September 18, 2018

On Jill Lepore’s These Truths and the foundational myths of the United States.

Adolphe Yvon, The Genius of America, ca. 1870.

It didn’t have to be this way.

This thought kept blinking through my mind, like a neon sign on a dark street, as I read These Truths, the newest book by the Harvard professor and New Yorker contributor Jill Lepore. A nine-hundred-plus-page tome, it is a full history of the United States, a country I was born in and soon after left. I was raised in Israel, a much younger country that was handed over by a colonizing force to a people desperate for a home back in the days—not so long ago, really—when colonizers could simply gift the land they’d taken as if it were theirs to give. The history I was taught from the ages of six to eighteen was both condensed and elongated, the history of a fledgling country full of war but also of an ancient people once enslaved and long persecuted.

But I was born in the U.S., which makes me a citizen. I didn’t have to pass a test or learn about this country or understand any more of it than any non-American understands about the place that gave us McDonald’s, the Internet, the iPhone. I moved back here easily, when I was nineteen years old. My birth certificate sufficed; my ignorance was never questioned or corrected.

What are the myths the United States has built itself on? Lepore’s question—the one the book explores—is more honed, adapted from statements by Alexander Hamilton: “Can a political society really be governed by reflection and election, by reason and truth, rather than by accident and violence, by prejudice and deceit?” Lepore’s answer is something like: Well, sometimes yes, and sometimes no, and in the past few decades, it kind of depends on who’s being asked. Read More

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September 18, 2018

Arts & Culture

Hey, Necromancer!

By Heidi Sopinka

On finding Leonora Carrington in her home in Mexico City and asking her to be a death guide.

Leonora Carrington at her home in Mexico City in 2008. Photo: Susana Gonzalez for the Los Angeles Times.

What did we have on that day? We must have looked like maniacs. Striped long skirts and bracelets made from silver duct tape, dragging a leather suitcase that looked like the underbelly of a snake. We stood in front of a thick wooden door in the leafy Mexico City neighborhood of Roma, across from an enormous earthquake-collapsed building, overrun with cats and scorpions. I had come with two friends full of purpose—to make art, to find a death guide—and in the almost hallucinatory Mexican sun, we knocked on the door. After a good amount of time, the door swung open, and a moonfaced housekeeper named Yolanda told us in Spanish to come back in two days. Leonora, last of the living surrealists, wasn’t well.

Four years earlier and six weeks too soon, I’d given birth to a baby. You might say my death drive, as Freud calls it, had made itself known. The baby’s lungs weren’t working properly, so he was hooked up to an incubator, and I was told to go home without him. It was a full moon. There were no beds, they said. I remember lying in our bedroom with my husband, a basket beside us but no baby in it. We would take a taxi to the hospital so that I could breastfeed, only to find that they’d just fed the baby through a tube in his nose. Because they kept bank hours, my husband and I were stuck waiting it out near the hospital between feedings. I remember sitting in a generic jazz bar thinking, My baby is in a plastic box in neonatal intensive care, and I am listening to a woman in a pantsuit belting out “My Way.” I’d kept it in, the whole shock of the rapid premature birth, the worry for the baby, the separation, but this was the final blow. Everything was wrong. Tears streamed down. I couldn’t stop crying.

And then, a week later, miraculously, he was in the basket. This simple arithmetic lodged in my brain. The cosmic joke: in birth, we appear; in death, we disappear. I became fixated on this, struck in particular by the metaphysical absurdity of death. Read More

September 17, 2018

Arts & Culture

The Lightning Sheen of a Do-Rag

By Durga Chew-Bose and John Edmonds

America, The Beautiful, 2017.

While I can’t recall where it happened—where online, that is—I first encountered John Edmonds’s photography in 2013. I chanced upon his work only to feel somehow formerly familiar with it. Not the imagery, necessarily, but the pull of it. How it grazed on my consciousness, prompting me to immediately email my friend Sarah a one-line dispatch with two links to his portraits. The subject: his name in all lowercase—“john edmonds.”

If memory serves, I was suggesting his work for the second issue of Adult magazine, which Sarah founded. What struck me was how John’s approach felt plain, in the same way natural light can feel all at once holy and plain. The everyday. The glorious too. A church. Your high school gym. That light. Or the patch of light on your floor that you witness every afternoon. And yet every afternoon, that patch of light temporizes you. It insists on what’s least insistent: delay.

The nude. How when disposed to natural light, the nude, as depicted by John, becomes statuary but not still. Living; having lived. Will live so much—and so much more. The diffusing nature of shadows and the strange, compelling way shadows come alive like moving images projected on the muscles of a back. On the sharp and secret sail of a pelvic bone. The attitude of an elbow. The peaceful sides of a face. Her heavy lids; his tattoos. A scar’s pulpy proof. On the lightning sheen of a do-rag. The rippled elegance of a knuckle. A diamond stud, out of focus. His palms; her underwear line; a bum, bare and black, in bed. The worn edges of a green towel, like moss draped on a naked lap. A person’s profile suddenly made planetary, as if rotating on its axis—absorbing the sun only to live in its dimmed wake, occupying space as only silhouettes can: suggestively. Read More

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September 17, 2018

Feminize Your Canon

Feminize Your Canon: Rosario Castellanos

By Emma Garman

Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors.

