January 27, 2021 Écuyères The Lioness of the Hippodrome By Susanna Forrest In Susanna Forrest’s Écuyères series, she unearths the lost stories of the transgressive horsewomen of turn-of-the-century Paris. Céleste Mogador as a countess (wikimedia commons) My horse carried me like the wind. I couldn’t breathe; I hugged his neck, like jockeys do; I called out to him; he leapt forward again … I was going to overhaul my companions, maybe win the race! This idea transported me. I threw my horse against the ropes at the turn … I blocked the woman who was pressing closest to me and I passed her! I was so happy that, for fear of seeing the other woman beat me, I closed my eyes, left everything to my horse and spurred his left flank. I heard them say: She has won! That’s Élisabeth-Céleste Venard looking back on her first race as a stunt rider at the Hippodrome at the Barrière de l’Étoile outside Paris in 1845. At the time she was twenty, already notorious, hired to titillate the new arena’s eight thousand spectators in sidesaddle hurdle races, costumed parades, and chariot chases. She hared around for another circuit, took her winner’s bouquet, and breathed, “France is mine!” All eyes were on her, and her “nom de guerre,” Mogador, was on every tongue. “Mlle Céleste has a mischievous little face that exposes itself quite happily to the public’s lorgnettes,” wrote one critic. But Céleste, as she preferred to be known, had been exposed from the start. The audience at the Hippodrome knew what she was: a sex worker. To be more precise, in the city’s rigid, grasping sexual bureaucracy she was a fille inscrite, or “registered girl”—and one who had gone rogue, at that. She had been born to unmarried parents in the dirty and labyrinthine district of Temple, her father had died when she was six, and her mother worked in hat-making ateliers. Four years before her debut at the Hippodrome, when still a minor of sixteen, Céleste had made her mother sign her on to the notorious Paris register of sex workers. She could no longer live at home, where her mother’s lover had tried to rape her twice (her mother took his side), and she’d already been picked up by the vice squad and locked up in the notorious Saint-Lazare prison on suspicion of being a fille insoumise, or unregistered prostitute. Working-class women like Céleste had little hope of an appeal or fair trial in these roundups, regardless of their actual crimes or lack thereof. In the prizon she’d both had her first lesbian affair and made a friend who convinced her that becoming a pensionnaire at a bordello would provide an escape from home and a better apprenticeship than being a seamstress. It took one night at the elegant, curtained bordello for Céleste to realize how mistaken that was. That’s when she began to plot her next escape—one that led her to the Hippodrome and far beyond, although that hasty signature in the registry chained the bordello to her ankles for much of the rest of her life. Read More
January 14, 2021 Happily We Didn’t Have a Chance to Say Goodbye By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. The Plague Doctor (Photo: Sabrina Orah Mark) “I can’t find my plague doctor.” “Your what?” says my mother. “My plague doctor.” “I don’t know what that is,” says my mother. I text her a photo of my plague doctor in his ruffled blouse and beak mask sitting on my bookcase a few months before he disappeared. “I still don’t know what that is,” says my mother. “Forget it,” I say. “If you want to find it then look for it.” “I am looking for it.” “Then look harder.” “I am looking harder.” “It’s the strangest thing,” I keep saying. But I know it isn’t the strangest thing. I tell everyone who will listen that I’ve lost my plague doctor. Nine months ago I wrote about seeing the small porcelain doll in a shop in Barcelona, and wanting him immediately. If he had been real his beak mask would’ve been filled with juniper berries, and rose petals, and mint, and myrrh to keep away a plague I thought belonged only to the past. This was ten years ago. My husband and I were on our honeymoon, and I thought I only wanted the plague doctor. I didn’t know I’d eventually need him, too. “You can’t be serious,” says my brother. “Who loses a plague doctor during a plague?” “I guess I do,” I say. “We’ll find him,” says my husband. But we never do. Read More
January 7, 2021 Re-Covered Re-Covered: Bette Howland By Lucy Scholes In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. When I began writing this column two years ago, I initially restricted myself to discussing only titles that were out of print. But over the past year, as publishers continue to increase their efforts to resurrect lost classics, I’ve begun including pieces about previously neglected books that have been rediscovered and repackaged for a new generation. There are many success stories: the unexpected triumph of the Vintage Classics edition of John Williams’s Stoner, a book that sold less than two thousand copies when it was first published in 1965 before falling swiftly out of print, but as a reprint went on to become the Waterstones Book of the Year in 2013; or Lucia Berlin’s unforeseen posthumous literary stardom in 2015 after her selected short stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women (edited by Stephen Emerson for Farrar, Straus and Giroux), became a New York Times best seller. But there’s no more interesting tale of neglect and rediscovery than that of Bette Howland. Howland was a working-class Jewish writer from Chicago who in a single prolific decade published three books—a memoir, W-3 (1974), and two short-story collections Blue in Chicago (1978) and Things to Come and Go: Three Stories (1983)—and won both Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, then all but disappeared from view. She resurfaced briefly, sixteen years later, in 1999, with the publication of what would be her final work, the novella-length story “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” in TriQuarterly, but it garnered scant attention. If it hadn’t been for an editor’s fortuitous discovery in a secondhand bookshop shortly before Howland died in 2017, at the age of eighty, hardly anyone would have been familiar with her name, or her incredible work. Read More
January 6, 2021 Melting Clocks Reality Is Plasticine By Eloghosa Osunde In Eloghosa Osunde’s new column, Melting Clocks, she takes apart the surreality of time and the senses. My memory of my childhood is a black hole, save for the moments and ages marked by revelations and miracles. Take age six for instance, the year I learned to call things that are not (yet) as though they are (already.) It’s a biblical lesson, this, and my brothers were born from inside it, after years of waiting. Leaning on those words from the mouth of my mother, I prayed nightly for twin siblings, and soon started to talk about them like I knew them already. In a sense, I did. One, because they were real before their bodies were formed, and two, because my requests were already cool wax on the inside of God’s ear. I was taught things about holding hope unswervingly, about manifesting with laser focus, and the veracity of those lessons raised the hairs on the back of my neck even when there was no one there. I sealed prayers with amens and had them delivered swiftly; fleshed wishes out in my heart that stumbled into my life, already breathing. The pattern begins in my first name, directly translated to mean “it is not hard for God to do.” As in, nothing is. That name leads my head. My family took my dreams seriously, because God put the future behind my eyes often, but when the seeing got too heavy, I gave one of my many eyes back to God—the one that got visions, that put the weight of knowing on me—saying, This one is too much. Age thirteen, I believe, the year I learned that God understands consent, that They will never force anything on me for the sake of it. The spiritual controls the physical, so everything breathes there before it ever lands here. I’ve never lost this lesson, which is also an inheritance, as in drooling through the genetic code. A gift, as in given freely. I did hide it though, so as not to look unhinged. For a long time, there was nothing I wanted more than to be normal, to be as a person should, to be young, to unknow things. It still takes work to release the weight of normal, of should. Time isn’t real, that’s true, but years are time capsules in a sense. This year just gone shook the ground, took people in numbing numbers and cost some of us more than others, because nothing is equal. At points, I experienced consistent blocks of happiness, despite the world. A big part of that was made possible by safety and the privilege of a home with a roof and walls that disconnected me from nearly everything, but the other part was a dogged refusal to believe the world I want to see isn’t born yet. It is. That’s not hope; it’s faith, which Hebrews 11 defines as the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” Twenty-twenty turned me six again, treating stories like my life, the future like the present, the present like the past; stacking surreal on top of real, time on top of time. I don’t know what it looks like from the outside. But it feels a lot like peace if you’re wearing my skin. I’ve been wearing my skin. Read More
January 4, 2021 Notes on Hoops On One-On-One By Hanif Abdurraqib In his new column, Notes on Hoops, Hanif Abdurraqib revisits the golden age of basketball movies, shot by shot. Still from Love & Basketball © 2000 Alliance Films ONE Before any of this unfolds, I must first be honest. Before I can talk romantically about the way a basketball hoop, ornamented by a clean net, glows even as a starless nighttime empties its dark pockets over a cracked court. Before I can talk about the way when a well-worn ball begins to lose its grip it spins wildly in your palm, but is still the ball you have known and therefore you must care for, as you would an elder who whispers the secrets of past and future worlds into your ear. Before that, it must be said that you, reading this now, from whatever cavern you are riding out this ongoing symphony of storms, could beat me in a game of one-on-one if the opportunity arose. If you have ever made two shots in a row on any court anywhere. If you have known, by the sweetness left on your fingers, that a shot was going in before it reached the rim. If you have talked some shit that you could back up, even one