May 20, 2019 YA of Yore Francesca Lia Block and Nineties Nostalgia By James Frankie Thomas Has there ever been a novel with a more misleading opening sentence than Weetzie Bat? Francesca Lia Block’s 1989 debut begins: The reason Weetzie Bat hated high school was because no one understood. On the basis of that sentence alone—its stale familiarity, its clunky syntax (“the reason was because”), its pandering parents-just-don’t-understand gloss on adolescent alienation—you’d expect the most formulaic of young adult fiction. On the basis of that sentence alone, you probably wouldn’t keep reading. Certainly you would never guess what follows: They didn’t even realize where they were living. They didn’t care that Marilyn’s prints were practically in their backyard at Grauman’s; that you could buy tomahawks and plastic palm tree wallets at Farmer’s Market, and the wildest, cheapest cheese and bean and hot dog and pastrami burritos at Oki Dogs; that the waitresses wore skates at the Jetson-style Tiny Naylor’s; that there was a fountain that turned tropical soda-pop colors, and a canyon where Jim Morrison and Houdini used to live, and all-night potato knishes at Canter’s, and not too far away was Venice, with columns, and canals, even, like the real Venice but maybe cooler because of the surfers. Surprise! Weetzie Bat is not a novel of teen angst but a novel of teen delight. It’s a novel whose heroine makes a wish to a magic genie to meet “my secret agent lover man” and pages later meets the love of her life—whose actual name, with no explanation, is My Secret Agent Lover Man. It’s a novel that, halfway through, contains this sentence: “And so Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man and Dirk and Duck and Slinkster Dog and Fifi’s canaries lived happily ever after in their silly-sand-topped house in the land of skating hamburgers and flying toupees and Jah-Love blonde Indians.” Weetzie isn’t too cool for school, or too deep or too smart, but simply too happy. She’s bursting with joy to be alive, right here, right now. Even the English language can hardly contain her exuberance. Read More
May 16, 2019 Pinakothek More Obscene than De Sade By Lucy Sante In his biweekly column, Pinakothek, Luc Sante excavates and examines miscellaneous visual strata of the past. “Maybe it would be better if we stopped seeing one another. Maybe there is no remedy to our solitude because … we don’t love each other enough.” Fotonovela, fumetti, roman-photo—the terms betray the fact that the form never got much traction in the Anglo-Saxon realm. There is no word for it in English, exactly. You could say “photo-comics,” but you’d risk being misunderstood. These narratives, often but not always romantic, are conveyed by means of photographs arrayed in panels on a page, with running text often in talk balloons. Their impact has been almost entirely restricted to countries that speak Spanish, Italian, or French; their readership is overwhelmingly female, at least in Europe. Their history formally begins in 1947 in Italy, in the magazine Grand Hotel, soon followed by its French sibling, Nous Deux; both magazines still exist. Fotonovelas flourished in the fifties and early sixties (into the eighties in Latin America), then began a slow decline that still refuses to yield to extinction. Everything was all mixed up. She closed her eyes and thought she heard Daniel. “Your hair is so fine and aromatic!” The culprit of their near-demise, of course, was television, in combination with social anxiety. Fotonovelas were associated with the poor and unlettered (my mother aspirationally ignored their weekly appearance in Femme d’Aujourd’hui, to which she subscribed for almost fifty years), the naive and sheltered and perhaps delusional. Roland Barthes, having written that “love is obscene precisely in that it puts the sentimental in place of the sexual,” went on to call Nous Deux “more obscene than de Sade.” Some years earlier, in a less militant phase, he noted of the fotonovelas that “their stupidity touches me” and ranked them with other “pictographic” forms, such as stained-glass windows and Carpaccio’s Legend of St. Ursula. There are even more specific antecedents, although no record of actual influence: Nadar’s famous conversation with the centenarian chemist Michel Chevreul was published as sequential captioned photographs in Le Journal Illustré in 1886, and La Folle d’Itteville, the collaborative photo-novel by Germaine Krull and Georges Simenon, was published in 1931. Read More
May 15, 2019 Notes on Pop On Nighttime By Hanif Abdurraqib Hanif Abdurraqib’s new monthly column, Notes on Pop, muses on the relationship between songs and memory. Source: Thinkstock I find myself most aware of silence when I am thinking about the many ways it can be punctured. Under the wrong circumstances, a hospital room can become a symphony of noises, each of them courting the worst of a person’s anxieties. There might be an incessant but inconsistent beeping, or the sounds of several machines doing the work of keeping a person alive. It is a privilege to be told that someone you love is going to survive. The message comes from some exhausted doctor, eager to give the good news after the tests, or the surgery, or whatever else. I have also been on the other side: knowing that I would be watching a person I love slowly fade until they vanished altogether, and understanding there’s nothing that can be done. There’s something uniquely challenging about the moments in between, when the good news of a person’s continued living is delivered, but they still have to stay in a hospital room for a few more days before they can go home. From far enough away, underneath a wave of monochromatic hospital blankets, it can be hard to tell if someone is still breathing. Particularly if you’ve already imagined a world without them in it. If you’ve spent enough time imagining someone as dead, it can be difficult to visualize them as simply sleeping. I don’t love hearing the beeping and the sonic hiccups of hospital machinery, but it is worse not to hear anything. Read More
