June 8, 2021 Department of Tomfoolery Anatomy of a Hoax By Dan Piepenbring Photo courtesy of Penguin Young Readers. Eric Carle, the author and illustrator of more than seventy books that captivated, amused, and educated generations of children, died last month at ninety-one. Carle’s work, and his seemingly effortless connection to young readers, was motivated by the privations of his own childhood. Raised in Nazi Germany, he was forced to dig trenches on the Siegfried line; his father, whom he adored, had become a prisoner of war in Russia. Carle’s later proclivity for vivid, exuberant colors was a reaction against the “grays, browns and dirty greens” of buildings camouflaged to protect against bombing. After the war, in America, he worked as a commercial artist, developing meticulous collages of tissue paper and acrylics that soon launched his career as an illustrator and children’s writer. His most famous book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, came in 1969, and has sold more than 55 million copies worldwide. “I think it is a book of hope,” he said on its fiftieth anniversary, in 2019. “Children need hope. You—little insignificant caterpillar—can grow up into a beautiful butterfly and fly into the world with your talent.” If you looked at Twitter after Carle’s death, you may not have seen that quotation. It was lost in the din surrounding another remark: My publisher and I fought bitterly over the stomachache scene in The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The caterpillar, you’ll recall, feasts on cake, ice cream, salami, pie, cheese, sausage, and so on. After this banquet I intended for him to proceed immediately to his metamorphosis, but my publisher insisted that he suffer an episode of nausea first—that some punishment follow his supposed overeating. This disgusted me. It ran entirely contrary to the message of the book. The caterpillar is, after all, very hungry, as sometimes we all are. He has recognized an immense appetite within him and has indulged it, and the experience transforms him, betters him. Including the punitive stomachache ruined the effect. It compromised the book. This story was drawn from Carle’s interview with The Paris Review for Young Readers, and tens of thousands of people shared it in praise and remembrance. “What a good man,” one wrote. Another posted, “Eric Carle said fuck the system eat cake and be unapologetically hungry.” A third was inspired to go big for lunch: “a chicken Parm and a whole ass order of garlic knots.” Nigella Lawson retweeted the story, Smithsonian Magazine included it in their obituary, and the parenting site Motherly noted that it had “a profound impact … Eric Carle recognized the harm in implying shame should be something a living creature feels simply for eating food they need to eat in order to grow.” On KQED, during a live broadcast, the radio host asked Carle’s son, Rolf, for more details about the stomachache quarrel. “That’s one of the stories I haven’t heard,” Rolf said, “and when you get an answer, please get it to me.” Read More
June 7, 2021 Notes on Hoops On Sneakers By Hanif Abdurraqib In his column Notes on Hoops, Hanif Abdurraqib revisits the golden age of basketball movies, shot by shot. Coach Tracy Reynolds (Morris Chestnut) and Calvin (Lil Bow Wow) in Like Mike, directed by John Schultz, 2002. Photo: United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo. 1. It is best to not get this confused: there are many ways to grow up poor. There are differences between those who have little and those who have barely anything at all, even in the same neighborhood, even on the same street, even if those differences could not be gleaned from the way a house looks on the outside or the way a yard is kept. You’d have to grow up some kinda poor to know these differences, I’d say. You’d have to grow up some kinda poor and know some people who grew up some kinda poorer than you were. Just ask the kids who admired the hustlers and the kids who had to hustle. Just ask the people who got tired of eating the same stale and boring meals and then ask the people who went to bed hungry. When I talk about how my parents didn’t have the money to buy me cool sneakers when I was a kid, there are multiple things for the initiated and uninitiated to peep: what I’m saying is that my parents didn’t have the money to spend on anything foolish, certainly not anything costing more than a hundred dollars that served the purpose of decorating feet in the unpredictable weather of the Midwest. When I talk about how I pushed lawnmowers in the summer for sneaker cash or breathlessly lifted dense snow out of driveways in the winter, what I am also saying is that I lived in a place where enough people had spare cash to kick me a few bucks for work their kids could have done, work they absolutely could have done themselves. As many ways as there are to grow up poor, there are just as many ways—if not more—to cloak whatever foolish and misguided shame you might have in your material circumstances. There was always a sacrifice to make in the name of cloaking oneself in some vibrant distraction or deception. Read More
