September 17, 2018

Sex, hypocrisy, solitude, loss, the punitive affinities that swallow the self—these are Gary Indiana’s themes, jingling through his books like money in Balzac. But rumbling beneath the malice is a melancholy yearning, a mind groping vulnerably for a human link.

“Affection is the mortal illness of lonely people,” declares the narrator of Horse Crazy, whose own loneliness will froth into a mania by the novel’s end. A writer in his thirties, he’s just been named the art critic for a magazine he dislikes. “A new year had begun with ominously good fortune,” pushing him deeper into the New York culture industry, a feudal world ruled by bloated personae and venal logic. The post is prestigious; he greets it with dread. Chained to his column, he will now be a minor celebrity and a downtown figure, “an object of envy, malice, and all the other base emotions that drive the majority of people at all times in every conceivable place and circumstance.” Risible, then, that he wants to be loved.

And Horse Crazy is, by the laxest possible definition, a book about love—about a psyche smashed by what it can’t help but want. The narrator—I’ll call him “the critic”—is infatuated with a younger man, a twenty-seven-year-old artist named Gregory Burgess. But their courtship is pricked by a wincing imbalance. The critic is “established,” and Gregory is not. Gregory is a former heroin addict who makes rent by waiting tables at a passé restaurant, an arrangement he sees as a kind of cosmic abuse. Philippe, his boss, is an erratic French freak who deals cocaine, terrorizes his staff, keeps a gun behind the counter, and has lascivious designs on Gregory (the burden, of course, of his sexual appeal). Read More

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September 14, 2018

This Week’s Reading

Staff Picks: Butt Fumbles, Bounty Hunters, and Black-Market Auctions

By The Paris Review

Where do I start with The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl? The latest film from Masaaki Yuasa is a beautifully bonkers, Ulysses-esque rendering of a single night in Kyoto. Its shapeless, sneaky plot—plot? nested series of absurdities?—follows the titular girl on her quest to drink everything in town. Simple, right? In this world, though, a single night can be turned sideways, shaken out like a picnic blanket, transformed by the light, accordioned out to reveal endless mysteries nestled in the interstices between minutes and moments. The difficulty in describing this movie is that something new is always happening, and it is always happening in vivid color. The preppy director of the school festival runs a complicated surveillance system that follows students’ every action from birth. A man named Don Underwear refuses to change his skivvies until he once again meets the woman of his dreams—with whom he locks eyes at the exact moment apples fall from trees and bonk both of them on the head. A tiny god with an ice cream cone raids a black-market literary auction and frees the books, which take to the air, scatter like pigeons, and alight on the shelves of a nearby used-book fair. I left the theater certain that everything is connected and life is beautiful—the sorts of platitudes you think when you’ve somehow stumbled your way into that rarest of things: a perfect night out. Roll your eyes all you want—you’ll thoroughly understand my joy once you’ve experienced the rush of a single long, short night bouncing around in Masaaki Yuasa’s head. —Brian Ransom
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September 14, 2018

Arts & Culture

Dashiell Hammett’s Strange Career

By Anne Diebel

Dashiell Hammett

In a 1929 interview with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dashiell Hammett described his first attempts at “breadwinning.” After dropping out of Baltimore Polytechnic Institute at 14, he worked as a messenger boy for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, then as a junior clerk (“very junior”) in an advertising office, a stockbroker, a timekeeper in a cannery and a machine shop, and a stevedore until it became “too strenuous”—at which point he responded to an “enigmatic want-ad” and was hired as an operative in the Baltimore office of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. From 1915 to 1918 and from 1920 to 1922, Hammett worked as an op. Despite the modest pay, he “liked gumshoeing better than anything I had done before” and “sleuthing” even more. In 1921, at 27, he got married and had a child. He needed money, and so he “decided to become a writer,” he told the Eagle. “It was a good idea. Having had no experience whatever in writing, except writing letters and reports, I wasn’t handicapped by exaggerated notions of the difficulties ahead.”