May 14, 2019 Happily Children with Mothers Don’t Eat Houses By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Turns out, for three months, Eli, my five year old, had a small black pebble in his ear. Don’t ask me why it never bothered him or why I never noticed. I am only his mother. When the very old doctor gently removed the pebble, Eli said, “Oh, there you are. I was looking for you all over.” About a week later I read about the Makapansgat pebble, a two-million-year-old reddish-brown pebble described as “water worn” with “staring eyes.” In 1925, this pebble, a pebble with a face, was found outside the vicinity of extinct hominids, implying that it was carried a good distance, as one might carry a fairy tale, because in the pebble a human recognized something and so kept it and carried it. In Grimm’s “Hansel and Gretel,” it’s not the breadcrumbs but the moonlit pebbles that point the children home. The breadcrumbs, eaten by birds, are the vanishing path that lead Hansel and Gretel to an edible house inhabited by a ravenous witch. At first, Hansel and Gretel gently nibble at the house, like mice. Then Hansel tears off a big piece of cake-roof. Then Gretel knocks out an entire sugar windowpane. The children are insatiable because what they are really hungry for is a mother and their mother is gone. Children with mothers don’t eat houses. While I write this essay, my mother stops speaking to me. The reasons are as old as the oldest fairy tale. As old as pebbles. For days my chest feels like it’s filling up with dry leaves. My head is bricks and glass. A shattering takes up residence in my body. I am forty-three and her silence still does this to me. I want sugar. I want to sleep. Read More
May 13, 2019 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Mariama Bâ By Emma Garman Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. As a Muslim schoolgirl in Senegal in the forties, Mariama Bâ had to choose her life’s direction at the age of fourteen. When girls graduated from primary education in the French colonial system, the main options were enrollment in either typing or midwifery courses. Only the most academic students at Bâ’s school progressed to the École normale des jeunes filles de Rufisque: an elite teacher training college just outside Dakar, whose intake included the surrounding Francophone territories. Bâ had decided to become a secretary, but her dynamic headmistress, ambitious on her behalf, wouldn’t hear of it. “You are intelligent,” she told her pupil. “You have gifts.” So Bâ took the entrance exam for the École normale and received the highest mark in French West Africa. The headmistress’s discernment of exceptional talent was again strikingly vindicated when Bâ, on publishing her debut novel at age fifty, became one of the first black African women to achieve international renown as an author. So Long a Letter, an incandescent critique of Islamic polygyny from the point of view of a middle-aged Senegalese widow, won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa and was translated into many languages. Bâ, who had been a women’s rights activist since the sixties, was suddenly hailed as the pioneering feminist voice of a continent. Sadly, she had little time to enjoy her success. Less than a year after accepting the Noma prize and giving a speech at the 1980 Frankfurt Book Fair, Bâ died of cancer. According to those who knew her, she didn’t rail against her fate. She accepted premature death as the price of her startling literary glory. Read More
May 9, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Mother’s Day Edition By Sarah Kay 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, Sarah Kay is on the line. ©Ellis Rosen Dear Poets— People say you can’t know a certain kind of love until you have a child. I hated when people said this before I had a child, but now I know it is true. My love for my daughter sometimes feels terrible and desperate and weighty with responsibility. But also sweet and tender and silly. I’m frequently irritated, sometimes infuriated, but nothing she could ever do or say would stop me loving her. I keenly feel the reality that she will leave me one day. Hopefully she’ll be happy, she’ll call home at least weekly, but that’s the best case scenario. It’s also possible, even likely, that—at least at some point—she’ll be distant and not return my calls and will discuss in therapy all the ways I’ve hurt her. And even that’s not close to worst case scenario. I just LOVE her. Even when she screams with all the vehemence her wild four-year-old self can muster that she doesn’t love me … even when she wakes me up at three in the morning … even when she writhes and wails for forty minutes because I didn’t have a quarter for the gumball machine … This love is exhausting. It’s so ordinary yet extraordinary. Is there a poem for a mother’s love? Thank you, Exhausted Read More