June 4, 2021 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Exes, Hexes, and Excellence By The Paris Review Joss Lake. Photo: J. Aharonov. Part sci-fi, part fantasy, part trans Brooklynite millennial saga, Future Feeling revels in its own chaos. Joss Lake’s debut novel kicks off when Pen, a trans man who works as a dog walker, enlists his roommates, the Witch and the Stoner-Hacker, to place a hex on Aiden, a trans influencer whom Pen resents. Rather than falling on its intended target, the hex sends Blithe, an adopted Chinese trans man raised by white parents, to the Shadowlands, a dark landscape one goes to when they have “completely lost their shit.” The Rhiz, a highly elite underground queer organization, enlists Pen and Aiden to bring Blithe back from the Shadowlands, where he’s struggling emotionally with his transracial upbringing and gender transition. Am I doing the plot justice? Not really—I told you this book revels in its own chaos, and chaos and coherent narrative summary don’t tend to mix. But I love how Future Feeling lingers in the mayhem. More than linger, Lake embraces it, forgoing the neat narrative of before and after in favor of the messiness of process and becoming. Plus, this book is fun: hexes, moonlit rituals, a pet plant named Alice the Aloe, and well-placed critiques of gender, capitalism, and the alienating nature of advanced technology all abound. I’m still not sure how to classify Future Feeling—but defying neat categorization is kind of the point. —Mira Braneck Read More
June 4, 2021 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: John Murillo and Nicole Sealey Read Anne Waldman By John Murillo and Nicole Sealey The second series of Poets on Couches continues with John Murillo and Nicole Sealey reading Anne Waldman’s poem “How to Write.” In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances. “How to Write” by Anne Waldman Issue no. 45, Winter 1968 Perhaps I’m kidding myself about the life I lead Sometimes I feel I’m dying like a lot of things I see around me Then I turn on the TV and understand that everything must still be moving Music, for example, and I rush outside around the corner to a concert It’s so easy Everything accessible from where I happen to live at the moment Things like rock concerts not too many trees on 2nd Avenue Once, on the Sixth Avenue bus I got a sudden sensation I had been alive before That I was a man at some other time Traveling You would think this strange if you were a woman If I were a man right now I’d be getting out of the draft but I think I’d want to be a poet too Which simply means alive, awake and digging everything Even that which makes me sick and want to die I don’t really, you know I just don’t want to be conscious sometimes because when you’re conscious in the ordinary way you have to think about yourself a lot Dull thoughts like what am I doing ? Uptown in a large crowd I want to sit down and cry because everything is simple and complicated all at once Everyone has this feeling Even people downtown It is very basic to the way we are which is why I can say “we” A lot of drugs can change you if you want because you too are made of what drugs are made of In fact you are just a bundle of drugs when you come right down to it I don’t want to go into it but you’ll see what I mean when you catch on That’s not meant to sound snotty I’m open to whatever comes along This is the feeling I get before I take a plane Then everything’s the same afterward anyway All into one space and here I am again alive still, same worries on my mind The thing is don’t worry! You are doing what you have to what you can You hear from your friends They let you know what’s happening in California, Iowa Vermont and other places about the globe They take you out of your little room just like the newspapers or the news or the man you live with and put you in a much larger room one in which you are in constant motion around the clock John Murillo is the author, most recently, of Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Nicole Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast and received the Rome Prize. Her poem “Pages 5–8” appeared in the Fall 2020 issue.
