July 15, 2019 Notes on Pop On Warnings By Hanif Abdurraqib Still from Belly (1998) It is hard to say when I stopped noticing the sirens. They’re still there, piercing the otherwise normal Wednesday-afternoon noise. But I haven’t noticed them for at least fifteen years. In the central Ohio area, a test of the state’s tornado-siren system takes place every Wednesday at noon. I would describe the sound for you, but even now I can barely remember it. I recall it beginning as a low whistle that bends into a loud howl, but the sound feels distant to me now. It’s indistinguishable from all the other ways this city rumbles its way toward productivity. When I was a kid in elementary school, I assumed the siren tests happened everywhere. Twice a month, at noon, when the howling began to announce itself, all of us kids spilled into the hallway, and sat on our knees facing the wall. We’d lock one of our hands into the other, put them behind our heads, and curl ourselves downward. It was practice for the actual tornado, which we were told might come at any moment. It might come while we were in our classrooms learning whatever it is elementary school kids learned in the nineties (yet another thing I don’t recall). I never knew this was something exclusive to my school, or schools in my area. I imagined an entire chain of balled-up bodies, trembling against walls in school hallways across the country. Once I hit my early teenage years, when tornado rehearsals were no longer required of me, my ears stopped registering the sirens. Most people who have lived in central Ohio for long enough echo this sentiment. We know the sirens only by those around us who haven’t been here long. The way they jump, or their eyes widen as they look to the sky, expecting chaos. That’s when I hear the noise again. Read More
July 10, 2019 Happily I Am the Mother of This Eggshell By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. When my grandfather was dying, he pointed into the gray hospital air and said, “Buildings.” “Drawn in light pencil,” he said. “All around me.” “Are they yours?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “They’re mine.” Now he is dead and his children are fighting over these buildings. I tell my mother I am writing about inheritance and fairy tales. “Well,” she says, “soon there will be no inheritance.” I imagine an eraser rubbing all the pencil drawings out at the exact moment my grandfather takes his last breath. An inheritance of rubber dust, as soft as the sawdust lining the twelve coffins in the Brothers Grimm’s “The Twelve Brothers.” That fairy tale begins with a king and a queen and their twelve sons. They are happy until a daughter is born with a gold star on her forehead. The king wants her to inherit the kingdom and so he orders twelve coffins made. A coffin for each son, filled with wood shavings and each fitted with a small pillow. He orders all his sons dead, but the queen orders them to flee into the woods. What is inheritance? In fairy tales it’s where loneliness resides. It divides and isolates. It leaves the girl with the star on her forehead looking up at twelve empty shirts on a clothesline that once contained her brothers. “These shirts are far too small for Father. Whose are they?” The queen replies with a heavy heart: “They belong to your twelve brothers.” Read More
July 9, 2019 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Ingeborg Bachmann By Emma Garman Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Ingeborg Bachmann. Photo: Heinz Bachmann. In early 1973, the year she died, the celebrated Austrian poet and novelist Ingeborg Bachmann visited Auschwitz and Birkenau during a reading tour of Poland. She remarked: “I don’t understand how one can live with them nearby … There is nothing to say. They are simply there, and it leaves you speechless.” Bachmann had spent her career grappling with the inadequacy of language, in pursuit of the inexpressible. “If we had the word,” she argued in a 1959 speech, “if we had language, we would not need the weapons.” She believed in the potential of poetic language to expand the limitations of communication, but had become disillusioned with poetry as a medium. “Believe me,” says the writer-narrator of Bachmann’s cult-classic 1971 novel, Malina, “expression is insanity, it arises out of our insanity.” Bachmann was twelve when Germany invaded Austria in 1938, but her schoolteacher father already belonged to the Austrian branch of the National Socialist Party. She later described the marching of Hitler’s troops into her southernmost border state, Carinthia, as the “specific moment which destroyed my childhood … It was something so terrible, that my memory begins with that day: with that early sorrow.” When World War II ended she was nineteen, and a fervent leftist. Her diary entries from the summer of 1945 were published posthumously alongside letters from Jack Hamesh, the object of her innocent yet deeply formative first love. Hamesh was an Austrian Jew who, having fled Vienna for the British Protectorate of Palestine as an eighteen-year-old orphan in 1938, returned to Austria with the liberating British army. Though Bachmann and the young soldier were from such different worlds, they recognized each other’s loneliness and alienation. They bonded over conversations about literature, “Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig and Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal … he told me he never thought he’d find a young girl in Austria who’d read all that despite her Nazi upbringing.” (Mann, Zweig, and Arthur Schnitzler were all banned under the Third Reich.) It was “the loveliest summer of my life,” the teenage Bachmann recorded in her diary, “and even if I live to be a hundred it will still be the loveliest spring and summer.” In a 1946 letter from Tel Aviv, where he had settled, Hamesh wondered: “Was our life together just a chance episode? I felt it was something much deeper … for me it was proof that despite everything that has overtaken our two peoples there is still a way—the way of love and understanding.” Read More
