July 6, 2020 Happily I’m So Tired By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Arthur Rackham, Sleeping Beauty/Briar Rose, 1920 I am halfway through writing an essay about “Sleeping Beauty” when I get a text from my mother: “It’s lymphoma.” My sister. She is twenty. Three lumps on her neck. I erase the entire essay. And then I vomit. Ever since we went into our homes and shut the door, I have been comforted by images of nature reclaiming deserted places. I search the web and watch snow fall on a dead escalator in an abandoned mall. I find a tree growing out of a rotting piano. The pedals have disappeared into the earth, and on its brown wooden torso someone has carved the initials “C+S” inside a heart. For hours, I search the web for more. Goats walk through city streets as if remembering the woods that once grew there. White mushrooms push up through the floor of a cathedral. I trace each mushroom with my thumb. It makes me want to pray. “I don’t believe in anything anymore,” says my mother. “Don’t say that,” I say. “Please don’t say that.” But she can’t hear me. She’s already somewhere far, far away. Before the text, I had been writing about Charles Perrault’s “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” because I wanted to write about the bramble. I wanted to write about the hedge of briars that grows around the castle when Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger on a spindle and falls asleep for one hundred years. I wanted to write about the fairy who touches the governesses, ladies-in-waiting, gentlemen, stewards, cooks, scullions, errand boys, guards, porters, pages, footmen, and the princess’s little dog, Puff, so that they all fall asleep, too. I wanted to write about the kindness of the fairy who makes sure when Beauty wakes up she doesn’t wake up alone. I wanted to write about the wind dying down, and the sleeping doves on the roof. I had an idea that the bramble was good. That what we’ve needed all along is for us to hold still and allow nature to grow wild around us. I had this idea that when we all woke up together, the bramble would teach us something. I imagined we’d all rub our eyes and a new civilization would hobble toward the bramble and learn to read its script. I imagined the bramble clasped together like hands filled with cures and spells. I imagined we’d learn a lesson that could save us. Read More
July 2, 2020 First Person The Pain of the KKK Joke By Hope Wabuke “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.” — Toni Morrison Some time into my studies at university, as I was walking up the avenue that cut between the green fields of east campus and the wide blue of Lake Michigan, headphones in my ears and daydreaming about something or other, I came across a white classmate who was a rather good friend of mine striding along in a KKK costume. He was in full regalia: the sheet covering the entirety of his body, the rope tied around his waist ready for lynching, the eye-slitted hood carried under his arm. He saw me and stopped to talk, so I had to stop as well. But, unlike him, I was unable to carry off a nonchalant conversation, and I asked him what he was doing with all that. He blushed, as he began to register how he appeared to me, and said it was for a joke. Then, at my shocked expression, he said it was for a class project. When I asked which one, since we were the same major and in nearly all the same classes that year at Northwestern, he muttered that it was something to do with his fraternity, and that he had to go. We never spoke of this again. Instead, I remained silent, and we remained friends. He was part of the central group of the privileged, popular, and powerful in my predominantly white university—the kids whose parents’ money or connections already made them players in the careers to which the rest of us aspired. He and I worked on independent film projects together for years, attended the same parties where offers were extended; both my summer internship and the housing situation for that internship were landed because of this group of friends. As second- and third-generation legacies, scions of generational wealth and cultural capital, they had power and access. I, as the first-generation child of refugees, had only the brains and work ethic my parents had gifted me, but which were enough to secure me a tenuous place. Speaking, I knew even back then, would have meant being shut out of that world. And learning to understand that world, my father had told me, wide-eyed with surprise that I did not yet get it, was the real reason for taking on the student loans and the work-study jobs necessary to afford the elite university I attended. The straight A’s were only half the point, my father had said. The other half was everything else—the cultural capital, the access—which my father, who had worked harder than I could ever understand to survive a genocide and get us to America, knew that I would need in order to succeed in this country. But mostly, I was just afraid. So, like many Black people in my situation, I stayed silent even as the racism grew. It was training, I was understanding, for the real world after university, which would be more of the same. * Read More
