August 31, 2021 Re-Covered The Madame Bovary of North-East London By Lucy Scholes In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Photo: Lucy Scholes. In the final months of 1922, people all across the United Kingdom were gripped by a cause célèbre. In the early hours of October 4, Percy Thompson, a shipping clerk, and his wife, Edith, a twenty-eight-year-old bookkeeper and buyer for a millinery business, were making their way home after a trip to the theater in the West End. About a hundred yards from their house in Ilford, a lower-middle-class suburb in North-East London, a man suddenly appeared, stabbed Percy multiple times in the face, neck, and body, and then raced off into the night. Percy died almost instantly. Reporting on the event the following day, the Times declared that the details were still “a mystery,” and that the police were waiting for Edith to recover enough to be able to “give a coherent account of the incidents preceding her husband’s death.” Then, only twenty-four hours later, the case took an unexpected twist when the police announced that they’d charged two persons: Edith and a twenty-year-old ship’s steward named Frederick Bywaters, who had for a short time been the Thompsons’ lodger. Edith and Bywaters had been conducting an illicit affair for the previous eighteen months. Their correspondence, written while Bywaters was away at sea, had been found by the police and was being used as evidence for the prosecution. By the time the trial began—two months later, on December 6, at the Old Bailey—much of the content of these letters was already all over the press. Every day the court’s public gallery was packed. The enterprising unemployed began queuing outside as early as 4 A.M., selling their spots to those with money in their pockets who arrived later in the day. For those unable to afford these escalating prices—in his book Criminal Justice: The True Story of Edith Thompson, René Weis reports that by the final day of the trial a seat in the gallery was going for more than the average weekly wage—the Times reproduced verbatim transcripts from each day’s proceedings. On Monday, December 11, the jury announced their verdict: both defendants were found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. As he was removed from the dock, Bywaters was still protesting that Edith was innocent, as he had done throughout the trial—a refrain that she herself loudly took up as the reality of her fate sunk in. Sobbing and screaming, she was half dragged, half carried back to the cells to await her execution. Read More
August 16, 2021 Corpus Oranges By Jordan Kisner In her column Corpus, Jordan Kisner examines the stories our bodies tell. Zoe Leonard, Strange Fruit (detail), 1992–97, orange, banana, grapefruit, and lemon skins, thread, buttons, zippers, needles, wax, sinew, string, snaps, and hooks, 295 parts, dimensions variable. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Purchased with funds contributed by the Dietrich Foundation and with the partial gift of the artist and the Paula Cooper Gallery, 1998. © Zoe Leonard. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Graydon Wood. When I undertook this column, I had the notion that I would be writing about, I don’t know, heredity. Like: I went to a healing circle in south Brooklyn. After a few days of being asked to think about the particular ways we might need to be healed, as well as the particular ways we might offer healing to other people, we were taken into a small, dark room in groups of four or five and told to sit on stools and close our eyes. The two women leading the healing circle told us they would be drawing initiatory symbols in the air over our heads and invoking various energies on our behalf. They instructed us to keep our eyes closed and to anticipate that we might receive a vision of a spirit that would guide us in this healing journey. I was there because I was curious about the nature of the healing these women claimed to invoke, but I was resistant to the endeavor. I did not want my vibrational frequencies altered. I did not want a spirit guide. I was feeling fraudulent and confused and a little guilty for being an unbeliever in this room of aspiring healers, and so I was startled when—sitting there in the dark with my eyes closed, confused and fraudulent, dimly aware of these two women waving their hands in the air around me—I had a sense suddenly that my grandmother (my father’s mother, Mardell) was near my left shoulder and my great-grandmother (my mother’s paternal grandmother and namesake, Carmen) was at my right. They’ve both been dead for more than fifteen years, and I hadn’t thought about them for a while—nor had I ever really thought about them together. I’d never spent any time with them together, and they weren’t at all alike. Their arrival as a pair in my imagination was a surprise. In the moment, I half wondered whether this meant they needed some kind of healing or attention from me, posthumously—or, conversely, whether I needed some kind of healing that had to do with them. Read More
