September 28, 2020 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Alice Dunbar-Nelson By Joanna Scutts Our column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Alice Dunbar-Nelson In April 1895, the up-and-coming poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, whom Frederick Douglass had dubbed “the most promising young colored man in America,” saw a poem by a young writer, Alice Ruth Moore, accompanied by a photograph in which she appeared stylish and beautiful. He wrote to her immediately at her home on Palmyra Street in New Orleans, expressing his admiration, and they began an intense epistolary courtship that lasted two years. Six months in, Paul was declaring. “I love you and have loved you since the first time I saw your picture.” He called Alice “the sudden realization of an ideal!” She combined beauty with literary talent and the feminine accomplishments appropriate to an upper-class young woman of the day: “Do you recite? Do you sing? Don’t you dance divinely?” They modeled themselves self-consciously after Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, another pair of lovers and writers whose romance began by letter. Paul referred to “This Mr. and Mrs. Browning affair of ours,” and Alice, after they’d married, reflected on her role as a wife who was at once muse, colleague, and practical support: “We worked together, read together, and I flattered myself that I helped him in his work. I was his amanuensis and secretary, and he was good enough to write poem after poem ‘for me,’ he said.” The Dunbars embodied the aspirational ideal of the educated, cultured African American, allowed access to the white halls of fame and power as long as they were willing to remain, flattened and fixed, in the roles of representatives of their race. Such a role did not allow for physical passion and disorder. When the couple met in person, the refinements of their written courtship became scrawled over with violence. In November 1897, in what Paul described as “one damned night of folly,” he raped Alice, leaving her with internal injuries. Five months later, the couple eloped. The marriage lasted four years, and ended as violently as it had begun, with a drunken beating. Alice left, and never returned. Paul tried to woo her back with letters, but she answered only once, with a single word delivered by telegram: No. When he died of tuberculosis in February 1906, at the age of thirty-three, she found out by reading a notice in the newspaper. Yet despite their estrangement, Alice worked hard after Paul’s death to keep his reputation and his work alive, reading his poetry in public and, in 1920, editing The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer, a hefty anthology of “the best prose and poetic selections by and about the Negro race,” including many selections by Paul, but also her own poetry and selections by writers from James Weldon Johnson to Abraham Lincoln, with the “Caucasian” writers denoted by an asterisk. (Alice’s portrait, rather than Paul’s, appears as a frontispiece.) Read More
September 25, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Monsters, Monuments, and Miranda July By The Paris Review Evan Rachel Wood as Old Dolio Dyne in Miranda July’s Kajillionaire. Photo courtesy of Focus Features. In California, you’re always waiting for the Big One. This shaky ground serves as the foundation for Miranda July’s latest film, Kajillionaire, in which the Big One could be either an earthquake or a windfall for an oddball family of three who get by pulling scams and living in the leaky office of a bubble factory. But that’s how they like it, the patriarch claims, saying, “Everybody wants to be a Kajillionaire. I prefer to just skim.” His twenty-six-year-old daughter, Old Dolio, has never known anything but this perpetual absence of money, comfort, and so-called tender feeling. Along comes Melanie, who tries to show Old Dolio a world beyond her parents. Small earthquakes anticipate Old Dolio’s reckoning, interrupting moments of potential intimacy. But little tendernesses urge her to crawl out from the bubble factory basement or the gas station bathroom stall. Even the simplest acts of affection are transcendent, surprising: getting her hair brushed, the word hon. Fans of July’s work will not be surprised by the strangeness—the intricate motions of the bodies, the strange encounters, the role-playing—but they might not expect the sense of resolution. This ending is hard earned, though. The cinematography brings out the precious moments of softness as the screen suddenly is overtaken by a sunspot and the soundscape swells. “I’m lucky … I won’t miss my life,” Old Dolio says when she thinks the Big One has come. She knows this is it, she says, because she’s always been told that when it comes, “it will be all dark all around.” Then she opens the door to blinding light. —Langa Chinyoka Read More
September 24, 2020 Arts & Culture Ramona Forever By Adrienne Raphel I returned to Ramona Quimby for nostalgia. What I found was even better: a mystery. Beloved Portland, Oregon, author Beverly Cleary wrote the Ramona books over four decades, from Beezus and Ramona (1955) to Ramona’s World (1999). Set on leafy Klickitat Street in Portland, the eight-book series follows the adventures of spunky Ramona Quimby, her sister Beezus (and, later, her baby sister Roberta), her cat Picky-picky, her parents, friends, and neighbors. Seeing images of Portland in tear gas, under an orange sky, I’ve felt enraged, terrified, and helpless. I’ve wanted to escape to Ramona’s Portland, with invisible lizards and makeshift sheep costumes and beloved red rubber boots. And then, escapism turned into an enigma. Cleary writes in Ramona Quimby, Age 8, “Ramona had reached the age of demanding accuracy from everyone, even herself.” As it turns out, this isn’t exactly true. The Ramona series has many tiny pinpricks of the uncanny—and each is a delight. Ramona and Her Father, the fourth book, opens with Mr. Quimby bringing home a little bag of candy as a present for Beezus and Ramona. “His daughters pounced and opened the bag together,” writes Cleary. “‘Gummybears!’ was their joyful cry. The chewy little bears were the most popular sweet at Glenwood School this fall. Last spring powdered Jell-O eaten from the package had been the fad. Mr. Quimby always remembers these things.” But there’s something wonky in the state of Oregon. How does Ramona know what gummy bears are? Ramona and Her Father was published in 1977, but gummy bears didn’t hit American stores until at least 1981. In the twenties, German factory worker Hans Riegel, founder of the candy company Haribo, produced the first bear-shaped gummy candies, and they quickly became a beloved confection in Riegel’s home country. In the sixties and seventies, military service members introduced the candies to their families, and German teachers started bringing the bears to American classrooms. But it wasn’t until the eighties, when gummy bears started getting mass-produced for the U.S., that they became a huge hit, inspiring TV shows (The Adventures of the Gummi Bears) and earworms (“The Gummy Bear Song”). So how were gummy bears the confection du jour in Portland, Oregon, in 1977? Ramona and Beezus aren’t in German class, and Mr. Quimby, who procures the candies for them, isn’t in the army. Plus, the flavors are all wrong. They call the red bears “cinnamon,” which, as any Haribo (or Trolli or Black Forest) fiend knows, is never the red flavor. Read More
September 24, 2020 Look David Hockney’s Portraits on Paper By The Paris Review Opening next week at the Morgan Library & Museum, “David Hockney: Drawing from Life” is the first major exhibition to focus on the artist’s portraits on paper. Spanning more than half a century, the works showcased in “Drawing from Life” see Hockney returning again and again to some of the individuals he holds dearest: the designer Celia Birtwell, his friend and former curator Gregory Evans, the printer Maurice Payne, his mother, and himself. Evident everywhere is Hockney’s mastery of color and his devotion to capturing the subject at hand. A selection of images from the show appears below. David Hockney, Self Portrait with Red Braces, 2003, watercolor on paper, 24″ x 18 1/8″. © David Hockney. Photo: Richard Schmidt. David Hockney, Gregory, 1978, colored pencil on paper, 17″ x 14″. © David Hockney. Photo: Richard Schmidt. Read More
September 23, 2020 First Person Dear Building Residents By Lee Conell Dear Building Residents, I grew up underneath you. Some of you made a show of knowing my name, would call to me and wave if you passed me in the lobby. Some of you didn’t even know your building superintendent had a daughter. My father, when he was still your super, used the computer in our basement apartment to write you letters a little bit like this one—notices telling you to please be advised about upcoming hot-water outages and elevator-maintenance work, which always ended with an apology for any inconvenience and a note of thanks for your patience and cooperation. He would often tell me there were lots of worse jobs out there. But last year, when he announced at sixty-six that he was leaving the job, one of you, surprised, asked him why. You thought he’d stuck around the building for over thirty years because he loved being a residential super, or working for you, or the Upper West Side location. Please be advised: he was mostly there because he wanted health insurance. Read More
September 23, 2020 Arts & Culture When Murakami Came to the States By David Karashima In his rigorous new book, Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami, David Karashima examines how Haruki Murakami came to be one of the most beloved writers on the planet. The excerpt below chronicles the U.S. publication of Murakami’s first book to appear stateside, A Wild Sheep Chase. The original Japanese and American covers of Haruki Murakami’s novel Hitsuji o meguru bōken (A Wild Sheep Chase). On May 10, 1989, Haruki Murakami’s editor at Kodansha International, Elmer Luke, sent Murakami a fax reporting on the sale of U.S. paperback rights to A Wild Sheep Chase (to Plume for fifty-five thousand dollars) and asking him to take part in the promotional activities that were scheduled in New York that fall. Murakami declined. Several months later, Luke and Murakami met in person for the first time in Tokyo (together with another editor from KI), and on August 14, just three days before a copy of A Wild Sheep Chase arrived at the Murakamis’ home, Luke again asked Murakami to join him in New York. Murakami once again declined. On September 24, Luke asked again, saying that Murakami’s translator Alfred Birnbaum had become unable to attend, and that they had also managed to arrange an interview with the New York Times. Murakami finally relented. Murakami and his wife, Yoko, landed in New York on October 21, and Luke and Tetsu Shirai, the head of Kodansha’s New York offices, picked them up at the airport. Shirai remembers handing Murakami a copy of that day’s New York Times folded open to a story in the arts section about him and A Wild Sheep Chase. The headline, “Young and Slangy Mix of the U.S. and Japan,” was followed by a tagline: “A best-selling novelist makes his American debut with a quest story.” “Of course, it was something that had been in the works,” Shirai tells me, “but I was surprised by how well the timing worked out.” Shirai and Luke had chosen a hotel on the Upper East Side, thinking Murakami, an avid runner, would like to be near Central Park. Ten years later, Murakami would write in an essay for the women’s magazine an an that, while he preferred the Village and SoHo with its many bookshops and secondhand record stores, he ends up staying uptown in New York because “the appeal of running in Central Park in the morning is too great.” Read More