February 7, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: I Woke to Myself 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 week, Claire Schwartz is on the line. ©Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I’ve been betrayed by my best friend, my mentor, and my first (and only) lover. He was a narcissist, a cheater, and a liar—but I didn’t recognize it quickly enough. I left him and am doing all I can to heal, but my half-closed wounds rip open at the slightest irritations. I crumble when a mention of him is floated between mutual friends, or when I discover another of his countless mistresses populating my “Suggested Friends” list on Facebook. He’s a successful man, and for him, life has gone on. I, on the other hand, feel ashamed and insignificant. Worse than the pain is my anger: I keep rewriting our breakup script, inserting scenes where I finally get to make him feel my pain. Do you have a poem to help me surrender my rage? Kindest, Eaten By Grief Read More
February 5, 2019 Archive of Longing Posthumous Bolaño By Dustin Illingworth In his new monthly column, Archive of Longing, Dustin Illingworth examines recently released books, with a focus on the small presses, the reissues, the esoteric, and the newly translated. Right image: stencil of Roberto Bolaño from Barcelona, 2012 The Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño idolized Jorge Luis Borges. “I could live under a table reading Borges,” he once told an interviewer. In the Argentine metaphysician, Bolaño found a path through the Latin American Boom’s sticky, commercial aftermath. Borges, with his elegance, his recursiveness, his allegorical purity and erudition, may at first blush seem worlds apart from the violent, hard-boiled predilections that came to define Bolaño’s oeuvre. But to think so is to overlook Bolaño’s subtle comic chops and lifelong interest in pulp. One of the great gifts Bolaño bestows upon Borges in return is how, in essays and interviews, he dispels the aura of brainy sobriety that tends to rarify his hero into an abstraction. Bolaño absorbed the cosmopolitanism and menace of Borges’s lesser-known stories—he was especially fond of the detective potboilers Borges wrote, pseudonymously, with Adolfo Bioy Casares. But he also pursued something more corporeal, savage, and belatedly modern in his own work. To a remarkable degree, Bolaño’s characters—all of them poets or poets manqués, regardless of their stated profession—delineate the aches and appetites that moor the gentle madness of their art. They eat ham sandwiches, fuck in stairwells, fight, sob, ride motorcycles, drink coffee, and read until their eyes burn. They are often poor or hungry, morally benighted, naive, wretched with longing and a writer’s remote gratifications. “Literature is basically a dangerous calling,” Bolaño said during a 1999 acceptance speech for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and his work, like a slow mugging, poses a persistent, shiv-sharp question: What price would you pay for literature? Read More
February 4, 2019 Happily The Postmenopausal Fairy Tale By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. “I’m dying,” says my grandmother. “Dying where?” I ask. “I’m coming. Don’t go anywhere before I get there.” “I have to go,” says my grandmother. On December 26, 2018, my grandmother, Gertrude Mark, died somewhere. * If this were a fairy tale, I’d go look for her. Read More
February 1, 2019 Devil in the Details The Art of the Bruise By Larissa Pham Larissa Pham’s monthly column, Devil in the Details, takes a tight lens on single elements of a work, tracing them throughout art history. In this installment, she focuses on bruises. The bruise in Nan Goldin’s “Heart-Shaped Bruise” could be anyone’s. A woman reclines on floral sheets, her face out of frame. She lies on her side like an odalisque. Her black-and-white striped dress is pulled up above the knee, her sheer black tights are yanked down. Framed in the middle, as if between curtains parted to reveal a stage, is the titular bruise, high on the woman’s right thigh. It is defined by its outline, like the imprint left on a table by an overfull coffee cup. One edge is beginning—just barely—to purple; the bruise is at most a day old. The photograph can’t show how the bruise will turn purple, as bruises do, then deepen into blacks and blues. We won’t see how the burst capillaries, like lace under the skin, will sour into greenish yellow and mauve. But we know. The bruise will move through a rainbow of colors, mottled like the translucent surface of a plum, until finally—weeks later, and no longer heart-shaped—it will fade back