November 10, 2022 Re-Covered Re-Covered: She-Crab Soup by Dawn Langley Simmons By Lucy Scholes “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Virginia Woolf once asked a little boy named Dinky, in the gardens of Sissinghurst Castle, the home of Woolf’s loverVita Sackville-West. “A writer,” Dinky replied. As in a fairy tale, the child’s wish came to pass: Dinky, who was born Gordon Langley Hall, the son of Sackville-West’s chauffeur, went on to become the author of twenty books, including She-Crab Soup (1993), a high-camp Southern Gothic novel about the romantic adventures of a wealthy Southern belle—a story as remarkable as the author’s own life. By then, the former Dinky had undergone a series of dramatic self-reinventions, having transformed herself from the illegitimate son of working-class Brits to a cultured expat author living in Charleston, South Carolina. And in 1968, at the age of forty-six, she transitioned, rechristening herself Dawn. She was, as Simmons—who eventually took her husband’s surname—wrote in her memoir, “a real-life Orlando.” Read More
November 9, 2022 On Music I Remember All Too Well: Taylor Swift and Joe Brainard By JoAnna Novak Taylor Swift. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 4.0. Last year, I began running the trail at Lake Storey in Galesburg, Illinois, where I live. My friend S. recommended Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version)” as an exercise soundtrack; soon, I was clocking my runs by it. Five took me around the lake and to the dock where I stretched. For me, there is only the ten-minute version. The five-minute original is like getting cheated out of an orgasm. The song had just been released on Red (Taylor’s Version), the 2021 rerecording of her fourth album, which came out in 2012. It’s a power ballad, the story of a dissolved romance that haunts the speaker, who is still hurting over the cruelties of the relationship. “You never called it what it was,” Swift sings. “All I felt was shame.” “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)”—which broke the Guinness World Record for longest song to hit number one on Billboard’s Hot 100—is also a master class in the present tense. By the second, third, or fifth listen of a run, all I could think about was point of view, verb tense, and one of the few “craft” words I like: temporality, which sounds so much more well behaved than time. Verse one opens in scene: “I walked through the door with you, the air was cold.” The door is the door to an ex-lover’s sister’s house, where Swift has forgotten a scarf. The first three lines of the verse are written in simple past, but the fourth shifts to present perfect, foreshadowing the showdown to come between tenses. In the ten-minute version of “All Too Well,” forty-nine lines are in past and forty-seven are in present. Read More
November 7, 2022 Poetry In the beginning is the end By Meret Oppenheim Meret Oppenheim, X-Ray of M.O.’s Skull (Röntgenaufnahme des Schädels M.O.), 1964, printed 1981. Hermann and Margrit Rupf Foundation. Kunstmuseum Bern. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Born in 1913 in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district to a German Jewish father and a Swiss mother, Meret Oppenheim lived out the initial decades of her life in the shadows of Europe’s two world wars. Yet hope is inherent in her artistic practice, which spans painting, sculpture, works on paper, jewelry design, and poetry. Oppenheim’s work isn’t particularly uplifting, much less cheery; indeed, the language in her poems is often exceedingly dark and piercing. But her inventive verse opens up spaces for transformation—even under circumstances in which any sense of possibility is veiled by cruelty, and is therefore fleeting. Such contradictions come to life, for example, in an untitled poem that opens with the exclamation “Freedom!”: Freedom! Finally! The harpoons fly A rainbow encamps on the streets Undermined only by the distant buzz of giant bees. Read More
November 4, 2022 The Review’s Review The Review’s Review: Real Housewives Edition By The Paris Review Season 5, episode 3 of Selling Sunset. One of my favorite lines of reality TV dialogue belongs to the Real Housewives of Atlanta star Kenya Moore, who once told an adversary, “I’m Gone with the Wind fabulous,” snapped her fingers, twirled the tail of her peach-colored chiffon dress centrifugally like a tipsy Wonder Woman impersonator, and eventually spun out of the scene on a dime. Presumably, this was a nod to Scarlett O’Hara, the quintessential Southern belle, a prototypical Georgia peach. Ever since the episode aired in 2012, the line has been memed to death by pop culture nerds and reality TV obsessives, probably with much the same fervor that movie buffs have parroted Rhett Butler’s famous closing quip to O’Hara from the 1939 film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel. (When O’Hara asks Butler what she’ll do with her life if he walks out on her, he replies, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”) I love how ridiculous the reference is, especially in the context of a petty poolside skirmish. I dig the layers of racial commentary in the comparison, whether intended or not. What does “Gone with the Wind fabulous” actually mean, on a scale of style? Does it speak to a propensity for overwrought fashion, melodramatic flair, Southern grandeur? A tendency to leave devastation in one’s wake? If that’s the case, then maybe it’s Butler, not O’Hara, to whom Moore alludes when she sashays away from her rival. Viewers of the scene are left with the image of the sway of silky fabric, and her winsome Miss USA wave—the gesture reminiscent of a done-in O’Hara, who clutches a large plantation doorframe as her man storms out. —Niela Orr, contributing editor Read More
November 2, 2022 First Person Encounters with Ghosts By Sadie Stein Victorian spirit photograph. Preus museum, no restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons. One Monday evening some five years ago, I walked into my first Spiritualist service. In those days, the New York Spiritualist Church held services roughly once a month in a broad-minded white-marble Methodist structure designed to hold some thousand parishioners. But the Spiritualists only filled the first few rows. It was dim, churchy-smelling, and vast. I’d thought about what to wear. It was, after all, a church; it was also seven in the evening in late November. In the end, I changed out of my jeans and wore a high-necked Laura Ashley dress and a tweed jacket and my least ironic glasses. My hair was severely curtailed into a topknot. I suppose, as in many such moments, I was trying to control the one thing I could. As it turned out, I could have worn anything. There were people in jeans, there were people in gowns, there was a Guardian Angel beret—or maybe it was just a red hat. There was one person in a cape. From the moment I walked in, I was approached by other congregants: people introduced themselves and shook my hand and told me how long they’d been attending. Some made unusually intense eye contact; I’d later learn these were the mediums. We were all there to see ghosts; we were all, I suppose, future ghosts. Read More
November 1, 2022 Rereading Why Do Women Want?: Edith Wharton’s Present Tense By Sarah Blackwood Edith Wharton. Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. “Undine Spragg—how can you?” her mother wailed, raising a prematurely-wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a languid “bell-boy” had just brought in. It strikes me as odd that the opening of Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel, The Custom of the Country, rarely appears on those “best first lines in literature” lists that go around every so often. The sentence has everything that makes the novel, and Wharton’s work in general, so great: vigor, voice, irony, detail. Through it, Wharton sketches a tense and dissonant world in which the colloquial and the bejeweled come into uncomfortable relation with each other. Dramatic and dynamic, this world nevertheless feels intensely claustrophobic. From the first five words of the novel, the reader is tied to a repetitive present tense that feels inescapable—no future, no past, just a boxed-in present (“how can you?” rather than the usual “how could you?”). Each time we read the novel, it seems, the continuous present of the deliciously named Undine Spragg happens to us all over again. The Custom of the Country, many recent commentators have noted, feels uncannily up to the minute. Its heroine, the beautiful, social-climbing, rapacious, and empty-souled Undine Spragg, reminds us of a tabloid fixture or a reality television star; her currency as a figure who exemplifies the ideas about white womanhood in every era has remained constant. If the morality of divorce—the main “problem” in this 1913 “problem novel”—is perhaps no longer the most pressing social phenomenon to imaginatively explore, Undine’s grasping, financially speculative approach to personal identity and relationships still is. Read More