June 7, 2019 Summer Solstice In Summer We’re Reborn By Nina MacLaughlin In this series on the summer solstice, which will run every Friday through June 21, Nina MacLaughlin wonders what summer’s made of. Max Pechstein, Frische Brise, 1921 We start in the stars and move to the womb, which is to say water, which is to say swimming, which is the best part of summer. We’ll ease in. On the dawn of the summer solstice, rouse yourself from bed and head to the lawn or the field or the garden, kneel in the grass or the mulch, and with palms open, touch the grass or leaves or petals, get the damp on your hands, and put the wetness to your face. Power lives in the solstice dew—it gives youth, beauty, health, new glow. Especially true for maidens, it’s said, but all can take part. Take a dew bath in the solstice dawn. It makes sense somehow with the residual self-evidence of childhood—oh, of course the solstice dew holds magic—like a belief in fairies or demons. There’s a lot in this world we can’t see. Dew is the damp left behind as day is born out of night, “a child of moon and air,” according to the lyric poet Alkman, writing in the seventh century B.C. Air and moon mingle and the result is a bead on the grass blade. Haikuist Kobayashi Issa writes: The world of dew is the world of dew. And yet, and yet— Here, the dash is the haiku’s Rorschach test—how does your brain fill in what’s next? This world is real, but it won’t last long. This world exists and yet—we can’t enter it, and yet—we live right in it. And yet the world of dew is not a world at all. And yet what is a world and what are we doing? On the solstice, a baptism with these beads brings renewal, purification, a whole new life. We’re made fresh and ready. When Christianity took sway over paganism, there came a midsummer day, the midpoint between planting and harvest, known as Saint John’s Eve. It marks the feast day of Saint John the Baptist, he who dipped people in the river and washed them of their sin, he who rebirthed people in the water. Read More
June 6, 2019 The Big Picture Modernism’s Debt to Black Women By Cody Delistraty An exhibition at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay centers on a black model named Laure in Édouard Manet’s Olympia and reinterrogates the role of black people in art history. Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, 51″ x 75″. Presented at the 1865 Salon. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, RF 644. Photo © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. Around the time that Édouard Manet was painting Olympia, in 1863, a liberating politics was underway in France. Napoleon III had become so distracted with foreign affairs—handling the Second French Intervention in Mexico, breaking up a burgeoning Roman Republic in order to restore the Pope’s power, and making colonial conquests throughout Central Africa, Asia, and the South Seas—that he had little time to resist many of the political pressures back home. And so he was actually carrying out some of the promises he’d made in the run-up to his Second Empire coronation, such as reducing media censorship and allowing workers to strike. By 1870, Napoleon III, under the pressure of the Liberals, even assented to a parliamentary legislature in France, which would ultimately serve as the basis of the Third Republic. In the late nineteenth century, Paris began to seem like an integrated and relatively racially equitable city. After the 1848 Revolution, slavery had been abolished in France’s territorial colonies; Caribbean people moved en masse to the French capital. Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, and his father, Thomas-Alexandre—who was one of the most important black military men in European history—were viewed as unassailably prominent members of French society. Racism, of course, still existed, even at the highest levels of government: in 1884, Jules Ferry, who served as both prime minister and as president of the senate, was espousing his eugenics-based racism, saying things like, “The higher races have a right over the lower races … a duty to civilize the inferior races.” But for a moment, the scene seemed to be set for a fresh form of liberty and relative equality. Gustave Le Gray, Portrait d’Alexandre Dumas en costume russe, 1859, oval proof laminated on gray paper, itself laminated on cardboard, 10″ x 7 1/2″. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, PHO 1986 11. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d’Orsay) / image RMN-GP. Art, naturally, was both driver and recipient. The poet Charles Baudelaire was dating Jeanne Duval, a French Haitian actress so beautiful she was often called the Black Venus and was painted by Manet. Manet, meanwhile, was fashioning himself as a recorder of the contemporary social scene. A number of his paintings depicted the black people who had immigrated to the northern neighborhoods of Paris. In his studio notebook, he described the black maid whom he painted standing next to the lounging white prostitute in Olympia and the black caregiver in his Children in the Tuileries Garden (1862) as “Laure, très belle négresse, rue Vintimille, 11, 3éme étage.” Manet’s depiction of Laure wasn’t exoticized—not the kind of nude caricature that had been standard of European depictions of black women. Instead, with her voguish neckline and bouquet of flowers, Laure modeled a typically “white role,” as a clerk in a department store or a server at a café. Also: whereas in Titian’s Venus of Urbino (ca. 1532), a clear forerunner of Olympia, the maid, who is white, is turned away from the nude, lounging women in the foreground; in Olympia, Laure is just as much a part of the scene, in both the amount of the canvas she takes up and her foregrounded placement. Read More
