August 14, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Girlfriends, Grenades, and Godheads By The Paris Review Steven Garza in Boys State. Still courtesy of Apple TV+. What I remember most about being seventeen is how infallible I felt, how naively but deliriously hopeful. So it didn’t surprise me, watching the documentary Boys State, that a group of a thousand seventeen-year-old boys imitating a political election would devolve into a raucous theater of ego. The film follows the 2018 Texas Boys State convention, a weeklong summer camp held every year in every state by the American Legion, and primarily documents the race for the coveted office of governor. Boys State won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, but still, I think I expected shallower thrills. I thought I knew how it would end—who would be the hero, the villain, the winner, the loser. But though it could have said something easy to believe about politics, something easy to believe about boys, the film provides more nuance. It offers a complex interpretation, something frightening but almost forgiving, of being seventeen. Even at the heights of the rampant manipulation and self-aggrandizing enacted by the boys (of which there is so much), every interaction feels like an attempt to be liked and to feel alike. “I thought if I played to that, then they’d love it,” one of them says when his misjudgment of his peers costs him an election. And while I could have told him that trying to read the minds of teenage boys is an effort destined to fail, the best moments are when the godheads come loose. The more heartbreaking moments are when, for some, their ego is only affirmed. Real life, I was reminded, is not a bildungsroman. But I am now barely the person I was when I was seventeen, and 2020 feels eons away from 2018, when the film takes place. These boys could be anyone now. Then again, they could also be exactly the same. —Langa Chinyoka Read More
August 14, 2020 The Last Year There Was Beauty By Jill Talbot Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces in real time the moments before her daughter leaves for college. The column ran every Friday in November, January, and March. It returns for a final month this August, as Jill and Indie take one final road trip together to Indie’s college campus. “What is documented, at last, is not the thing itself but the way of seeing—the object infused with the subject.” — Mark Doty I’m reading the billboards along I-44 East while my daughter, Indie, sleeps in the passenger seat. Today is our second seven-hour drive on our trip to her college in New York. We left Texas Wednesday, and we’ve made it through Oklahoma and Missouri. Now we’re halfway through Indiana, where I pass a sign for foot-high pies. Indie stirs and sits up, tells me she wants to drive. We talk about that difficult year often now, turn its pages. For years we didn’t. Maybe it’s because she’s leaving, but for the past few weeks we’ve been trading stories about all the places we’ve lived, and that one comes up more than the others. What we carry from it. Over the phone, the landlady had described the couch, the coffee table, and the desk that would be in the basement apartment before we arrived, but the day we opened the door to our new home, we found a twin bed against the wall. For a year, Indie slept on the mattress on the floor, and I slept on an air mattress on top of the box spring. Our small dining table, the only furniture we brought, took up most of the kitchen and became my writing desk. That year, Indie walked the two blocks to the elementary school on the corner. Sixth grade. I’d go one block with her, then stand on the sidewalk and watch until she stepped through the gate. Back at the house, I’d climb the steps down to the basement to write or prepare for the two classes I taught at a university downtown. The footsteps of the man who rented a room on the first floor were heavy, unsettling. The landlady hadn’t mentioned he lived there. We cross into Ohio, glide through unwavering greenery and billboards for antique stores. Indie passes a flatbed truck stacked with bags of grapefruit. I snap a photo. On the fifteenth of every month that year, my mother sent me a check to help out, and she sent Indie a small stack of single dollar bills. An hour after we pulled away from that house for the last time, I checked my rearview mirror to make sure the buildings of downtown were miles behind us. But there was beauty that year: The tree outside our landlady’s front yard—she paid me forty dollars a month to buy seed and keep the birdhouses full. All the hours those birds would flit and fly outside the window as I wrote. The sidewalk one morning after Indie and I had taken our nightly walk as she pulled petals from red tulips between our steps. The days we took off for the beach, Indie riding her scooter while I ran behind. The bookstore. Every time we went, Indie and I’d go straight to a book she found in the children’s section. It was Jon Klassen’s I Want My Hat Back, an illustrated hardcover with a bear on the front. The book begins, “My hat is gone. I want it back.” I’d whisper-read while Indie turned the pages. We loved how the bear asks a fox and a frog and a turtle and a rabbit (wearing a red hat) and a snake and some other creature the same question, “Have you seen my hat?” And while none of them claim to have seen the hat (not even the rabbit), our favorite response was the mysterious creature’s: “What is a hat?” We’d giggle in the aisle then set the book back on the shelf, sorry to leave it behind. At the end of that year, we moved to New Mexico, a three-day drive. On the second day, before we left a La Quinta in Amarillo, Texas, Indie gave me my birthday present. It was wrapped in paper that looked like an antique map, along with a note she had written on half a piece of white paper, as if she had carefully torn it down the middle after creasing it. The note was decorated with silly faces and hearts and stick figures (us holding hands) and I love yous. When I pulled back the wrapping paper, there it was—the book with the bear on the cover. Back home, I keep the book on an end table in our living room. The wrapping paper’s still inside, along with Indie’s note. I’ve always thought of the book as a map, an answer to the question, “What is a home?” As we pass silos and barns, the miles speed by. Read earlier installments of The Last Year here. Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction. Her writing has been recognized by the Best American Essays and appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Longreads, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and Slice Magazine.
