May 15, 2020 Inside the Issue Family Photographs By Beth Nguyen Beth Nguyen’s essay “Apparent,” on her absent mother and piecing together a fractured past, appears in our Spring issue. Family photograph (©Beth Nguyen) I have no pictures of myself as a baby. I was born in Saigon during a war, and was eight months old when my family became refugees; my memories begin in a worn-down house in a deeply conservative town in Michigan, where we were resettled. Photographs were expensive then, so we had few of them. The Polaroid colors are muted and mottled, an expression of what it felt like to grow up in a Vietnamese refugee family surrounded by whiteness. It has taken my entire life to understand the beginnings of this awareness. It began with watching my father go to work at a feather factory and come home with down in his hair. My uncles, who shared the house with us, worked different shifts at different factories. They saved money to buy records. My grandmother Noi took care of me and my sister. She knitted us ponchos out of marled yarn, let us wear fuzzy pink slippers into the snow. I didn’t know what it meant to be a refugee, but I knew we were different because on TV shows everyone else spoke another language. My sister and I learned English this way. I don’t remember wondering where my mother was or realizing she was still in Viet Nam. I didn’t even know what a mother was until I was told. My grandmother would give whole apples and pears to my sister and me, knowing that we would save them. We were always waiting for someone to come home. All family pictures create a chronology. But I realize only now that the pictures we took and kept were a space just for us. White people determined so much about our lives—jobs, schools, language—but not in these photos. In these images we seem to be in our own world, alone together. It’s such a short time. By the last picture, it’s over. Read More
May 15, 2020 Arts & Culture Graciliano Ramos and the Plague By Padma Viswanathan Graciliano Ramos. In 1915, long before he became one of Brazil’s most acclaimed novelists, Graciliano Ramos was a young man trying to make it as a journalist in Rio de Janeiro. I’d always heard that he failed in his pursuit of this career. Shy, homesick, and unsuited to the sophisticated conditions of big-city life, he was a thousand miles and a world away from his remote provincial hometown of Palmeira dos Índios, located in Brazil’s dry northeastern interior. I imagined him beating a retreat, returning to become a shopkeeper like his father before him, getting cranky at customers who interrupted his reading. In 1928, though, Ramos was elected mayor of Palmeira dos Índios and, by this unlikely route, came into national literary prominence. As a municipal leader, he was required to submit annual reports to the State of Alagoas on budgets and projects, income and expenditures. He treated these reports as a kind of formal challenge. In a narrative divided into subheads such as “Public Works” and “Political and Judicial Functionaries,” he sketched drily hilarious portraits of small-town life, rivalries, corruption, bureaucratic waste. The reports went viral—to import an anachronism—circulating around the country in the press and attracting a publisher’s query: Had he written anything else, by chance? His first novel, Caetés, was published shortly after, launching a luminous literary career. Ramos would eventually write three more acclaimed novels, a childhood memoir, a monumental account of his incarceration during the Vargas dictatorship, and numerous short stories, essays, and children’s books. A 1941 national literary poll named him one of Brazil’s ten greatest novelists. His influence in the years since has been profound and enduring. Most educated Brazilians have read at least one of his books. His last novel, Vidas secas (Barren Lives), has gone into more than a hundred editions. Recently, though, I learned that a viral narrative of another sort lurks within his story. After a year in Rio working as a typographer and then proofreader with multiple newspapers, the young man who lamented his timidity in letters home received some ego-boosting news: a number of his nonfiction pieces would shortly be republished in Gazeta de Notícias, one of the most prestigious newspapers of the day. Things looked hopeful, but fate soon intervened. In August 1915, Ramos’s father telegrammed to say that three of his siblings and a nephew had all died in a single day from the bubonic plague then ravaging Palmeira dos Índios. His mother and a sister were in critical condition. “There was no longer any way for him to remain in Rio,” the biographer Dênis de Moraes writes in Velho Graça, his account of Ramos’s life. Ramos abandoned his big-city ambitions, boarded a boat home, married his local sweetheart, and settled down. He wouldn’t move back to Rio for twenty-three years. Read More