July 8, 2019 The Big Picture What’s the Use of Beauty? By Cody Delistraty Édouard Manet. Woman Reading, 1880 or 1881. The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection. The halo effect is a type of cognitive bias in which your initial superficial assessment of a person influences your perception of their other, more ambiguous traits. In the name of cultural journalism, I conducted an informal experiment to test this. I posted five different photographs of myself to a website called Photofeeler, which people mostly use for their acting headshots, company photographs, and online dating profiles. Strangers vote on your attractiveness, trustworthiness, and intelligence, and, using a weighted algorithm, the website tells you the percentile you’re in compared with the rest of the people on the website so you can choose the best photograph. The photo of mine that was voted the most attractive—my fingers awkwardly crinkled around a wineglass on a terrasse—was the one in which I was voted smartest and most trustworthy. The photograph in which I was deemed ugliest—sitting in a cab—was the one in which I was voted dumbest and least trustworthy. In every photograph, my perceived attractiveness determined my perceived trustworthiness and intelligence, traits that, of course, are impossible for anyone to actually know from a picture. The notion of the halo effect and the idea that “beauty is good”—meaning that we assume people who are prettier must also be cleverer, kinder, more moral than uglier people—were first tested in 1972 by the psychologists Karen Dion, Ellen Berscheid, and Elaine Walster. They found that people almost uniformly believed that those who they found more attractive on the basis of three small photographs were also more generous and more stable and had better marriages, better jobs, and better families than less attractive people. A similar study from just a few years ago found that people trust those they consider more attractive significantly more quickly than those they consider less attractive. Is beauty, therefore, the most useful trait one might have? Read More
July 3, 2019 My Terrible Summer For Whom Is the Water Park Fun? By Barrett Swanson Barrett Swanson attempts to relax and ends up interrogating summertime Americana in the Midwest. Noah’s Ark Water Park The vacation was a professional recommendation. After two years of pursuing academic tenure at a small university in Wisconsin, an interval during which I served on department committees, advised undergrads, composed new essays, and taught sixteen classes, I had finally reached a point in my life of near-catatonic exhaustion. Granted, I did my best to keep up appearances on campus. Each day I donned a happy pedagogical mask of good cheer and scholastic rectitude, enthusiastically responding to every last student email (Of course I’ll write you another rec letter! Of course I’ll read seventeen chapters of your unfinished fantasy novel!) My use of exclamation points in work emails became worryingly frequent and was perhaps the lone sign of my psychic unraveling. At home, however, I wore my darkness on my sleeve. Evenings I would brood stoically beside the fire, muttering to myself recombinant strings of my most frequent comments on student papers: wrong word, comma splice, fallacy, abstraction. Wrong word, comma splice, fallacy, abstraction. This eerie anthem, whispered under my breath, was enough for my spouse to ask, “Is everything okay?” It wasn’t. Not really. At work, my mask started to slip. One student remarked on how I looked so dejected before class, but when the morning bell rang I seemed to “come remarkably to life.” And in my second-year review, one colleague noted that while I had been steadily publishing in Tier 1 journals and earning high marks on my student evaluations, his lone concern for me was one of stamina and endurance. Was it possible for me—for anyone, really—to keep up this pace across the duration of one’s career? Perhaps I would appreciate the unburdening of leisure, the more tranquil activity of apple-picking, say, or a recuperative binge of Netflix? What this colleague neglected to observe, however, was that his very injunction to relax was now a professional fiat, thereby making the prospect of leisure yet another requirement for securing tenure. It was maddening, this paradox, a dark dream. And yet maybe he was right. Maybe I needed to ease off the throttle and cool down a bit. Maybe I needed some good old psychic untethering. Then, all at once, it hit me: I would summer. I would render the whole season into a verb. The pastimes of June and July—redolent of chlorine and sunshine—would become my sole preoccupation. Think tilt-a-whirls and funnel cakes. Think roadside attractions and state fairs. I would become a connoisseur of all this forgotten Americana, all this kitsch and treacle of the season. Which was how I found myself standing in front of my wife one Saturday morning in May, talking very rapidly, with a Clark Griswold gleam in my eye. I was brandishing a Groupon for Noah’s Ark (“America’s Largest Water Park”), which was only a scant hour from where we lived. On my head was a jaunty Gilligan cap, and my nose was a sad white diamond of SPF cream. “Do they have a lazy river?” my wife asked. “They have two lazy rivers,” I said. “I’ll only go,” she said, “if I can read Hannah Arendt on my raft.” Only upon approaching the entrance gate did my enthusiasm begin to wane. Only then did I remember some crucial facts about myself—namely, I hadn’t been to an amusement park since 1996. A friend had invited me to Six Flags with his family, and after going on what I was later told was a fairly tame ride called The Whizzer, I nevertheless erupted into tears and refused to go on any more coasters. This prompted my friend’s mother to ask, unkindly but not unfairly, “Well, why did you even come then?” To which I rather histrionically replied, “Because I wanted your son to like me.” Read More
July 2, 2019 Dice Roll Dice Roll: Civilization Dawns in San Francisco By Michael LaPointe Michael LaPointe’s monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. ©Ellis Rosen “Murder! murder most foul and dastardly has been committed in our streets, and the blood of the victim crieth aloud for vengeance.” Even regular readers of the Daily Evening Bulletin had never seen its editor, James King of William, this angry. All through the winter of 1855–56, he’d been calling for Charles Cora’s death. “He must and will be hung!” he’d written. And if the sheriff of San Francisco let Cora slip away? Then “hang him—hang the Sheriff!” But now, Cora had been caught, and the only thing hung was the jury. Rumor had it that Cora’s lover, the madame of a Waverly Place parlor house who was known simply as Belle Cora, had influenced the jury with gold dust. Key witnesses were fleeing the city. The murder case was falling apart. “Hung be the heavens with black!” cried King of William, quoting Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 1. He cursed Cora’s “obscene paramour”; he wept for “the fame of the fair city.” In the pages of his newspaper, he’d already declared war in San Francisco, “war between the prostitutes and gamblers on one side, and the virtuous and respectable on the other.” He viewed the hung jury as a patriotic humiliation. But he wasn’t about to surrender. He ended his editorial with a threat that would’ve chilled anyone who recalled the violent excess of the Committee of Vigilance: “Gamblers, we warn you! remember Vicksburg!” Read More