June 4, 2019 Dice Roll Dice Roll: A Gambit for Civil Rights By Michael LaPointe Michael LaPointe’s monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. Original illustration © Ellis Rosen You wouldn’t expect James McMillan to bluff. He once called Lyndon Johnson “the most bigoted bastard that I’ve ever known.” McMillan had a blunt honesty that hampered his success in electoral politics. But in March of 1960, with just ten days before the protest, he was doing his best to keep a poker face. As president of the NAACP in Las Vegas, he’d written a widely publicized letter to the mayor promising a massive protest on the Strip unless segregation ended in the city. At the time, black people were barred from casinos downtown and on the Strip. Yet as the date of the march approached, McMillan surveyed his organizational efforts with dismay. It wasn’t easy to rally people for an event where they faced potential beatings and arrests. “This isn’t going to happen,” he told himself. “These people are not going to march.” The last move remaining was the stone-cold bluff: stare down the Vegas power brokers, some of the most dangerous underworld figures in the country, and hope they folded first. “The only thing that I had going for me was that the caucasians had not faced this type of thing before,” he recalled. “They were afraid.” In the meantime, he was getting death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. His children would answer the phone and be told to expect a bomb. But there was no turning back. McMillan’s gambit would define his life and transform the city of Las Vegas. Read More
June 3, 2019 Writers’ Fridges Writers’ Fridges: Kristen Arnett By Kristen Arnett In our series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. The thing about a fridge is we spend a lot of time standing in front of it wondering what’s inside. We don’t wanna necessarily open it because that will let all the cold air out, but I also like to think we stand in front of that closed door because we’re allowing ourselves to think that it holds something we truly want. Infinite possibilities. We are keeping hope alive! Read More
June 3, 2019 YA of Yore YA of Yore: Annie on My Mind By James Frankie Thomas In her monthly column, YA of Yore, Frankie Thomas takes a second look at the books that defined a generation. Here’s the mystery of Annie on My Mind, the 1982 young adult novel by Nancy Garden: I’ve never met a straight person who’s read it. As far as I can tell, only queer women have read it—and yet I’ve never met one who sought it out on purpose. It comes to us only by accident. I’m generalizing, I know. But test it out for yourself. Ask your favorite lesbian how she first encountered Annie on My Mind, and you may well hear something like this Amazon review from the year 2001: “Someone gave me this book when I was 17 and wondering who the heck I was. I read it in one sitting, flipped it over and read it again.” Or this one, from 2009: “I was walking down a [library] aisle and just had this funny feeling to pull out this book. Call it crazy, but it felt like the book that I’ve never seen before wanted me to read it.” As if by enchantment, the novel finds its way, often in disguise, to those who don’t know they need it. It found its way to me in the summer of 2000, when I was thirteen, via the Union Square branch of Barnes & Noble. Back then YA fiction took up just one small shelf, consisting mostly of Francesca Lia Block and the hoax diaries of Beatrice Sparks, so I was quick to notice a book I’d never seen before. The tagline intrigued me: “Liza never knew falling in love could be so wonderful … or so confusing.” Why did I assume that Liza was in love with a boy, when the book gave no such indication? Its front cover depicted two girls holding hands, their eyes closed, their foreheads tenderly touching. Its back cover, which was a soft-butch shade of salmon pink, featured a short excerpt in which Liza’s mother asked, “Have you and Annie done more than the usual experimenting?” But these things have a way of hiding in plain sight from anyone not actively looking for them. We see what we expect to see. Annie was Liza’s best friend, I thought; the two of them were experimenting with boys. What else could they be doing? The other possibility, of course, is that I did know. On some level, perhaps, I knew right away. Read More
May 31, 2019 Summer Solstice The Start of Summer By Nina MacLaughlin In this series on the summer solstice, which will run every Friday through June 21, Nina MacLaughlin wonders what summer’s made of. Max Pechstein, Summer in Nidden. 1919-1920 It was early June, Saturday, midmorning on the Red Line. I was moving through tunnels beneath Cambridge when a teenager approached and asked if I wanted to take part in a memory project. Take an index card and a pen and write down a memory, any memory at all, and get one from a stranger in return. I took a card, a pen, and wrote. I handed it to her, and before we reached the next stop she returned and handed me a memory that belonged to another person on the subway car. It was written on an index card folded in half: On the last night of summer camp, my best friends and I snuck out of our cabins and slept on the tennis courts so we could stargaze and spoon with each other all night. I saw 6 shooting stars that night. Such is summer. Unroofed, under stars, away from parents, away from rules, pressing against friends, laughing, urgent whispers—did you hear that?—quiet, quiet, earth as bed and sky as blanket. The stars sweep across the sky in silence, heaven’s hemispheric map-makers, time-tellers, their positions revealing where in the year we are. Where in the year are we? We don’t need to track the stars to know. Here in the northern hemisphere, each evening’s longer light alerts us. Right now the year is skipping toward the opening of the heated season. Which, for some, begins tomorrow, June 1. Where you define the start of the summer depends on whether you align yourself with the meteorological calendar, which is used by climatologists and meteorologists, or the astronomical calendar. If you stand with the scientists, June 1 starts summer (and September 1 starts fall, December 1, winter, and March 1, spring). If you base your seasonal switches on the earth’s tilt and changing relationship to the sun, the solstice opens the season, this year on June 21, when, in the northern hemisphere, the sun reaches its highest point in the sky, and light lasts longer than any day of the year. Read More