May 14, 2020 Inside Story Inside Story: A Wrinkle in Time By Derek Palacio In the column Inside Story, parents share the books they are reading with their children to get through these times. About fifteen years ago, when I was fresh out of college, I taught middle school, sixth and seventh grade English. It was a trip. I knew nothing about anything, let alone the thematic depth of The Red Badge of Courage or all the things a noun can be (person, place, idea, emotion, name, et cetera). I spent my first year, as I imagine many novice teachers do, just trying not to drown. Mostly, I was terrified that my students would find out I barely knew what I was teaching them. I’d stay up late the night before, read a few chapters ahead, and then put together a weekly assignment sheet that suggested an authority I did not have. The next day, we’d go over their homework, and I’d stand at the front of the class sweating through my blazer and praying my voice wouldn’t break. Then I’d preview the coming unit as if I really knew the future, feigning confidence, meaning to reassure them. I could see the path ahead absolutely, could see it all the way to its glorious end in June. When the lockdown began in Oregon, when it became clear that my five-year-old daughter would not be returning to school for the year, I thought back to those early teaching experiences. It seemed I was again in the same boat: unprepared, ill-equipped, drowning in my own ineptitude. My only option was to do as I had done before, to try as hard as possible. For a while, I really did. I made a schedule that transitioned her, every thirty minutes, from “educational” iPad games, to some kind of art-making, to free play, to basic math, and so on. That lasted one week. My own work piled up (I’m fortunate to be an instructor at a university, and my teaching, like everyone else’s, has gone remote). I decided very quickly to scale back, to ask one thing of her a day. I decided we would try, for the first time, to read a chapter book together. We didn’t choose Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time for any other reason than it was already in our house. A friend had gifted my daughter the complete series for Christmas. My daughter can sound out words fairly well. The struggle is, of course, with patience, with seeing a new and unfamiliar term and not allowing its length and phonetic combinations to overwhelm her. The work is slow, and I remember from teaching middle school that I must marshal my own patience before I can help with hers. Read More
May 14, 2020 First Person July 7 By Bernadette Mayer In 1971, the poet Bernadette Mayer spent the entire month of July attempting to capture the movement of her attention and the formation of her memories. Over the course of those thirty-one days, she wrote two hundred pages and shot more than a thousand 35mm slides. The resulting project, Memory, is oceanic. Each of Mayer’s daily journal entries rolls and eddies as she allows herself to thoroughly investigate the elasticity of language and the contours of her mind. Arrayed in grids, the photographs—of grass, cats, friends, flags, skies, boats, herself, the moon—fix into place the minutiae of her days. Later this month, Siglio Press will publish a new edition of Memory that collects the full sequence of images and text for the first time in book form. Mayer’s diary entry and photographs for July 7 appear below. Do you have access to a T? Do you have access to a xerox machine? This is a major fate hate weigh your fat. So lost so you’re lost how lost can you be when everywhere you turn it’s morning & a flag’s going up over a map: 2 bean sprouts resting on a snow pea pod & then, it snows, it snows for the first time it snows buckets it snows mainly. It snows rain snow gets rid of a lot of germs, says x of the piemonte ravioli co. we pack our pasta in boxes it’s homemade & speak about the weather: homemade stolen electric typewriters it isnt one yet stolen cassette tape recorder he had schemes. Between recorder & he is: the difference between me & the maharajah. We dont we wont atone for that we leave it as it is so, lost you’re lost how lost can you be when everywhere you go it’s morning & the sun’s coming up over a map: & the map a map to alford massachusetts to a certain place in alford massachusetts within the town lines it goes like this forward: start up the car past golf course along winding road across route 183 past j&k’s house (blue & yellow) up to T in road (chesterwood sign) follow the sign make left the road turns to dirt follow the arrows who? Till the road it’s dirt veers off in two directions always bear right on the dirt road. Veering right watch for oncoming cars on this narrow dirt road you’ll go by a white fence just pass by it when you get to real road, asphalt, that’s route 41, take a left go over a small bridge quickly (it’s green) you go a tenth of a mile & make the first right up & around the black surface of winding cobb hill road, if you’re careful you see the sign. Winding & uphill until you read a complex of buildings that looks like a textbook farm, if you make the right right in a second you’ll be passing a big red barn on the left, watch for the cows & people on the road & incidentally here’s where the road — if you walk on it you’ll see — looks like it was hit, the surface of the road, by a series of small meteors burning holes making holes making burns in the surface of the black hard asphalt brown burns. Go right on till you see a small sign that’s faded over it says alford five miles & something else, this is your first left on the road — if you’re on a motorcycle at night you’ll notice here that the temperature of the air is considerably warmer than before, we are in some kind of valley air pocket but after driving a few miles uphill it seems inexplicable except to the people who live here, here we also pass a dream-like farm nestling in the valley’s expensive soil, after making this left the road suddenly turns to gravel — I think this was probably temporary so dont count on it but the gravel begins as you cross the west stockbridge-alford town line sign. Just after you’ve passed the alford brook club or just before alford brook itself is almost invisible like a light on the shore of the country we’re making for, we’re almost there, go about 1.3 miles on this road & then stop at the house. Read More