Solitude seeks fulfillment in my tears
and awaits me in the depths of every mirror
and closes the windows carefully
so the sky will not come in.
—Rosario Castellanos, excerpt from an early untitled poem.

Images of literal and emotional solitude haunt the work of Rosario Castellanos, the visionary Mexican feminist, poet, novelist, and essayist. It’s a state she both cherished and mourned. From a young age, the act of writing was her bulwark against the pain of loneliness. “In order to feel ‘accompanied,’ ” she says in a newspaper column toward the end of her too-short life, “I almost never felt the need of the physical presence of another.” She adds, however, that “there comes a time when I have to admit that I am a totally helpless creature, and my eyes fill with tears thinking about the fact that I am orphaned and divorced.”

These words epitomize the prose style—vulnerable, revealing, self-searching—that for Castellanos was a conscious feminist act, a way of carving out a female space in public intellectual life. Among the literati of postwar Mexico, her unembarrassed confessionalism incurred derision. But rather than emulating the default male modes of writing, Castellanos critiqued them. She satirized the articles that offered sweeping pronouncements on Mexican politics and culture; she taught her students that Hemingway’s much-vaunted machismo was not a literary virtue; she took Graham Greene to task for what she viewed as his propagandism. In her own fiction, she foregrounded the perspectives and experiences of Mexican women who, whether white or indigenous, were otherwise denied a voice. And she engaged with the ideas of women writers from other nations, such as Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Gabriela Mistral, Emily Dickinson, and Virginia Woolf, whom she viewed as kindred spirits. “It’s not good enough to imitate the models proposed for us that are answers to circumstances other than our own,” a character says in Castellanos’s 1973 play, The Eternal Feminine. “It isn’t even enough to discover who we are. We have to invent ourselves.” Read More

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September 17, 2018

Arts & Culture

To Die, in Effect, for Love: On Gary Indiana’s Horse Crazy

By Tobi Haslett

Sex, hypocrisy, solitude, loss, the punitive affinities that swallow the self—these are Gary Indiana’s themes, jingling through his books like money in Balzac. But rumbling beneath the malice is a melancholy yearning, a mind groping vulnerably for a human link.

“Affection is the mortal illness of lonely people,” declares the narrator of Horse Crazy, whose own loneliness will froth into a mania by the novel’s end. A writer in his thirties, he’s just been named the art critic for a magazine he dislikes. “A new year had begun with ominously good fortune,” pushing him deeper into the New York culture industry, a feudal world ruled by bloated personae and venal logic. The post is prestigious; he greets it with dread. Chained to his column, he will now be a minor celebrity and a downtown figure, “an object of envy, malice, and all the other base emotions that drive the majority of people at all times in every conceivable place and circumstance.” Risible, then, that he wants to be loved.

And Horse Crazy is, by the laxest possible definition, a book about love—about a psyche smashed by what it can’t help but want. The narrator—I’ll call him “the critic”—is infatuated with a younger man, a twenty-seven-year-old artist named Gregory Burgess. But their courtship is pricked by a wincing imbalance. The critic is “established,” and Gregory is not. Gregory is a former heroin addict who makes rent by waiting tables at a passé restaurant, an arrangement he sees as a kind of cosmic abuse. Philippe, his boss, is an erratic French freak who deals cocaine, terrorizes his staff, keeps a gun behind the counter, and has lascivious designs on Gregory (the burden, of course, of his sexual appeal). Read More

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September 14, 2018

This Week’s Reading

Staff Picks: Butt Fumbles, Bounty Hunters, and Black-Market Auctions

By The Paris Review

Where do I start with The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl? The latest film from Masaaki Yuasa is a beautifully bonkers, Ulysses-esque rendering of a single night in Kyoto. Its shapeless, sneaky plot—plot? nested series of absurdities?—follows the titular girl on her quest to drink everything in town. Simple, right? In this world, though, a single night can be turned sideways, shaken out like a picnic blanket, transformed by the light, accordioned out to reveal endless mysteries nestled in the interstices between minutes and moments. The difficulty in describing this movie is that something new is always happening, and it is always happening in vivid color. The preppy director of the school festival runs a complicated surveillance system that follows students’ every action from birth. A man named Don Underwear refuses to change his skivvies until he once again meets the woman of his dreams—with whom he locks eyes at the exact moment apples fall from trees and bonk both of them on the head. A tiny god with an ice cream cone raids a black-market literary auction and frees the books, which take to the air, scatter like pigeons, and alight on the shelves of a nearby used-book fair. I left the theater certain that everything is connected and life is beautiful—the sorts of platitudes you think when you’ve somehow stumbled your way into that rarest of things: a perfect night out. Roll your eyes all you want—you’ll thoroughly understand my joy once you’ve experienced the rush of a single long, short night bouncing around in Masaaki Yuasa’s head. —Brian Ransom
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America Doesn’t Have to Be Like This

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Arts & Culture

Hey, Necromancer!

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Arts & Culture

The Lightning Sheen of a Do-Rag

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Feminize Your Canon

Feminize Your Canon: Rosario Castellanos

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Arts & Culture

To Die, in Effect, for Love: On Gary Indiana’s Horse Crazy

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This Week’s Reading

Staff Picks: Butt Fumbles, Bounty Hunters, and Black-Market Auctions

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