September 5, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: The Radiant Bodies of the Dead By Claire Schwartz In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This month, Claire Schwartz is on the line. Dear Poets, I lost my father suddenly on New Year’s Day. I have lived without him for over a year and a half now, and while I’ve found that my heart is more resilient than I imagined, I’ve started to fear the passing of time. The first of every new month feels like it’s stabbing me with the reminder that time will not slow down. I’m scared for this year to end, because right now I can still claim his death is recent, and it scares me that one day it will be in the distant past. I’m scared that I’ll start forgetting pieces of him, or that I’ll stop thinking about him as much, which would feel like letting him die again. I’m wondering if you can give me a poem about how to accept the passing of time and stop seeing it as the enemy. Sincerely, A Fearful Daughter Read More
September 4, 2019 My Terrible Summer The American Rodeo By Barrett Swanson Over the last couple months, I’ve been on a quest for the American summer, and right now, I’m on my way to the Greater Midwestern Rodeo, puttering across the interstate in search of Portage, Wisconsin. I also have non-rodeo-related reasons for venturing out to the heartland. A few weeks ago, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that, if left untreated, can result in the ossification of the spine, whereby all the spaces between one’s vertebrae slowly fuse together. For the last few months, I’d been waking up in the middle of the night with terrible zaps of pain surging across my sacrum, and things got so bad that I began to experience a limited range of motion. At thirty-four years old, I confess I’m terrified to write a sentence concerning my “limited range of motion.” Is it possible I’ll start describing myself with adjectives like “spry”? Thanks to the wonky health insurance offered by my state university, I hadn’t been able to find a doctor in my hometown, so I have to schlep out here, to the heart of the heart of the country, where a doctor will take stock of the disease’s advance. The irony of combining a doctor’s visit with a rodeo didn’t hit me until I finally pulled off the exit. After all, I was about to watch a posse of cowboys and cowgirls have their spines whiplashed into oblivion, and not only did this seem like a mean parody of my new medical condition, but it also seemed like an apposite description of certain liberal voters. Indeed, over the last few years, as the very foundations of American democracy have writhed and shuddered beneath us, it’s often felt like the best we can do is simply to try and hold on. The fair is located in a desolate sector of Portage where the dominant aesthetic might be best captured by Clevelander Joyce Brabner’s phrase, “rust belt chic,” a term she used to describe coastal appropriation of the heartland. Lawns have been mowed into board game rows, and American flags droop from gonfalons that have been bolted to screened-in porches. I grew up in Wisconsin, but I’m suddenly worried folks out here might think me an interloper if they catch a glimpse of my backseat, which is brimming with all the accouterments of my left-leaning disposition (sushi-rolled yoga mats, weatherworn New Yorkers). I might as well be wearing a Marianne Williamson button. Read More
September 3, 2019 Writers’ Fridges Writers’ Fridges: Etgar Keret By Etgar Keret In our series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. Nearly thirty years ago, when I moved out of my parents’ place, it took me no more than a week to feel at home at my new, tiny, rented apartment. The bed was comfortable, the shower water warm and friendly, and the ripped beanbag on the little balcony was just perfect for napping. The only thing that felt a little distant and cold was the fridge. My mom, who was the best cook ever, had been very protective of her kitchen and barely let my siblings or me enter it. This had made me develop a polite relationship with my parents’ fridge, formed on a strict need-a-beer basis. But my rented apartment’s old fridge wasn’t as nice as my parents’ and it took me only a few attempts to realize that it didn’t have any beers inside. Read More
September 3, 2019 Freeze Frame The Brief Idyll of Late-Nineties Wong Kar-Wai By Tash Aw In Tash Aw’s new column Freeze Frame, he explores how his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema have influenced him. Still from Wong Kar Wai’s “Happy Together” In the summer of 1997 I was living in London, trying to figure out what to do with my life. I’d left college and had been in the city for a year, trying, like so many other twentysomethings, to write a novel. I’d given myself a year, but as the chapters took shape so did a curious tension about the way my life was playing out. Part of me was exhilarated and determined: I was writing about a country and people—my people—that did not exist in the pages of formal literature; I was exploring sexual and emotional boundaries, forming relationships with people who seemed mostly wrong for me, but whose unsuitability seemed so right; I was starting, I thought, to untangle the various strands of my cultural identity: Chinese, Malaysian, and above all, what it meant to be foreign, an outsider. But the increasing clarity of all this was troubled by a growing unsettledness: I had imagined that the act of writing my country and people into existence would make me feel closer to them, but instead I felt more distant. The physical separation between me and my family in Malaysia, which had, up to then, been a source of liberation, now created a deep anxiety. All of a sudden I saw the huge gulf between the person I had been and the one I now was. In the space of just five or six years, university education had given me a different view of life, a different appreciation of its choices. My tastes had evolved, the way I used language had changed—not just in terms of syntax and grammar but the very fact that standard English was now my daily language, rather than the rich mixture of Malay, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Malaysian slang that I had used exclusively until the age of eighteen. I was writing about the place I was from, about the people I loved (and hated), but felt a million miles from them. Read More