May 14, 2020 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Fanny Fern By Joanna Scutts Our column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. In 1854, one of America’s most popular newspaper columnists, the pseudonymous Fanny Fern, published Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of The Present Time, an autobiographical novel so thinly veiled as to be downright scandalous. In a preface, Fern announced that her book was “entirely at variance with all set rules for novel-writing,” eschewing an intricate plot, elaborate descriptions, and cliff-hanging suspense. Instead, the author likened herself to a casual visitor, dropping by unannounced with gossip to share—and, clearly, some scores to settle. Fanny Fern’s identity had been an increasingly open secret, but now the life of the woman born Sara Payson Willis in Portland, Maine, in 1811, was revealed, yoked to that of the novel’s long-suffering, noble heroine. Yoked, too, and thoroughly skewered, were Willis’s family: her monstrous mother-in-law, her mean and hypocritical father, and especially her brother, Nathaniel Parker Willis. A famous man of letters and newspaper proprietor, “N.P.” was flayed in the pages of the novel via the character of Ruth’s brother Hyacinth Ellet, a fop, fortune-hunter, and fraud. Unlike many sentimental fictions of the time, Fern’s book did not claim to impart any obvious moral lesson. Instead, the author wanted to “fan into flame … the faded embers of hope” among readers who felt abandoned and abused—who were, like her heroine, victims of fate rather than of their own failings. Ruth starts the story a lucky young woman: intelligent, beautiful, and about to marry a man she loves. We meet her on the eve of her wedding, reflecting back on her unhappy childhood as an awkward, solitary child, who craved true love but was surrounded by people who cared only for flattery. She appears to have triumphed over her past, however, in a marriage that is blissfully happy. It can’t even be marred by the obsessive malice of her husband’s parents, who are determined to see the worst in Ruth. Their power is limited—until Ruth is widowed. Then she is vulnerable to the neglect and cruelty of her in-laws and her own family. She struggles to keep herself and her two young daughters housed and fed, trying all the limited employment options open to a woman, while her family members duck and twist to avoid providing for them. At her lowest ebb, Ruth decides to become a freelance journalist. In the second half of the book, Ruth and her creator slowly claw back pride and power, as the sentimental tale transforms itself into a fantasy of vengeance for every downtrodden and underestimated Victorian woman. “I tell you that placid Ruth is a smouldering volcano,” her mother-in-law observes, reluctantly admitting that she’s met her match. One hard-won draft at a time, Ruth ascends to fame and fortune, vanquishes her familial and professional enemies, reclaims the daughter her in-laws tricked her into giving up, and leaves her bleak city lodgings for a country home, paid for with her own pen. Read More
May 13, 2020 Arts & Culture When Your Sister Becomes a Janeite By Karen Tei Yamashita Hugh Thomson, illustration from Pride and Prejudice, 1894. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. One day you wake up, and your sister is a Janeite. You think it might be a coincidence about her name, Jane, but as Emma says, this does not signify. Friends and family hover between amused and clueless since maybe, like you, they’ve seen the movies but probably never actually read Jane Austen. And now that Austen’s become a pop phenomenon, folks figure it finally got easy to get your sister a gift; you name it—Jane Austen doll, mug, puzzle, Post-its, apron, newest rip-off zombie bodice ripper. Just to be clear, your sister sneers at this consumerist appropriation; she’s moved on to a higher level of Janeitism. This is a serious field of inquiry. She’s a gentlewoman and a scholar. She’s also become an haute couture Regency seamstress, fashioning with meticulous attention to outward authenticity (the Velcro and metal hooks are hidden) the most extravagant gowns with matching headgear and purses. And you thought it was all about the empire dress fashioned after some Greek goddess. Someone asked about your sister’s interest in cosplay, but you think if Austen became a Disney princess, it also wouldn’t signify. You love your sister; she has her thing, and you have yours. But isn’t it time you read Jane Austen, at least one book? You’ve read Edward Said’s essay “Jane Austen and Empire,” but not Mansfield Park. You agree with Said, but then aren’t you a fraud? So you buy the complete novels of Jane Austen with an introduction by Karen Joy Fowler. Hey, KJ is a fan; couldn’t hurt to crack it open. To be honest, you don’t read any of them, but you do listen on audio. You cook and clean, pay bills, answer email, write syllabi, often fall asleep, and listen to one novel after another. Does this count? The English accents are authentic. It’s true that imperialism and colonialism are alive and fueling the second-tier aristocracy and the nouveau landowners; guys disappear to the New World, the Middle Passage, and Indian assignments, and return eligibly wealthy. Someone has got to fund all those balls, concerts, carriages, and month after month living on the considerable resources in the many rooms and extensive gardens of those grand estates. Austen isn’t telling; she’s just showing. When home gets reproduced in other worlds, you figure that this is the memory that builds those plantations. If there are six main characters, there has to be sixty servants who pretty much never appear or speak, but this is not their story. And this is not the point. Read More