July 22, 2021 Melting Clocks & Other Stories By Eloghosa Osunde In Eloghosa Osunde’s column Melting Clocks, she takes apart the surreality of time and the senses. Eloghosa Osunde, At the Beach in Your Dream, 2020, mixed media. If you really think about it, we were all raised inside a giant dictionary. Society as we know it is simply a collection of shared definitions. Who is normal? What is beauty? Who is a criminal? What is a woman? What is a man? What is good love? What is sex? What is fair? Who is holy? What is evil? The more you agree with the definitions you’ve been given, the more you belong. The more you belong, the farther away you are from punishment. And you want to be safe in this scary place, don’t you? So you do what you’re supposed to do, and you avoid what leads to suffering. You don’t want to be lonely either, do you, so you believe the rule: there’s nothing but nothing for you outside the defined lines. You’re told this from when you’re little, that your questions will put you in trouble, that you are and will always be too small to challenge a meaning. You’re just one person and this is how it works: society decides, you obey. But is that true? Seeing as many of us are alive on the outskirts of definitions, seeing as that’s the address that saved some of our lives, the place where we watch our safeties spring out of the ground, it’s clear that whatever was defined can be redefined. Whatever was written by a person for a people, can be edited by a person or a people. We’re proof. What is society, anyway? It’s an anthology of someones. We make it up. We have always made it up. Art making is my strongest argument for redefinition, because nothing shows you the lie of impossibility and the multiplicity of worlds better than a body of work standing where once there was nothing. You don’t know how to turn Something into Something Else? Listen to what a remix does to a song: how in African Lady, an ADM remix, TMXO lays Masego’s music over a Lagbaja sample, rubbing two worlds against each other until they spark a three-minute-fifty-seconds long fire. Listen to the Red Hot + Riot album made in honor of Fela’s music and enter the rooms that appear when Meshell Ndegeocello, Manu Dibango, Sade Adu, Kelis, Common, Tony Allen, and D’Angelo are invited to the same house party. Or watch Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer and notice the world you hold too tight become subsumed in an alternate reality, another now. Watch the Greek film Dogtooth and remember how you were taught to see; see how every manipulation has its genesis in language, how language reshapes the cornea and whatever stands before it. Read The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa and register what feels familiar about the premise; where have you seen that before? It’s strange, isn’t it, to know that what we remember is also a collaboration. Find all five remixes to Rema’s “Dumebi” [Vandalized, Major Lazer, Henry Fong, Becky G, Matoma]. All these unalike branches, growing out of the same tree. You think language is set in stone? Listen to a Nigerian talk a person to the fringes of their own English using pidgin—a genius composition. Strict binaries and genre are real until you watch DJ Moma play a New York club or DJ Aye play a Lagos night. Technically a thing like that should be impossible—continents ejecting you onto the same dance floor, that voice meeting this synth, the low wail of a bass guitar free-falling through the deep grunt of an ancient drum: jazz meets Afrobeats meets house meets alternative meets grime meets highlife meets soukous—but there you are, all of a sudden, thinking, Wait, who said these things can’t belong together? Read More
July 14, 2021 Re-Covered Re-Covered: Barbara Comyns By Lucy Scholes In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Photo: Lucy Scholes. When I’m asked how I first became interested in out-of-print and forgotten books, my answer is always the same: it all began with Barbara Comyns. Eight years ago, Virago reissued three of the midcentury British writer’s novels—Sisters by a River (1947), Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950), and The Vet’s Daughter (1959)—on their Modern Classics list, and I was immediately and utterly smitten by her singular voice. With her way of combining elements of social realism, replete with Dickensian touches, with all manner of macabre gothic tropes dark enough to have been taken out of the original Grimm’s fairy tales, Comyns was quite unlike anyone I’d ever read. Angela Carter is the only writer who comes close, but Comyns’s work has none of the same feminist underpinning. I wrote a short rave review of the 2013 Virago editions for the Observer, and then I began tracking down copies of Comyns’s eight other works, only two of which were then also in print: Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954), which had been reissued in the U.S. by Dorothy, a publishing project, in 2010, and The Juniper Tree (1985), which appeared as a Capuchin Classic in the UK the following year. I also began learning what I could about Comyns’s life, keen as I was to find out as much as possible about the woman behind these weird and wonderful books. Tantalizing tidbits were scattered both in the various introductions that had been written by her admirers and friends over the years and in the novels themselves, since Comyns often fictionalized her own life. As a child, she and her siblings had been left to run wild in the hands of inattentive governesses. Comyns’s parents—a deaf and disinterested mother and a violent, alcoholic father—were too consumed with their own sparring to pay their children much attention. Comyns documents this in her debut, Sisters by a River, a book she wrote to entertain her own children when she worked as a cook and housekeeper during World War II; it was initially serialized in Lilliput magazine under the title “The Novel Nobody Will Publish.” As a young woman, she showed considerable talent as a painter; she trained at the Heatherley School of Fine Art and exhibited with the London Group. Later in life, she supported herself and her family by doing a variety of jobs that included modeling, selling antiques and classic cars, renovating houses, and breeding poodles. Perhaps most intriguing of all, though, was her connection to the infamous MI6 double agent Kim Philby, who was a colleague of Comyns’s second husband, Richard Comyns Carr, in Whitehall, and in whose Snowdonia cottage the newlyweds spent their honeymoon in 1945. Ultimately, though, rather than satisfying my curiosity, these enticing snippets of what came across as an extremely eclectic and often precarious life left me with more questions than answers. Read More
