May 7, 2020 Arts & Culture Still Life By Lynn Casteel Harper Jacques de Gheyn II, Vanitas Still Life (detail), 1603, oil on wood, 32 1/2 x 21 1/4″. With vanishing on my mind, I crossed Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a late autumn morning on a sober errand. Ginkgo leaves, freshly fallen, coated my path. My root-word research on vanishing—which, like vanity, comes from the Latin evanescere (“die away”) and vanus (“empty void”)—had led me to a genre of still-life painting that flourished in the Netherlands in the early seventeenth century. The vanitas school of painting takes its name from the Latin version of an Ecclesiastes refrain (“Vanity of vanities! All is vanity”) and it involves carefully juxtaposing objects deemed symbolic of life’s brevity and the evanescence of earthly achievements. Objects such as mirrors, broken or tipped glassware, books, decaying flowers, and skulls are meant to encourage viewers to contemplate their own mortality. Jacques de Gheyn’s Vanitas Still Life, the earliest known vanitas painting, hangs in one of the Met’s seemingly less popular galleries. Most visitors pass through this corridor of dark still-life paintings on their way to lighter, more moving pieces. That autumn morning, I had Vanitas Still Life to myself. A modest-size piece, 32 1/2 by 24 1/4″, it contains a panoply of vanitas symbols. A thin stream of vapor rises from an urn, an orange flower with browning leaves languishes in another. Dutch medals and Spanish coins glitter in the foreground. Two philosophers—Democritus, the “laughing” philosopher, and Heraclitus, the “crying” philosopher—recline in the painting’s top corners, pointing to the objects below. A large transparent bubble hovers above a human skull. From every angle, the viewer confronts images of life’s transience, but it is the skull that serves as the central reminder of human vanishing. The empty eye sockets locked my gaze, making me think—vainly—of my own future. A hollowed head, more than any other bodily remnant, symbolizes death’s totality, an unyielding force that consumes the entire person, even the ability to think. I guess there’s a reason why the sight of Yorick’s skull, not his rib cage or pelvic bone, occasions Hamlet’s famous lament. Read More
May 7, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Jake Skeets By The Paris Review In this series of 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. “Horses, Which Do Not Exist” by Alberto Ríos Issue no. 101 (Winter 1986) The strong horseshoe shape of a horse’s mouth Of his teeth, set that way of a suitcase handle And the way a bit, in just that way, pulls him: Come here to where it is I say. Like that A horse’s mouth, and so his manner, broken Those horses no longer running along the far Distance visible from a Tucson highway thirsty Stopping for water, making one of those paintings Living rooms wear as pendants. Those paintings Too unreal, laughed at and finger-poked And so these horses too must be unreal, A bad painting of nine, A pond of browning water. Birds, two kinds. Grass too green—spring has come this year, And water—mountains too blue, too many shades, In the distance. And so they are, this all is‚ As children say, like a dream, Laughing hard at how good it seemed at the moment. Winner of a 2020 Whiting Award for Poetry, Jake Skeets is Black Streak Wood, born for Water’s Edge. He is Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico. He is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (Milkweed Editions, 2019), a National Poetry Series–winning collection of poems. He holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Skeets is a winner of the 2018 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Skeets edits an online publication called Cloudthroat and organizes a poetry salon and reading series called Pollentongue, based in the Southwest. He is a member of Saad Bee Hózhǫ́: A Diné Writers’ Collective and currently teaches at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona.
May 7, 2020 Happily Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over. By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Hänsel and Gretel, by Darstellung von Alexander Zick In February, as a plague enters America, I am a finalist for a job I am not offered. I am brought to campus for a three-day interview. I am shown the library I’ll never have access to, and introduced to students I’ll never teach. I shake hands with faculty I’ll never see again. I describe in great detail the course on fairy tales I’ll never offer. I stand up straight in a simple black-and-white dress. “Don’t say anything strange,” says my mother. “Don’t blather,” she says. “You have a tendency to blather.” I meet with a dean who rubs his face until it reddens, then asks me whether writers even belong in universities. I meet with another dean who asks me the same thing. There are so many deans. I cannot tell the deans apart. Another dean asks me who the babies in my first collection of poems, The Babies, actually are. “We only have a few minutes left,” he adds. “They don’t exist,” I think I say. I am hurrying. “I was writing about voices we’ll never hear,” I think I say. He stands up and shakes my hand. I shake so many hands. I can’t tell if everything is at stake, or nothing is at stake. All I know is that I am being tested, and whether or not I am offered this job will depend on the appetite and mood of strangers. “Your final task,” I imagine the dean saying, “is to make a rope out of these ashes. Do it and the job is yours.” On the third day of the interview, the head of the creative department asks me if the courses I would be expected to teach should even exist. “No,” I wish I had said as I made my body gently vanish. “They shouldn’t exist at all.” Instead I say yes, and pull a beautiful, made-up reason from the air and offer it to him as a gift. Gold for your dust, sir. Pearls for your pigs. “Who is watching your sons right now?” he asks. “Their father,” I answer. What does it mean to be worth something? Or worth enough? Or worthless? What does it mean to earn a living? What does it mean to be hired? What does it mean to be let go? Read More