There would be difficulties ahead, one of which would be maintaining that pragmatic attitude towards writing. But when he gave this interview, things were going well. His first novels, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, had been published by Knopf, and he had turned in a manuscript of The Maltese Falcon, which he told his editor was “the best thing I’ve done so far.” Reviewers praised Red Harvest’s liveliness and dialogue, and The Dain Curse, though not as celebrated, made the New York Times Christmas list. The books were selling well. Hollywood was interested.

In The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett, Nathan Ward considers “exactly how he made his famous transformation from Pinkerton operative to master of the American detective story.” Why is equally important. The simple answer is that Hammett was chronically ill and couldn’t do much else. By the age of 28, he had suffered a series of ailments. In June 1918, at 24, he had enlisted in the army and was stationed at Camp Meade, outside Baltimore. In October, he caught the Spanish flu, which caused (or possibly provoked a latent) tuberculosis, and in May 1919 he was honorably discharged. He spent the next year living with his parents, either in bed or out on the town, smoking, drinking, and “helling around.” In a period of good health, he moved to Spokane, Washington, and worked at a Pinkerton outpost before he fell ill again: he was short of breath, and at six foot one inches and around 130 pounds, he was weak and emaciated. He was sent to a Tacoma hospital, where he met Josephine Annis Dolan (who went by Jose), a pretty nurse from Anaconda, Montana. Hammett was transferred to a hospital outside San Diego, from which he wrote her fervent letters: “I didn’t intend doing this—writing you a second letter before I got an answer to my first—but that’s the hell of being in love with a vamp, you do all sorts of things.” Jose soon discovered she was pregnant, and within a few months they were married and living in San Francisco. Hammett went back to sleuthing, but his “health continued to go blooey,” his weight dropped further, and in February 1922, he quit Pinkerton and took up writing.

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September 14, 2018

Arts & Culture

The Novel Jane Austen Wrote When She Was Twelve

By Claudia L. Johnson

When the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle was asked whether he read novels, he famously replied, without missing a beat, “Oh, yes—all six, every year.” And without missing a beat, we get the joke, of course, not because we believe that Jane Austen’s novels throw all others into the shadows (though we do) and not because they bear annual rereading (though they do) but rather because we all know—or think we know—that she wrote six of them.

But Austen wrote more than six novels. Along with Love and Freindship and Lady Susan, which enjoy modest fame, Austen proudly subtitled several shorter works as “a novel”—such as Jack and Alice: A Novel and Henry and Eliza: A Novel. But these, though enjoyed by a handful of avid enthusiasts, are mostly unknown to the general public. Written for the amusement of her family, these works belong to the collection of early writing referred to sometimes as the “juvenilia” or “minor works,” both terms being rather disparaging, and most recently as “teenage writings.” Variously described—by Austen herself—as novels, tales, odes, plays, fragments, memoirs, and scraps, the juvenilia consist of twenty-seven pieces written from 1787 to 1793, when Austen was between the ages of eleven and eighteen. Austen was demonstrably attached to these works, in 1793 transcribing them into three stationer’s notebooks and entitling them Volume the First, Volume the Second, Volume the Third, each paginated and each including a table of contents. That Austen esteemed these pieces is proven by the very existence of these volumes, presented as if together they might constitute a magnum opus, a three-volume novel in the manner, say, of Pride and Prejudice or Emma. That she continued to return to these works once she grew up is proven by her emendations in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and by her allowing a niece and nephew to try their hands at finishing some as late as 1814–16. That Austen’s closest relations continued to treasure them is proven by the fact that Austen’s sister, Cassandra, the keeper of Austen’s literary effects, carefully preserved these volumes after Austen’s death, and upon her own willed them to her brothers and her nephew. Read More

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September 13, 2018

Arts & Culture

Subverting the Chinese Immigrant Story

By Vanessa Hua

San Francisco’s Chinatown.

The first time my parents read my fiction, my mother had just one comment about the short story, which featured a server at a Chinatown restaurant: “Chinese can be more than waitresses.”

