June 27, 2019 Pinakothek Souvenir By Lucy Sante In the spring of 1914, nine American sailors were arrested by the Mexican government for unauthorized entry into a loading area of the oilfields in Tampico, Tamaulipas. They were released with an apology, but without the twenty-one-gun salute also demanded by the United States naval commander. President Woodrow Wilson ordered the fleet to prepare for an occupation of the port of Veracruz. They were to await authorization from Congress, but then news of an arms shipment headed for the port overrode that formality. The weapons, procured by an American arms dealer, were destined for the newly self-appointed president of Mexico, Victoriano Huerta, who had been assisted in his coup d’état by the American ambassador; despite this, the United States sided with his rival. Battleships and cruisers landed a force that would ultimately number some 2,300. In the city they met with fierce resistance from determined but poorly equipped local citizens. The occupation lasted seven months. This picture, taken by Walter P. Hadsell, an American photographer resident in Veracruz, was published as a (silver gelatin) postcard and enjoyed wide circulation, even being bootlegged by other photographers. Read More
June 26, 2019 One Word One Word: Striking By Myriam Gurba While aiming a lens at my face, the photographer whispered, “You’re striking.” This quality lives far from pretty. Daisies are pretty. Adolescent hamsters are pretty. William Wordsworth wrote pretty poetry. It wasn’t striking. Striking poetry ambushes us. The sensory details are chosen to paralyze, discomfit, or inflict pain. When such poetry bears lilies, they fester. When such poetry harbors horses, they crush toes. When such poetry casts a fishhook, its metal sinks into an open eye. Striking phenomena resemble beautiful ones in their force and strength. “Beauty quickens,” said critic Elaine Scarry. “It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid.” When I was a ten-year-old tomboy, I asked my father, “Why does evil exist?” After looking up from his watch, he replied, “Myriam, imagine how boring life would be if evil didn’t exist.” It makes life more vivid. At the time, my father’s authority on the matter went unquestioned. In hindsight, his answer strikes me as slapdash, dangerous, and wrong. When I was older, I lived with a man who, though he was evil, was as boring as he was dangerous. Here is an inventory of his pastimes: plucking bass guitar while buzzed, extolling the greatness of soccer player Lionel Messi, and misogyny. He turned me into a human soccer ball, and yet I couldn’t recognize what was happening. The radical feminist Andrea Dworkin experienced this same perceptual inability, explaining that the horror of what is happening to a battered woman exists, “quite literally, beyond her imagination.” My mind could not name what he did to me. Misogyny struck me dumb. Read More
June 24, 2019 Re-Covered Re-Covered: A Blisteringly Honest Lesbian Suicide Memoir By Lucy Scholes In her monthly column Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Photo: Lucy Scholes In April 1962, after a day of sailing in Dorset, the fifty-year-old English writer and teacher Rosemary Manning got into her car and drove inland, up a long river valley and into the chalk country of the South Downs. She stopped briefly, to eat some biscuits and two bananas and to post a letter to a solicitor acquaintance in London, after which she continued up a deserted track. Parking her car under some trees, she took a short walk in the moonlight before burning a stash of personal letters. Manning then climbed back into her car, locked the doors and poured herself a whisky, which she washed down with over seventy sleeping tablets. Waiting for the drugs to take effect, she began to read T. H. White’s The Goshawk, but after about twenty minutes she became worried that the car’s interior light shining in the otherwise pitch-black night might attract unwanted attention. She switched it off and settled back in her seat, and, “with the suddenness of a tropical night, blackness overwhelmed me.” Manning was discovered the following morning—she would later describe the story of her rescue as “shot through with a positively Hardyesque irony”—and rushed to the hospital, where her stomach was pumped. All this is recounted in frank and straightforward detail in A Time and a Time (1971), the autobiography she wrote in the aftermath of these events—she began it two years later, in 1964, and finished it in 1966. It’s not the complete story of Manning’s life—this would come later, in her second memoir, A Corridor of Mirrors (1987), published just a year before her death at the age of seventy-six. A Time is an attempt to “come to terms with living.” Manning recounts the events that led up to her suicide attempt: the breakdown of her relationship with her lover, Elizabeth, which Manning believed was proof of her inability to find “a woman with whom I could live a full life, sexually and in companionship,” and her failure to achieve success as a writer. Most poignantly, though, it’s an uninhibited examination of the unanticipated road that now lay in front of her. Read More