June 3, 2021 First Person The Secret Identity of Janis Jerome By Michelle Orange Thomas Pollock Anshutz, Woman in an Interior Reading, n.d., oil on canvas, 16 1/4 x 23 1/4”. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. During one of the texting sessions that became our habit over the period I now think of as both late and early in our relationship, my mother revealed the existence of someone named Janis Jerome. The context of our exchange was my need for context: two years earlier I had set out to capture the terms of our estrangement, to build a frame so fierce and broad it might finally hold us both. If not an opponent to the cause, my mother was a wily associate—allied in theory but elusive by nature, inclined to defy my or any immuring scheme. The channel that opened between us across her sixties and my thirties spanned two countries and bypassed decades of stalled communication. We pinged and texted our way into daily contact, a viable frequency. This was its own miracle, a combined feat of time, technology, and pent-up need. As she neared seventy, the repeated veering of our habitually light, patter-driven exchanges into fraught, personal territory was my doing, a response to a new and unnameable threat. Perhaps she had felt it, too: that there may not be time to know all the people I had been in her absence; that I might never meet the many versions of her I had discounted or failed to recognize. That we wouldn’t tell the most important stories. Read More
June 2, 2021 At Work History Is the Throbbing Pulse: An Interview with Doireann Ní Ghríofa By Rhian Sasseen Photo: Bríd O’Donovan. In the work of the Irish writer Doireann Ní Ghríofa, history is amorphous, a living thing that frequently bleeds into or interrupts the lives of those in the present day. “The past has come apart / events are vagueing,” reads the Mina Loy epigraph that begins Ní Ghríofa’s sixth collection of poetry, To Star the Dark, published earlier this year. In A Ghost in the Throat, a hybrid of autofiction and essay first published by Dublin’s Tramp Press and out this week in the U.S. from Biblioasis, she writes, “To spend such long periods facing the texts of the past can be dizzying, and it is not always a voyage of reason; the longer one pursues the past, the more unusual the coincidences one observes.” A Ghost in the Throat served as my introduction to Ní Ghríofa’s writing, and it is a work I have returned to repeatedly over the months since I initially encountered it, mulling over its questions of history, motherhood, obsession, and the porousness of time, place, and identity. The book twines together Ní Ghríofa’s harrowing experience following the birth and near loss of her fourth child with the life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman who, upon discovering her husband’s murdered body, drank handfuls of his blood and composed an extraordinary poem lamenting his loss. “When we first met,” writes Ní Ghríofa, “I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries.” What follows is a tale of love across eras, as Ní Ghríofa painstakingly devotes herself to researching the overlooked pieces of Ní Chonaill’s life and translating her “Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire.” The poem appears in its entirety at the book’s end, translated from the Irish by Ní Ghríofa herself. The following conversation happened over Zoom in early April from my living room in Brooklyn and Ní Ghríofa’s home in Cork. Even through the screen, Ní Ghríofa is a warm and inviting presence, leaping up frequently to grab books from the stuffed shelves behind her and reading snatches of poetry aloud to illustrate her points. At the time, Ireland was in the midst of its fourth month in severe lockdown due to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis while New York was beginning to announce its vaccination process. Since then, both the U.S. and Irish governments have eased restrictions, and as time moves forward, it is strange to think that this moment of global crisis and fear is, for some parts of the world, beginning to vague into history, too. INTERVIEWER A Ghost in the Throat is your first book-length work of prose. Why did you choose prose specifically for this work? DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA I suppose I feel as though the form chose me. When I reflect on the path to writing this book in terms of craft, I’m struck by how often I felt driven by the book itself rather than vice versa. I felt as though the book were showing me the form it needed to be in, and because this is my first work of prose, that was very unfamiliar to me. There were points in the process where I felt as though I should be more in control, but anytime I tried to fight against that sense of a natural unfolding, the process very quickly taught me that resisting was a mistake. The book became itself when I was able to relinquish that sense of control. I know how frustrating it is, as a writer, to read interviews where people articulate their process like that. “This character just wanted to be who they were”—it can be irritating to hear authors speak like that, and yet, this is simply the truth of this book’s becoming. It insisted on itself. Read More