to the pink of healthy skin. We know that as we look, the bruise has already healed: Nan Goldin took the photograph in 1980. It is an old wound. It exists now only as a memory—a mark destined to fade, captured before it did. Every time I have a nosebleed—which is often lately, in the bone-aching dryness of a New York winter—I absolutely must take a photograph. I wish I didn’t have this terrible, maudlin impulse, but as soon as I feel the jet of warm blood I’m in the bathroom with my iPhone, doing my best Francesca Woodman impersonation until the little runnel of red hits the bottom of my chin. Bruises, too, have found their way onto my camera roll, captured from the moment I first notice their purpling presence and tracked as they blossom into violet, ultramarine, and lemon-yellow hues. Read More
January 28, 2019 Objects of Despair Objects of Despair: Fake Meat By Meghan O’Gieblyn Inspired by Roland Barthes, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s monthly column, Objects of Despair, examines contemporary artifacts and the mythologies we have built around them. The Impossible burger Science lifted us out of nature. It tamed the wilderness; it gave us tools to transcend our lousy, fallen bodies; and it shot us to the moon. Now it has produced a hamburger made entirely of vegetables that bleeds like real beef. The packaging of the aptly named Impossible Burger instructs you, as if daring you, to cook the patties medium rare. Three minutes on each side, and the center will remain the fleshly pink color of raw sirloin. This effect is the result of heme, the protein that carries oxygen through our blood and gives it its crimson color, and which food scientists have discovered how to ferment in a lab using genetically engineered yeast. (Pedantic foodies will point out that the red in beef is not blood but myoglobin, but this is beside the point. We call burgers “bloody” to acknowledge a truth that modernity has long tried to obscure: that meat was once, like us, a living thing.) Heme, which is abundant in animal muscle, is also what lends beef its distinctive flavor. The first time I prepared the Impossible Burger at home, the skillet erupted into a fatty sizzle (the patty contains emulsified coconut oil, which melts like tallow), and within seconds the air filled with the iron aroma of singed flesh. But the most uncanny moment arrived when I finished eating and there remained on the plate a stain of pinkish-brown drippings. In that moment, when I should have been marveling at the wonders of food science, I confess I was thinking of the weeping Madonna of Civitavecchia, a wooden statue that was said to shed tears of real blood—the signs of flesh where there is none. Read More
January 25, 2019 One Word One Word: Boy By Bryan Washington In our new column One Word, writers expound on a single word. William Lindsay Windus, The Black Boy, 1844 I’ve worked a lot of jobs where I’ve dealt with boys. Lately, I’ve been teaching conjugation and sentence structure to junior high kids, swaths of whom are just flexing the boundaries of their boyhood. They ask a lot of questions. One little dude, from Puerto Rico, wonders how many light bulbs there are in the building. One boy, another brown kid, asks me whether Houston will survive the inevitable floods brought about by global warming. And another boy, a little older, during an SAT excerpt featuring Anna Karenina, asks about the legality of queer marriage in Russia, before also asking whether I think he can hack into the building’s Wi-Fi, did I know that he can floss, do I listen to Gucci Mane, can I loan him some money for Fortnite. They’re just boys. And that word—boy—is pretty interesting in itself: it embodies a phase of life and a physical state and a way of being. Boy is garçon. Boy is chico y niño. The distance between boy and man is elastic, and the word itself is just as flexible. Nearly every culture has some sort of ritual transition out of boyhood: bar mitzvahs for Jewish folks, cow jumping among the Hamar in Ethiopia, Seijin-no-Hi in Japan. A first gig. A first kiss. A first beer. And the word’s weight adopts fluidity as it drifts from mouth to mouth: when my aunt calls me boy, in a sprawling patois, it’s not the same boy I’ve heard on fuck knows how many crowded street corners, at whatever ungodly hour. That boy comes after I’ve said something dumb or needlessly contentious or unspeakably obvious. Boy like, Really nigga? Boy like, Slow your roll. Boy like, Bruh; like, Fuck outta here; like, Your assertion is wildly improbable, but my acquiescence to your instigations are an integral part of our friendship’s contract. Read More