June 22, 2021 Re-Covered Re-Covered: Cleo Overstreet’s The Boar Hog Woman By Lucy Scholes In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Photo: Lucy Scholes. In a literary landscape often obsessed with youth—whether it’s the buzz surrounding so-called hot new talent or those “30 under 30” and “best of young novelists” lists—stories of late-in-life success prove especially fascinating. I’m talking about writers like Penelope Fitzgerald, who didn’t publish her first book until she was in her late fifties, and won the Booker Prize at sixty-three. Or the British novelist Mary Wesley, who was seventy when the first of her ten best-selling novels for adults made it into print. Then we have the doyenne of them all, Diana Athill, who experienced unexpected literary celebrity in her nineties. As such, Cleo Overstreet’s debut novel, The Boar Hog Woman—which was published in 1972, when its author was fifty-seven years old—couldn’t help but catch my attention. David Henderson’s celebratory obituary for Overstreet, which ran in the Berkeley Barb on the occasion of her death, only three years later, in the summer of 1975, opens with a description of the deceased as “a grandmother and a novelist.” She “came to writing late in life,” Henderson explains, “but she had in her mind’s eye many stories to tell. She dedicated the last 12 years of her life to putting them down on paper.” Unlike Fitzgerald, Wesley, and Athill, however, Overstreet’s late-in-life career was sadly short and sweet. Henderson mentions her “unpublished novels,” referring to the most recent by name: Hurricane, the manuscript of which Overstreet’s close friend Ishmael Reed was apparently asked to edit for posthumous publication by Random House. Yet as far as I can see, this never actually happened, which means that The Boar Hog Woman remains the only one of Overstreet’s books to have made it into print. Of all the books and authors I’ve written about thus far in this column, The Boar Hog Woman and Cleo Overstreet have to be those about which and whom I’ve uncovered the least information. Bar the brief author bio on the dust jacket of my secondhand copy of The Boar Hog Woman, Henderson’s obituary is the only account of Overstreet’s life that I’ve found. There’s a short Kirkus review of the novel that describes it as “weirdly engrossing,” and a significantly longer write-up—a rave, by the writer and film scholar Clyde Taylor—in the June 1974 edition of Black World. But what I learned from these pieces, combined with the novel’s publication date, was enough to intrigue me. Two of the most exciting and experimental female-authored works to emerge from the Black Arts Movement were written during the early seventies—Fran Ross’s Oreo (1974) and Carlene Hatcher Polite’s Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play (1975)—so I was keen to see how The Boar Hog Woman compared. Short answer: although not quite up there with Oreo, Overstreet’s entertaining and often moving account of the comings and goings of a close-knit Black community in mid-’60s Oakland, California, more than holds its own. But don’t just take my word for it. “Cleo Overstreet has done to narrative what Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes did to Negro poetry, put it on a solid Black footing by tapping the folkroot,” Taylor writes. “She gives a hip to the creaky machinery of the novel—point of view, stream of consciousness, the objectivity of the narrator, the incessant analysis of motivation, jabber jabber—then she leaves it hanging out to rust. She has up-fingered its tradition more successfully than any Black writer in North America.” Read More
June 7, 2021 Notes on Hoops On Sneakers By Hanif Abdurraqib In his column Notes on Hoops, Hanif Abdurraqib revisits the golden age of basketball movies, shot by shot. Coach Tracy Reynolds (Morris Chestnut) and Calvin (Lil Bow Wow) in Like Mike, directed by John Schultz, 2002. Photo: United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo. 1. It is best to not get this confused: there are many ways to grow up poor. There are differences between those who have little and those who have barely anything at all, even in the same neighborhood, even on the same street, even if those differences could not be gleaned from the way a house looks on the outside or the way a yard is kept. You’d have to grow up some kinda poor to know these differences, I’d say. You’d have to grow up some kinda poor and know some people who grew up some kinda poorer than you were. Just ask the kids who admired the hustlers and the kids who had to hustle. Just ask the people who got tired of eating the same stale and boring meals and then ask the people who went to bed hungry. When I talk about how my parents didn’t have the money to buy me cool sneakers when I was a kid, there are multiple things for the initiated and uninitiated to peep: what I’m saying is that my parents didn’t have the money to spend on anything foolish, certainly not anything costing more than a hundred dollars that served the purpose of decorating feet in the unpredictable weather of the Midwest. When I talk about how I pushed lawnmowers in the summer for sneaker cash or breathlessly lifted dense snow out of driveways in the winter, what I am also saying is that I lived in a place where enough people had spare cash to kick me a few bucks for work their kids could have done, work they absolutely could have done themselves. As many ways as there are to grow up poor, there are just as many ways—if not more—to cloak whatever foolish and misguided shame you might have in your material circumstances. There was always a sacrifice to make in the name of cloaking oneself in some vibrant distraction or deception. Read More