August 28, 2019 Literary Paper Dolls Literary Paper Dolls: Rebecca By Julia Berick and Jenny Kroik illustrations © Jenny Kroik You see her sometimes on the way to work. On the train, or on line at the coffee shop where, though you are late, you have stopped for coffee. She is wearing what you ought to have chosen that morning: something much more cool or much more practical or much more elegant than you. Her bag is from a shop you’ve heard about but haven’t gotten to yet or can’t afford. She is in Boston or San Francisco or Atlanta or L.A., but she is perhaps most indigenous to New York City. She is real and she is also a figment of your imagination. As I carried a copy of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca into a coffee shop recently, a woman stopped me to say it was one of her “favourites.” We spoke about it in a way that caught the attention of another woman in line, and the second woman explained the plot to the third. She told her that the book was about a lot of things, but that it was really about a house. As someone who has worked as a bookseller, I have gotten good at describing books I’ve read, and those I haven’t, to customers in four to nine words (which is as long as a person is willing to spend hearing about a book they probably aren’t going to read). To say that Rebecca was about a house seemed like the kind of stretch it would be to say Hamlet is about a marriage, and yet it is. It is about inhabiting a role you can’t quite play—the more I think about and read about Rebecca, the more I think this woman was right. It is about a house, only the house is a metaphor for a woman. Really, it’s a book about imposter syndrome. Read More
August 26, 2019 Conspiracy More UFOs Than Ever Before By Rich Cohen In his monthly column, Conspiracy, Rich Cohen gets to the bottom of it all. This month, he explores the sudden rise in UFO sightings after World War II. America had its head broken open during World War II, and out came the visions. Visions of global power, infinite markets, ideological struggle, and exotic flying machines. It’s not clear if the number of UFO sightings actually spiked in the years that followed or if it was just our imagination, but something changed. What had been a trickle of encounters dating back to the pioneering days of aviation became a torrent. Often described as saucers, these noiseless, shimmery machines were seen above highways and wheat fields and supermarkets in Forth Worth, Texas; Great Falls, Montana; Monmouth County, New Jersey; Salem, Massachusetts; Carson Sink, Nevada; Washington, D.C.; Miami, Florida; Norfolk, Virginia—the list goes on and on—in the late forties and early fifties. The timing makes it impossible to consider such phenomena without also considering the cataclysm that, more than any set of founding documents, gave birth to our colossal, unknowable, world-striding modern nation. In other words, before you can grapple with UFOs, you have to ask yourself: what the hell did that war do to America? Dreamers have seen things in the heavens since time out of mind. You can go back to 228 B.C., when the Roman historian Livy recognized portents of doom in the “phantom ships” he saw “gleaming in the sky.” Or when Pliny the Elder, an ancient scribe, recorded something that sounds like a Steven Spielberg UFO: a spark that “fell from a star and grew as it descended until it appeared to be the size of the Moon.” Such visions, which usually came in times of stress, were taken as a sign from God. Ezekiel’s fiery wheel, witnessed on the road to Babylon, was possibly a flying saucer. People have always had visions, but the language changed. In the religious age, it was angels and demons. In the scientific age, it’s intergalactic dream machines, hot rods cooked up by gearheads from across the inky vacuum. As the holy book says, “We see things not as they are, but as we are.” The Germans put the first jet plane in the air in 1939. The first rocket that could touch space went up in 1942. Called the V2, its target was not space but London. Chuck Yeager, flying the bullet-shaped Bell X-1, broke the speed of sound (767 mph) in October 1947. Ten years later, the Soviet’s launched the first artificial satellite. That was followed by the first man in space, the first man in orbit, the first man on the moon. One result of the aerospace boom was UFO mania. If we could do it, it was only logical to think aliens could do it, too. Roswell, New Mexico, where the air force was said to have recovered a flying saucer and a crew of dead aliens in 1946, was just the most famous encounter—there were hundreds of others during the Cold War. In 1949, government officials were said to have captured the crew of an alien craft that set down, in the cool of a desert evening, on a plateau in Aztec, New Mexico. What explains this sudden intergalactic traffic? Read More