On a visit home, in my early thirties, I’d given them a copy of the literary magazine that had published my story. I’d recently quit my newspaper reporting job, taken the leap into an M.F.A. program, and for the first time, I was showing them the result of my labors. Of all the reactions I might have anticipated—pride or excitement or maybe boredom or disappointment—I hadn’t foreseen that one. My mother seemed to feel that I should portray Chinese Americans only as model minorities, highly educated engineers and doctors who live the American Dream.

She didn’t know that for a time, I’d stopped writing about Chinese Americans at all. For a year or two in college, I had convinced myself that if I wanted to be considered a real author, all my characters had to be white—as if those were the only worthy stories to be told. After all, that’s what I’d grown up with and what I’d studied in school.

Even though we didn’t share the same race or place, I’d recognized myself in feisty aspiring writers in children’s literature: Jo March in Little Women, Laura Ingalls of the Little House series, and the titular Anne of Green Gables. As a girl, I also read and reread Laurence Yep’s Dragonwings—published the year I was born—about the Chinese immigrant son of a master kite maker in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the early twentieth century. But I didn’t identify with the main character, even though we were both of Chinese descent; he was a boy, and he spoke often of demons, which my scientist mother and engineer father never mentioned. Read More

September 13, 2018

Arts & Culture

Late Art

By Anna Ostoya and Ben Lerner

In the winter of 2015, Ben Lerner wrote a short story, “The Polish Rider,” incorporating fictionalized elements of the life and work of the artist Anna Ostoya, who had recently lost two of her canvases in the back of an Uber. As the narrator of the story helps the artist search for the missing canvases, he fantasizes about “recuperating the lost paintings through prose,” about how the verbal might take the place of the visual. After the story was published in The New Yorker, Ostoya painted the painting Lerner had invented based on her earlier work, transforming the fiction without changing any of the words. Ostoya went on to produce a series of compositions that respond to the story she’d helped inspire. In the essay below, Lerner describes how Ostoya’s actual body of work catalyzed the fiction.

View of “Slaying,” Anna Ostoya, 2016, Bortolami Gallery, New York.

That winter, a small pneumonia bloomed in his left lung. He’d embarked on a second course of antibiotics, the first having proved insufficient. He was getting better but was weak, and by about eight o’clock each night, profoundly so. Still, he wanted to see Anna and her opening in Chelsea. They made a plan to meet for an early drink downtown; they could catch up a little, then head to the opening together in a cab. He would look quickly around the gallery and rush back to bed in Brooklyn—another cab. (As long as he had an infection in his lung, it seemed, he could pay for private transportation without guilt. Taxis were on his mind; maybe he wouldn’t have otherwise written “The Polish Rider.”) But he’d take the B train into Manhattan.

Stepping out of his apartment was like stepping out of a darkened theater; he had that feeling of supersensitivity that attends a reemergence into public after a period of seclusion, streetlights startlingly bright, a nearby siren startlingly loud. Would he have written the story if he hadn’t met Anna in that condition? Over his soda water and her wine, he asked Anna how the installation of her show had gone, how she’d ultimately decided to hang the sequence of paintings she’d composed based on Artemisia Gentileschi’s monumental Judith Slaying Holofernes. He’d seen a few early versions of these paintings in her apartment (and studio) at 203 Rivington, on the Lower East Side. (The first few times he visited Anna’s place, he had a sense of déjà vu; finally he remembered that he and his wife had spent a couple nights at 203 Rivington—in a friend of a friend’s apartment, whose layout was identical to Anna’s—some years before. If not for this coincidence, he might not have, et cetera). Read More

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To Die, in Effect, for Love: On Gary Indiana’s Horse Crazy

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Staff Picks: Butt Fumbles, Bounty Hunters, and Black-Market Auctions

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Dashiell Hammett’s Strange Career

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The Novel Jane Austen Wrote When She Was Twelve

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Subverting the Chinese Immigrant Story

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Late Art

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