Smith Perhaps no other book provided a greater guide, as I set out on my youthful path, than Louisa May Alcott’s most beloved novel, Little Women. I was a wiry daydreamer, just ten years old. Life was already presenting challenges for an awkward tomboy growing up in the gender-defined 1950s. Uninterested in preordained activities, I would take off on my blue bicycle, to a secluded place in the woods, and read the books I had checked out, often over and over again, from the local library. I could hardly be found without book in hand and sacrificed sleep and hours at play to enter wholeheartedly each of their unique worlds. Many wonderful books captured my imagination, but in Little Women something extraordinary happened. I recognized myself, as if in a mirror, the lanky headstrong girl, who raced on foot, ripped her skirts climbing trees, spoke in common slang, and denounced social pretensions. A girl who could be found leaning against a great oak with a book, or at her desk in the attic bowed over a manuscript. She was Josephine March. Even her name breathed freedom, a girl called Jo. Louisa May Alcott had wrapped herself in her glory cloak, labored at her own desk, and penned a new kind of heroine. A stubbornly modern nineteenth-century American girl. A girl who wrote. Like countless girls before me, I found a model in one who was not like everyone else, who possessed a revolutionary soul yet also a sense of responsibility. Her dedication to her craft provided my first window into the process of the writer and I was moved with the desire to embrace this vocation as my own. Her missteps, comic to bold, were enviable, giving permission for my own. Read More
September 20, 2018 Arts & Culture Looking for Lorraine By Imani Perry Lorraine Hansberry was a giver. Bitterness never prevailed long enough in her spirit to destroy the “lift” that was a such a large part of her talent, and which comes naturally when human beings are created on stage. Mostly we see shadows being titillated into life, only to fall because their authors had no lover for them. I hate and deplore her death. We cannot afford such losses. As she once said of Baldwin: “We should be grateful we have him.” I say: we should be grateful we had her. Although what the hell all these words give her now, I don’t know. Relieve my chest. A gift given too late. —Camille Skirvanek of Brooklyn, in a letter to the New York Times, published January 21, 1965 In the tradition of Alice Walker, who followed the literary and literal maps of Zora Neale Hurston’s home and life, I find myself wanting to stand in the places Lorraine Hansberry stood. I want to make sense of the world in her spaces and on her terms. And I want to tell you about it. It isn’t so pretty. There is as much hell as heaven on this other—after the movement—side. Much has changed, some for better, some worse. Walking in the aftermath teaches this lesson. In the summer of 2017, I wondered somewhat angrily at the absence of a marker for Lorraine in Greenwich Village. But in October 2017, a red plaque was embedded in the rust-colored brick at 112 Waverly Place, in honor of Lorraine. Still, the Village is no longer hers. The multiracial lesbian bar (the only one that was multiracial in New York in the fifties) was a short walk away from her home, and it is gone. It is now a Mexican restaurant, which I don’t expect will last much longer either. It isn’t highbrow. Although the Village has a queer history and present, Lorraine’s presence is faint at best. She’s not really here. Nor is the Bohemia that once was, nor the poor who were there before that. They have been displaced by cool accumulation and edgy wealth. Read More
September 19, 2018 Arts & Culture The Most Unread Book Ever Acclaimed By Meghan O’Gieblyn Like the holy books, long novels are more often maligned than read. Critics complain that they’re exasperating or impossible or not worth the time. But in the history of my reading life, I’ve encountered nothing like the caveat lectors surrounding Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. They feel less like user warnings or cautionary tales than being forced to gaze upon the skeletons of those who had previously made the attempt. When it was published in 1965, the critic Peter Prescott gave up after two days, even though his editor offered him four times the normal rate (everyone else had refused). The online reader reviews I found vary between naked revulsion and sheepish endorsement. One Amazon reviewer claims he gave a copy of the twelve-hundred-page novel to each of his friends and promised that if they finished, he would pay for their children’s college education. “I’ve paid for no one’s education!” he writes. Upon Young’s death in 1995, thirty years after the novel was published, the New York Times proclaims it “one of the most widely unread books ever acclaimed.” I came across Young by way of her essay “The Midwest of Everywhere,” a short piece about a series of bizarre sights she claims to have witnessed firsthand in the American interior: elephants browsing the banks of the Wabash River; an entire town populated by deaf people; a dead whale in a boxcar, stranded in the middle of a cornfield. Young was born in Indiana and spent many decades in the Midwest—at the University of Chicago, where she studied Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, and at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she taught fiction—but in the essay, she writes about the region in a way that is entirely unfamiliar. “For me, a plain Middle Westerner, there is no middle way,” she writes. “I am in love with whatever is eccentric, devious, strange, singular, unique, out of this world—and with life as an incalculable, a chaotic thing.” I read the essay last winter at my home in Wisconsin. At the time, I was in a slump that was probably seasonal but felt dire and endless and linked, in a vague way, to the fact that I lived in a region that was bound up in the American imagination, and increasingly my own, with the television reboot of Roseanne. I have always lived in the Midwest and had often defended it against reductive stereotypes. But the notion that it was an economic and political wilderness had become such an insistent article of national consensus that I’d begun to doubt my own frames of reference. I was not in a particularly ambitious mood that winter, but I kept thinking about the strange consciousness I’d glimpsed in the essay. A couple days later, I found a copy of Miss MacIntosh. Read More