single time. I want it to be known that I am getting too old to not surrender to the truth, and I know I am no good in one-on-one. It is not my game and has never been, though it isn’t for a lack of trying. Depending on the day, I might give you some thrilling competition. I don’t want to oversell myself, but I also would never ask you to take it easy on me. That’s a fine line to walk. One that requires an opponent at least a little curious about mercy, as I am sometimes. Here’s what I will say, for the sake of whatever confidence I still carry around: there are some very strict circumstances that might allow me to take a game off of you, and they would all have to work in my favor. Let’s say we were playing first to five, and let’s say I get the ball first. Let’s say whoever makes a shot gets the ball back, as it should be. Let’s say that I’m feeling good and hit a few long jump shots over your hand, which is maybe skeptically outstretched on the first two shots, but then urgently outstretched on the last one. And then we’ll say that you are a smart enough defender to push up on me and take my jump shot away. I’ve still got enough of a first step to get by you once for a layup, probably. And then, finally, let’s say you are the easily discouraged type. Who, down 4-0, might throw in the towel, ease back and go through the motions. I could steal a winning bucket. But that’s never how it goes, is it? It’s always a game to ten, at least. I’m always finished before we even begin. It was the held-over bitterness of this knowledge that likely animated my distaste for the iconic ending to Love & Basketball when I first saw it, tucked underneath a blanket on a high school Friday night in the crowded basement of a girl I’d gotten a crush on. Quincy and Monica, lifelong neighbors, rivals, once romantic partners, play one-on-one. By the film’s final act, the two haven’t spoken since their breakup in college four years ago. Quincy is back home, recovering from an ACL tear. Monica, upon visiting him in the hospital, finds out he’s engaged. This sets up the grand emotional collision two weeks before Quincy’s wedding. It has to be said now that I have great affection for Love & Basketball and all of its romantic movie clichés. It was, when I first saw it, one of the first times I’d seen those clichés played out with a Black cast. Black characters playing a sport I loved, complicated Black families with complications that were not all that close to my own interfamily complications, but were familiar enough. In retrospect, I appreciate that the clichés were given room to flourish here, as they were in all of the mostly white teen rom-coms of the era. We are to believe, somehow, that Monica (Sanaa Lathan) is not attractive, but could be, if she would just do something with her hair. We get that scene—packaged within a school dance, of course—where Monica “becomes” beautiful, her beauty pulled to the surface by the hands of her sister, accented by the pearls her mother places around her neck. Read More
December 21, 2020 Winter Solstice Burn Something Today By Nina MacLaughlin This is the final installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s column Winter Solstice. It’s dark. I am up early enough to see the stars. The porch light on the house across the street shines bright enough to bring shadows into the room. The neighborhood is still. The rattling newspaper delivery truck has not yet been by, the morning news not yet tossed on stoops. Frost not dew, the grass is stiff; a woman scrapes ice off her windshield and I feel it in my teeth. Mothwinged darkness opens itself widest now. Today is the shortest day of the year. Wasn’t it just summer? Or was summer a thousand years ago? Was summer? Now it’s now. Here we are. The Winter Solstice. The close of the year, the opening of a season—welcome, winter—the longest night, and light gets born again. Today is tied with its twin in the summer for the most powerful day of the year. Light a fire. Light a fire on this day. Let something burn. That is what the solstices are for. Summer flames say, Keep the light alive (it’s never worked, not once). In winter, a more urgent message: Bring light back to life (it’s worked every time so far). The summer solstice scene is loose and dewy, flower-crowned crowds in debauch around the bonfires. People leaped over flames and the tongues of flame licked up high into the night. In winter: private fires. Home hearths. These fires “have such power over our memory that the ancient lives slumbering beyond our oldest recollections awaken with us …revealing the deepest regions of our secret souls,” writes Henri Bosco in Malicroix. The Yule log didn’t start as a cocoa confection with meringue mushrooms on the top. It was oak burned on the night of the solstice. Depending where one lived, the ashes of the solstice fire were then spread on fields over the following days to up the yield of next season’s crop, or fed to cattle to up fatness and fertility of the herd, or placed under beds to protect against thunder, or sometimes worn in a vial around the neck. The ancient cults cast shadows in our minds, shift and flicker, their fears are still our fears, down in the darkest places of ourselves. Read More