August 13, 2020 Arts & Culture Listening for Ms. Lucille By Aracelis Girmay The Summer issue features two previously uncollected poems by Lucille Clifton: “poem to my yellow coat” and “bouquet.” These—along with eight more newly discovered poems and a career-spanning survey of her work chosen by the poet and editor Aracelis Girmay—appear in How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton, which will be published by BOA Editions next month. Below, read the first five sections of Girmay’s twelve-part foreword to the book. Lucille Clifton. Photo: Rachel Eliza Griffiths. No one writes like Lucille Clifton, and yet, if it were possible to open a voice, like a suitcase, to see what it carries inside, I believe that within the voices of many contemporary U.S. poets are the poems of Lucille Clifton. There is the ferocity of her clear sight. There is the constellatory thinking where every thing is kin. The verbs of one body might also be the verbs of another seemingly disparate or distant body (her streetlights, for example, bloom). And all things have agency: as the speaker of “august the 12th” mourns a distant brother on his birthday, the speaker’s hair cries, too (“my hair / is crying for her brother”). The poems, in their specificity and dilating scale, startle readers into new sense. They discomfort as often as they bless, and they bless as often as they wonder—bearing witness to joy and to struggle. Over the course of her life, Clifton wrote thirteen collections of poems, a memoir (which she worked on with her editor Toni Morrison), and more than sixteen books written for African American children, including Some of the Days of Everett Anderson and Black BC’s. And in 1988 Clifton was the first writer to have two books of poetry appear as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in the same year. Those books were Next and good woman. Her works are explicitly historical and of a palpable present moment. The earliest of the poems in How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton were written during the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the nuclear age, ecological crises, and independence movements across Africa. As the poet Kevin Young writes in the afterword of the monumental Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010: “Both the poetry world and the world of the 1960s were in upheaval; the years from 1965 to 1969 saw the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and the first human walking on the moon, all of which appear in the poems … The Black Arts movement, which Lucille Clifton found herself a part of and in many ways helped to forge, insisted on poems for and about black folks, establishing a black aesthetic based on varying ways of black speech, African structures, and political action.” Read More
August 13, 2020 Re-Covered A Lost Dystopian Masterpiece By Lucy Scholes In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. This month, she examines an anomalous work, They, in Kay Dick’s already anomalous oeuvre. Kay Dick is a name all but forgotten today, but in the midtwentieth century she was at the heart of the London literary scene. A list of the guests regularly entertained by her and her partner, the novelist Kathleen Farrell, at their Hampstead home—they lived together from 1940 to 1962—includes a host of successful and popular writers of the era, including C. P. Snow, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Brigid Brophy, Muriel Spark, Stevie Smith, Olivia Manning, Angus Wilson, and Francis King. I mention them here, because it was the scathing description of Dick’s treatment of her friends, as detailed in her obituary in the Guardian in 2001, that first attracted my attention. “For many years,” wrote the writer and journalist Michael De-la-Noy, “the novelist Kay Dick, who has died aged 86, was at the centre of literary intrigue and gossip.” The claim he then makes—that she “expended far more energy in pursuing personal vendettas and romantic lesbian friendships than in writing books”—is cutthroat enough to smack of a vendetta all of its own. He describes her as a failed artist, “a talented woman bedeviled by ingratitude and a kind of manic desire to avenge totally imaginary wrongs.” De-lay-Noy’s obituary is less a celebration of Dick’s life and more an all-out character assassination, one that details a litany of grudges maintained, ambitions thwarted, and friendships cruelly smashed to smithereens. Needless to say, I was intrigued enough to immediately hunt down Dick’s books. Read More
August 12, 2020 Look Renee Gladman’s Sentence Structures By The Paris Review In 2013, Renee Gladman began drawing a series of dense, looping works that assume the characteristics of handwriting but prove to be indecipherable, a sort of scrawled sprawl of imagined structures. To readers of her Ravicka novels, which take place in a fictitious city-state full of surreal architecture and impossible phenomena, this should sound familiar; no matter the medium, Gladman pursues the limits of language, form, and communication. A selection of these drawings appears in Image Text Ithaca Press’s lovingly constructed One Long Black Sentence, printed in white ink on black paper and accompanied by a contribution from Fred Moten. Below, take a look inside the book. Read More
August 12, 2020 Arts & Culture Losing Smell By Shruti Swamy My mother, a classically trained dancer, didn’t stop dancing all at once. When she moved to America, she still performed, still taught. She stopped teaching when I was little. Still, she would sometimes be called into action, choreographing dances for the school plays my brother and I were in. A couple decades later, she stopped doing even that. Now, I know, she doesn’t even dance by herself, in her kitchen, as I remember her doing when I was a child. “I could give up dancing,” she told me once. “It wasn’t as if I was going to die. Only, it felt like the color went out of the world.” * There have been stretches of time when I have been unable to look at my life through language. What I mean is I was unable to write, but that is not only what I mean. There is a way I move through my life that is about putting language around its small pleasures, the sight of neighborhood flowers or strangers embracing or a crow slipped into a disorienting current of air and gliding backward: the narrative of my own life and the movements between its characters, and the narratives of my friends’ lives revealed through long conversations while walking through my city, on the phone or in person: a way of living in words even if they are not written. I am not always going around in this state, catching the soft smell of the chamomiles in the tall green vase on the dresser, moved nearly to tears by the sound of my daughter’s laugh in the evening—I wish! Like anyone, I am often preoccupied with the petty anxieties and logistics that rule my days: it’s just that, from time to time, and sometimes more often than others, a window opens. I catch a gust of fresh air, of language. A sentence forms in my head. When I am able to live this way, I understand who I am, even if I am not writing. When I am not living this way, when I am unable to reach out to something beautiful and to name it, I am wretched, a stranger to myself. The color drains out of the world. Read More