September 18, 2018 Arts & Culture America Doesn’t Have to Be Like This By Ilana Masad On Jill Lepore’s These Truths and the foundational myths of the United States. Adolphe Yvon, The Genius of America, ca. 1870. It didn’t have to be this way. This thought kept blinking through my mind, like a neon sign on a dark street, as I read These Truths, the newest book by the Harvard professor and New Yorker contributor Jill Lepore. A nine-hundred-plus-page tome, it is a full history of the United States, a country I was born in and soon after left. I was raised in Israel, a much younger country that was handed over by a colonizing force to a people desperate for a home back in the days—not so long ago, really—when colonizers could simply gift the land they’d taken as if it were theirs to give. The history I was taught from the ages of six to eighteen was both condensed and elongated, the history of a fledgling country full of war but also of an ancient people once enslaved and long persecuted. But I was born in the U.S., which makes me a citizen. I didn’t have to pass a test or learn about this country or understand any more of it than any non-American understands about the place that gave us McDonald’s, the Internet, the iPhone. I moved back here easily, when I was nineteen years old. My birth certificate sufficed; my ignorance was never questioned or corrected. What are the myths the United States has built itself on? Lepore’s question—the one the book explores—is more honed, adapted from statements by Alexander Hamilton: “Can a political society really be governed by reflection and election, by reason and truth, rather than by accident and violence, by prejudice and deceit?” Lepore’s answer is something like: Well, sometimes yes, and sometimes no, and in the past few decades, it kind of depends on who’s being asked. Read More
September 18, 2018 Arts & Culture Hey, Necromancer! By Heidi Sopinka On finding Leonora Carrington in her home in Mexico City and asking her to be a death guide. Leonora Carrington at her home in Mexico City in 2008. Photo: Susana Gonzalez for the Los Angeles Times. What did we have on that day? We must have looked like maniacs. Striped long skirts and bracelets made from silver duct tape, dragging a leather suitcase that looked like the underbelly of a snake. We stood in front of a thick wooden door in the leafy Mexico City neighborhood of Roma, across from an enormous earthquake-collapsed building, overrun with cats and scorpions. I had come with two friends full of purpose—to make art, to find a death guide—and in the almost hallucinatory Mexican sun, we knocked on the door. After a good amount of time, the door swung open, and a moonfaced housekeeper named Yolanda told us in Spanish to come back in two days. Leonora, last of the living surrealists, wasn’t well. Four years earlier and six weeks too soon, I’d given birth to a baby. You might say my death drive, as Freud calls it, had made itself known. The baby’s lungs weren’t working properly, so he was hooked up to an incubator, and I was told to go home without him. It was a full moon. There were no beds, they said. I remember lying in our bedroom with my husband, a basket beside us but no baby in it. We would take a taxi to the hospital so that I could breastfeed, only to find that they’d just fed the baby through a tube in his nose. Because they kept bank hours, my husband and I were stuck waiting it out near the hospital between feedings. I remember sitting in a generic jazz bar thinking, My baby is in a plastic box in neonatal intensive care, and I am listening to a woman in a pantsuit belting out “My Way.” I’d kept it in, the whole shock of the rapid premature birth, the worry for the baby, the separation, but this was the final blow. Everything was wrong. Tears streamed down. I couldn’t stop crying. And then, a week later, miraculously, he was in the basket. This simple arithmetic lodged in my brain. The cosmic joke: in birth, we appear; in death, we disappear. I became fixated on this, struck in particular by the metaphysical absurdity of death. Read More
September 17, 2018 Arts & Culture The Lightning Sheen of a Do-Rag By Durga Chew-Bose and John Edmonds America, The Beautiful, 2017. While I can’t recall where it happened—where online, that is—I first encountered John Edmonds’s photography in 2013. I chanced upon his work only to feel somehow formerly familiar with it. Not the imagery, necessarily, but the pull of it. How it grazed on my consciousness, prompting me to immediately email my friend Sarah a one-line dispatch with two links to his portraits. The subject: his name in all lowercase—“john edmonds.” If memory serves, I was suggesting his work for the second issue of Adult magazine, which Sarah founded. What struck me was how John’s approach felt plain, in the same way natural light can feel all at once holy and plain. The everyday. The glorious too. A church. Your high school gym. That light. Or the patch of light on your floor that you witness every afternoon. And yet every afternoon, that patch of light temporizes you. It insists on what’s least insistent: delay. The nude. How when disposed to natural light, the nude, as depicted by John, becomes statuary but not still. Living; having lived. Will live so much—and so much more. The diffusing nature of shadows and the strange, compelling way shadows come alive like moving images projected on the muscles of a back. On the sharp and secret sail of a pelvic bone. The attitude of an elbow. The peaceful sides of a face. Her heavy lids; his tattoos. A scar’s pulpy proof. On the lightning sheen of a do-rag. The rippled elegance of a knuckle. A diamond stud, out of focus. His palms; her underwear line; a bum, bare and black, in bed. The worn edges of a green towel, like moss draped on a naked lap. A person’s profile suddenly made planetary, as if rotating on its axis—absorbing the sun only to live in its dimmed wake, occupying space as only silhouettes can: suggestively. Read More