May 6, 2020 Inside Story The ‘Lord of the Flies’ Family Book Club By Darin Strauss In the column Inside Story, parents share the books they are reading with their children to get through these times. It’s unnerving how books mutate. You look up from your life—from these weeks of homey terror—and find a cherished old novel transformed into a bulletin from the front. * I have twin sons. They’re twelve years old and identical. When the crisis started, their school hadn’t done enough; my wife and I needed to fill the day, an Ozarks of empty time. We’d start a family book club. My own seventy-five-ish mother—a lady you might see lugging Judith Krantz paperbacks from an exurban library—agreed to join. That made five of us. Different ages, tastes, places to shelter in. I pushed for Orwell. Or David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green; the boys came back with Lord of the Flies. This may be hard to believe, but the pick didn’t seem so fraught then. A bookshelf is a photoshopped self-portrait. The novels people exhibit are there to portray us as we hope to be seen. Hip, smart, wide ranging. All I’ve got are books I’ve loved or books I think I will. And books I incorrectly remember having loved. But such memories can be the prosthetic noses and spirit gum of the reading racket. As soon as I pulled down Lord of the Flies I realized I’d forgotten it. “Oh yeah,” I’d said when we made the choice, “good novel.” Now my earlier opinions flowed back; in junior high I’d kind of hated the thing. My sons’ complaints were echoes, I realized, of my own: The book never says what happened to the adults. It’s very coincidental that it is only kids who survived. The crash is too expedient. All this seemed like a flaw, at first. Read More
May 6, 2020 Arts & Culture The Origins of Scandinavian Noir By Wendy Lesser Martin Lewis, The Great Shadow, 1925, drypoint on paper, 10″ x 7″. Smithsonian American Art Museum, bequest of Frank McClure. Sometime in the early eighties, I began reading a series of mysteries that featured a Swedish homicide detective named Martin Beck. I was living in Berkeley at the time, studying for a Ph.D. in English literature as I worked a variety of part-time jobs, and I knew a lot of people both inside and outside the academy. Being a talkative sort, I started telling everyone around me about this incredible Scandinavian cop series. Soon we were all reading it. What I knew at the time was that it was written by a couple, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who had from the very beginning envisioned it as a sequence of ten books that would portray Swedish society from a distinctly Marxist perspective. Published between 1965 and 1975, the Martin Beck series grew noticeably darker as it moved toward its end—though whether this was because Sweden itself (not to speak of the world beyond it) had worsened during that decade, or because Per Wahlöö had learned in the early seventies that he was dying of cancer, was something no one could answer. Wahlöö died, I later learned, on the exact day in June of 1975 when the tenth volume was published in Sweden, having worked like a maniac to finish it on time. (Sjöwall, who was his equal partner in many ways—they would write their alternating chapters at night, so as not to be interrupted by their small children, and would then exchange chapters for editing—has said that at the very end Wahlöö was pretty much writing everything himself.) At any rate, he left behind exactly what he had intended to produce: ten books containing thirty chapters each, which, taken together, constitute a single continuous social narrative comparable in some ways to a Balzac, Zola, or Dickens project, though clothed in the garments of a police procedural. It would be a melodramatic exaggeration to say that the Martin Beck series changed my life, but like all such exaggerations, this one would be built on a nugget of truth. Both my idea of Scandinavia and my sense of what a mystery could do were shaped by those books. If I later became a veritable addict of the form, gobbling up hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year in Kindle purchases of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian mysteries, that habit could no doubt be attributed to many things besides the Martin Becks: the invention of digital books, for instance, which allowed for impulse buying and virtually infinite storage; the massive and surprising success of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, which encouraged American publishers to bring out any and every available Scandinavian thriller; the introduction of the long-cycle police procedural on American television, including such gems as Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and ultimately The Wire, all of which cemented my fascination with the form; not to mention dozens if not hundreds of similar behavior-shaping factors that remain, for me, at an unconscious level. We never know for sure why we read what we read. I cannot, at the moment, even call to mind who first recommended the Martin Becks to me (though I know it was a person and not, say, a bookstore display or a newspaper review). Whoever it was, in any case, deserves my eternal gratitude. What is so special about these ten books? Or—a slightly different question—what was it that so appealed to me back in 1981 or 1982, when I was about to turn thirty and America was on the verge of becoming what it is today? Read More
May 5, 2020 Arts & Culture Jericho Brown Reads His Pulitzer Prize–Winning Poems By The Paris Review Standing in the woods of Decatur, Georgia, at the end of 2019, Jericho Brown reads two poems from his most recent collection, The Tradition, recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Several poems from The Tradition were first published in the fall 2018 issue of The Paris Review. Shared exclusively with The Paris Review, this film is an extract from the pilot effort of “Poets in Space,” directed and produced by Daniel Grossman and Sean Webley in collaboration with the poet Malachi Black.