July 2, 2020 Arts & Culture Philip Roth’s Last Laugh By Benjamin Taylor Philip Roth. Photo courtesy of Philip Roth. April 24, 2018: “Brace yourself, Ben,” Philip calls to say. “Our beloved Meatball has been downgraded by the Health Department from A to B. This will ruin them! People see that sickly green B in the window and stay away.” I report having seen something still more shocking at the Pan-Asian hellhole two blocks up. “I know, I know!” says Philip. “They’re sporting a ptomainish, orange-colored C. A rat in a tuxedo greets you at the door.” He’s on to the next thing and hangs up without goodbye. It is gratifying to hear him so exuberant. But five days later he phones to say he is “poorly”—one of his old-fashioned turns of phrase. I say I’ll stay with him that night at his apartment. Around two in the morning I hear him cry out from his room. He’s in trouble. I dial 911. Paramedics arrive with exemplary speed but have trouble defibrillating Philip. I can tell by the way they are talking that he could die. After an infinitely long minute or two his heartbeat reverts. We transport him first to Lenox Hill Hospital, then later that day to NewYork–Presbyterian, which he will never leave. Read More
July 1, 2020 At Work Music-Making across the Distance: An Interview with Alan Pierson By Garth Greenwell Still from Ten Thousand Birds / Ten Thousand Screens I first met Alan Pierson in 1996 at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. I was a freshman voice major, and Alan was a first-year graduate student in composition. We got to know each other through music: Alan signed up as my pianist for lessons and recitals, and we have remained very close friends ever since. During the end of his time at Eastman (he would eventually, in 2006, earn his D.M.A. in conducting), Alan founded the sixteen-player new music ensemble Alarm Will Sound, which quickly established itself as a vital part of the new music scene in New York. Over the past two decades, AWS has premiered pieces by John Adams, Steve Reich, Wolfgang Rihm, and Meredith Monk, and has produced a wide-ranging discography, including music by Donnacha Dennehy, David Lang, and Aphex Twin. In addition to his work with AWS, Alan is principal conductor of Dublin’s Crash Ensemble, codirects the Contemporary Music Ensemble at Northwestern University, and is a frequent guest conductor for ensembles including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the London Sinfonietta, among many others. In 2014, AWS premiered John Luther Adams’s piece Ten Thousand Birds as an immersive outdoor musical experience. On June 3 of this year, Alan and AWS released a new video, Ten Thousand Birds / Ten Thousand Screens, for which Alan and his boyfriend, Paul Melnikow, reimagined the piece using twenty-six phones, tablets, laptops, PDAs, and iPods carefully arranged around their Brooklyn apartment. The result is a strangely beautiful, moving, charmingly wacky experience. On May 26, I spoke with Alan via Zoom about this project, Alarm Will Sound, and his vision for music-making in an age of social distancing. Read More
July 1, 2020 Arts & Culture Ashes to Ashes, Eel to Eel By Patrik Svensson Katsushika Hokusai, Big Eels, ca. 1840, woodblock print, 5 1/4″ x 7 1/2″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. In one of the twentieth century’s most memorable scenes from literature, a man is standing on a beach, pulling on a long rope that stretches out to sea. The rope is covered in thick seaweed. He yanks and tugs, and out of the foaming waves comes a horse’s head. It’s black and shiny and lies there at the water’s edge, its dead eyes staring while greenish eels slither from every orifice. The eels crawl out, shiny and entrails-like, more than two dozen of them; when the man has shoved them all into a potato sack, he pries open the horse’s grinning mouth, sticks his hands into its throat, and pulls out two more eels, as thick as his own arms. This macabre fishing method is described in Günter Grass’s 1959 novel, The Tin Drum. Rarely has the eel been more detestable. The eel does not appear frequently in literature or art, but when it does, it’s often an unsettling, slightly revolting creature. It’s slimy and slithering, oily and slippery, a scavenger of the dark that salaciously crawls out of cadavers with gaping mouth and beady black eyes. Sometimes, however, it’s more than that. In The Tin Drum, the eel actually plays a rather important role. It both foreshadows and triggers tragedy. Read More
June 30, 2020 Arts & Culture A Letter to the Professor Whose Name I Carry By Malcolm Tariq Rudolph P. Byrd Dear Dr. Rudolph P. Byrd, Scores of Brooklynites are marching on the busy street in front of my apartment. I’m watching from the window, hearing white people chant, “Whose streets? Our streets!” I’m happy to see the support for Black Lives Matter, but here in gentrified Brooklyn, I can’t help but find that funny. I recorded two minutes of it in the event that it’s useful if I ever write poems again. (Cataloging has been a habit of mine this month.) It’s times like these that I miss teaching, sitting with cohorts of first-year college students as their safe worlds are torn apart by conversations around race and privilege. But all of that makes me recall my own reckoning, the moment when I realized the extent to which the law functions to serve these white students more than myself. That was the fall of 2011, the year the State of Georgia executed Troy Davis. And about a month later, you died. I sometimes think about Adrienne Kennedy’s People Who Led to My Plays, and who I would put in such a book, were I to write it. As a Black, gay, Southern artist, I want to practice intentional ways of memorializing people of influence. This is important for me, for the “people who led to my plays” are often those that will never have buildings or other monuments named in their honor. I imagine that some don’t even have headstones. I like to think of my writing, if not as a headstone, as an homage. Much of it is an homage to people like you who have shaped how I reimagine the world that has been given to me. Read More