June 21, 2019 Summer Solstice Summer is Made of the Memory of Summer By Nina MacLaughlin Today marks the summer solstice, and the final installment in Nina MacLaughlin’s four part series on the lengthening light. Max Pechstein, Sonnenuntergeng an der see, 1921 New season. New you. We began in the sky, in the stardust, we moved wombward into the water, out into the earthly world, and we arrive, now, in fire. Happy first day of summer. The solstice is a special day, irregular, when doors swing open that are otherwise closed, like on Halloween, like the winter solstice and the equinoxes. There are extra layers of possibility afoot. Open yourself, why not, ease yourself toward a more primal state of mind. A battle’s taking place. Twins wage war for rulership over the year. According to the ancient myths, the Oak King has been in power since the solstice in December. Now, after half a year at the helm, he’s sapped. Today, the summer solstice, when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky here in the northern hemisphere, the Holly King, the dark mischievous other half, beats his brother, and takes the throne for the darkening part of the year. He’ll rule through yule. The wheel of the year goes round—round like wreaths hung on doors in winter, round like flower crowns. Two halves within the whole, each force in tension with the other, pushing against, pulling apart, each wanting to overpower its irreconcilable twin. “The very value attached to the life of the man-god necessitates his violent death as the only means of preserving it from the inevitable decay of age,” writes James Frazer in The Golden Bough. “The same reasoning would apply to the King of the Wood; he, too, had to be killed in order that the divine spirit, incarnate in him, might be transferred in its integrity to his successor.” Ritual death, a fertility fest, rebirth. Power rising, taking hold, falling, taking new form. “He must increase, but I must decrease,” says John the Baptist of Jesus, born six months, a year’s half-turn, before him. “You can never have a new thing without breaking an old,” says D.H. Lawrence. “The new thing is the death of the old.” What’s coming? Read More
June 20, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Remember the Sky That You Were Born Under By Kaveh Akbar 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 week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, My niece is about to graduate high school. She has had to deal with a lot the past few years, including the death of her mother. I’ve watched her grow from an infant into the amazing young adult that she is today. I see how she’s getting ready to navigate all the complexities of life after high school. She is a talented artist and poet, and I’m so excited to discover what she does with the rest of her life. I wish that I could protect her from any unhappiness or difficulties, but I know that I can’t, and I realize that our challenges help us grow. Can you please share a poem to remind her that even though the world can be scary and contains pain, she is strong and resilient? Thank you, Proud Aunt Read More
June 20, 2019 Archive of Longing The Domestic Disappointments of Natalia Ginzburg By Dustin Illingworth In the novels of Natalia Ginzburg, family has a private grammar. “If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a dark cave or among millions of people,” she wrote in Family Lexicon, her most celebrated novel, “just one of those phrases or words would immediately allow us to recognize each other.” Ginzburg’s intimate cosmologies are fraught with allusive significance. Fantasy is the prism through which we glimpse her character’s dissatisfactions with each other. A wife may wish for a more loyal husband, or a father a more dynamic daughter, or a mother a smarter son, and in the strength of their desire, believe it is so. Out of these illusions, all manner of misunderstandings emerge, some comic (Ginzburg is a very funny writer), and others tragic. Ginzburg’s characters reveal themselves most fully in their unacknowledged weaknesses, the places where their ambition, yearning, disappointment, and pain all hide in plain sight. They are islands of misapprehension in a domestic archipelago. In many of Ginzburg novels, family is a loneliness compounded by virtue of its being shared. Two of Ginzburg’s books have recently been reissued by New Directions. Both explore the chasm between the intimacy we desire to have and what our bitter experiences have taught us to expect. The Dry Heart, a 1947 novella translated from the Italian by Frances Frenaye, begins with the unnamed narrator’s admission of having killed her husband: “I shot him between the eyes.” What follows is a kind of postmortem on the particulars of their failed relationship. In clear and precise prose, the narrator relates how she, a girl from the hill country, came to the city in pursuit of romance. “When a girl is very much alone and leads a tiresome and monotonous existence,” she explains, “with worn gloves and very little spending money, she may let her imagination run wild and find herself defenseless before all the errors and pitfalls which imagination has devised to deceive her.” Read More