May 11, 2020 Quarantine Reads Quarantine Reads: The U.S.A. Trilogy By Jennifer Schaffer Our flat in London has five windows and two skylights. Like most renters in this city, we have no yard, no balcony, no fire escape. Four floors up from the street, the windows offer our allotment of open space; the sky forms our personal outdoors. Over the past weeks, since our early self-quarantine bled into the UK’s nationwide COVID-19 lockdown, I have studied the way patches of light move through this flat like I’m a geographer of warmth. I follow it in arches as the hours pass, as though I’m a dot floating across a time-lapse heat map. Cooped up in a few hundred square feet, I have learned that my sanity depends on putting myself in that path of light, again and again and again. It begins in our bedroom, which faces southeast: early in the morning, a rectangle of light hits the wall at the foot of our bed, bisected by the windowpane’s even cross. At midday the skylight creates a square foot of heat in the hallway; the dog and I sit there, sharing it. By early afternoon the sun has moved to the other side of the flat; a corner of the dining table is flooded with light, illuminating every pock and scratch in the wood. If I sit there until evening, the sun leaves my cheeks pink. I’m light-chasing in my mind, too: trying to hop from one safe, warm spot of focus (the potted mint thriving in the window; the thin-sliced meat dry-curing in the oven; the dog nuzzled against my side) to the next (an untouched tray of watercolor paints; a fresh set of mismatched sheets on the bed; a bath at midday). The shadows of dread spread beneath my conscious thoughts. I look away as long-laid plans crack and rot. Fear has become ambient, the way you stop hearing the speeding train’s rattle when you live next door to the tracks. Like all those who have built lives in a country that is not their own, where one’s right to exist is granted only in brief, expensive, and uncertain installments, I found myself caught between risks: the risk of staying in London and the risk of returning to America, the risk of distance and the risk of infection, the risk of being within and the risk of being without. Time made the decision for me. Read More
May 8, 2020 At Work Rethinking the Eighties: An Interview with Quan Barry By Elinor Hitt Left: Quan Barry, photo courtesy of the author In 1692, a small group of adolescent girls dominated Salem politics, accusing local women and men of witchcraft. The condemned women were often misfits, unfairly deemed dangerous by their kin. The young accusers themselves—their active imaginations stifled by puritanical life—quickly became the main players in the Salem witch trials. In her second novel, We Ride Upon Sticks (Pantheon, 2020), author Quan Barry reexamines this notorious history with a new question in mind. Who would these women and girls be had they lived three hundred years later? Her answer: the 1989 Danvers High varsity field hockey team. We Ride Upon Sticks is a feminist bildungsroman set in a township just outside of Salem in the eighties. The field hockey team is on a losing streak, so they employ a dark strategy, using witchcraft to turn the season around. Forming an unlikely coven, each player signs her name in a makeshift devil’s book—a diary with a picture of Emilio Estevez on the cover. The losing streak becomes a winning streak, but victory on the field leads to debauchery off. A Ouija board urges human sacrifice, cars are smashed by field hockey sticks, a tarot reader is consulted, and potions are brewed. The team gathers for bonfires as regular and ritualistic as the games, where Janet Jackson blares on full volume and Bartles & Jaymes flows freely. Partaking in this pagan revelry, the girls dance stark naked in the clear light of the New England moon. Barry’s novel is a love letter to her hometown of Danvers. In artful prose that recalls Barry’s long career in poetry, she depicts her local landscape in detail, unveiling the communal memories imbued in each turn of Route 1 and each corridor of Danvers High. But her narrative is as universal as it is regional. The field hockey coach, Coach Butler, is recognizable to any woman who partook in high school sports. She was modeled on Barry’s real-life coach, Barb Damon, and so vividly recalls my own, Miss Monahan, who would stand on the sidelines waving her stick like a baton as I tore through crowds of players twice my size. Barry and I spoke over the phone in mid-March, just after she had concluded a book tour in New York and along Boston’s North Shore. She had appeared at Danvers High not a week before. Though COVID-19 loomed, we lingered on unrelated topics, such as hair, feminism, and D.I.Y. witchcraft. Our conversation took place, quite aptly, on Friday the thirteenth. INTERVIEWER In We Ride Upon Sticks, you play with the aesthetics and tropes of movies from the eighties, especially horror movies. Why did you choose the eighties as the backdrop for the novel? BARRY I’m from the town of Danvers, Massachusetts. I graduated from high school in 1990, which means I played on the field hockey team in 1989, the year in which the novel is set. But unlike in the book, it was never a rags-to-riches story. We were good all along. I knew the eighties. I knew the town. I knew the history of the Salem witch trials. That’s why all of those elements are in the book. I didn’t realize it when I was going into the project, but I like the fact that we can look back on that decade with a wiser eye. Oftentimes when people think of the eighties, they just recall the funny clothes and the hair. But, as is discussed in the book, the eighties definitely had their issues. It’s post-Reagan, you have the Central Park Five, you have the AIDS crisis. There was a lot going on, and I was interested in rethinking that time through a more complicated lens. It’s a time that was dear to my heart, because that was when I came of age. Read More
May 8, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Mums, Moms, and Mothers By The Paris Review Photo: Jane Breakell. In a paper gesture to the fistfuls of wilting dandelions offered by children, and beloved—surely!—by mothers all over the dandelion-growing world, I offer my mother Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide. I can remember Mom saying about certain plants, They grow where they are planted; in her tone, gratitude and admiration for the least fussy members of the garden. Were they wildflowers, which, as Dolly Parton sings, “don’t care where they grow”? Weren’t all flowers wild, at some point? Perhaps some are closer to their primal selves than others. At any rate, Mom—a Manhattanite transplanted to New England, with a few trying stops along the way—admires a plant that can make itself at home, and I’m grateful to her for encouraging, in conversation and by example, a weed-like adaptability in her children. In his guidebook, Lawrence Newcomb lets us get to know actual wildflowers with a neat key based on simple distinctions of flower shape, number of parts, and the shape and arrangement of leaves; detailed illustrations; and, important for my word-loving mother, a fine glossary of excellent botanical words: calyx, spadix, corymb; bulblet, axil, umbel. Today I identified a backyard flower as a celandine poppy: four symmetrical petals, deeply lobed leaves in opposite pairs. Newcomb describes this flower as “juice yellow.” He also notes its growing zone, which lies between western Pennsylvania and southern Wisconsin. Someone must have planted it in my scrubby little New York yard, where it now flourishes. I wish that I could keep a cutting from wilting and bring my mother a juice-yellow nosegay. —Jane Breakell Read More
May 8, 2020 First Person My Mother By Brit Bennett The author’s mother in the seventies. Photo: © Brit Bennett. When my mother first arrived in Washington, D.C., she stepped out of Union Station, entranced by the cherry blossoms. Those pink-and-white flowers blooming from the trees must have looked like a technicolor Oz, far from the green moss and brown bayous of small-town Louisiana she’d just left behind. She was nineteen then and had never been farther than Texas; well-wishers advised her to not reveal that she was from out of town so she wouldn’t get scammed. So she and her sister Liz jostled together in the back seat of a cab and acted unimpressed by all the sights—Oh, just the White House? The Capitol? We’ve seen it all before. But it must have been hardest for my mother to pretend to ignore the cherry blossoms. She told me this story once, years ago, and I like to think about my mother then, long before she was a mother, a woman I will never know. I like imagining her in the back seat of that cab, in awe of the world. Brit Bennett is the author of The Mothers. Excerpt from the new book Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them (Abrams Image), collected and edited by Edan Lepucki. © Brit Bennett and Edan Lepucki.
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.