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The Daily

February 12, 2019
Arts & Culture

The Racy Jazz Age Best Seller You’ve Never Heard Of

By Michael LaPointe
Ursula Parrott was accused of promoting a dangerous sexual freedom. In her best-selling novels, the controversial author chronicled “life in the era of the one-night stand” during the twenties and thirties. Parrott’s extraordinary life took her to the heights of literary New York and pre-Code Hollywood, then left her jailed, penniless, and alone. Today, her books are out of print, and her name is all but forgotten.

I stumbled across her name in an advertisement at the back of a copy of Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy from the early nineties. One of Parrott’s novels was sandwiched between works by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Toni Morrison in a series of classics by “American Women Writers.” Eminent company, to be sure, but that was the last time one of her books was reissued—thirty years ago. Pursuing Parrott through the scant archives, I discovered an author whose work and life were exemplary of her time, yet strangely stranded there. Read More
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February 12, 2019
Arts & Culture

Lynne Tillman and the Illusion of Realism

By Lucy Ives
Lynne Tillman. Photo: Craig Mod.

Realism disturbs me.

For indeed fiction, if realistic, is a manufactured veil through which we train our gaze in order to obtain a pattern that organizes dots and squiggles into something legible, “an image of a pork chop which looks exactly like a pork chop,” as Terry Eagleton writes in the London Review of Books. Realism is paradoxical: a lie that reads true. We take two pet rocks, name one “Reality,” the other “My (Mimetic) Attempts to Write About It,” and smash them enthusiastically together. What survives is combed into a neat pile, carefully labeled, set out as a sort of snack.

Figure 1.

Mimesis is imitation, and when Aristotle talks about it in his Poetics, he means for it to do one thing: Imitation isn’t a faculty poets deploy to represent the world solely for the sake of skillfully representing the world. Imitation is deployed with the specific aim of inspiring recognition—of evoking, in a somewhat distant audience, a feeling of pity. (Aristotle: “Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, ‘Ah, that is he.’ ”) We are brought to tears when someone on stage pokes out his eyes; safe in our chairs, we’ve confused him with ourselves. We’re deceived, yet in awe. Perhaps we resolve not to kill or have sex with our parents (or, failing this, not to get married—regarding which topic, more later). Read More
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February 12, 2019
In Memoriam

Ricky Jay, the Magician with an Edge

By Michael Chabon

Ricky Jay, one of the world’s greatest sleight-of-hand artists, was also an accomplished author, actor, historian, and renowned bibliophile with a library to envy. He died on November 24, 2018. The essay below is adapted from a speech given at a recent memorial service in his honor.

Still from the 2012 documentary Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay

The first time I saw Ricky Jay perform was sometime around 1976, on The Mike Douglas Show. Ricky was beheading roses and puncturing watermelons with one of the simple playing cards that, in his hands, became a deadly missile. He was wearing a three-piece suit but he had a long beard, and hair down to his waist, and my grandmother, watching with me, thought he looked like a degenerate. I thought he was the coolest human I had ever seen, and that impression only deepened when, many years later, I was lucky enough to get to know him. Ricky was an artist and scholar with a fearsome intellect and a biting wit. He was also a surprisingly sweet and gentle soul. The greatest trick I ever performed was fooling him, with my novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, into thinking that I really knew something about the magician’s art. The greatest of the many kindnesses he ever did me was to not hold it against me when he fairly quickly discovered that I was, in that regard at least, a charlatan.

We met in 2001, when the late Sydney Goldstein asked me to interview Ricky for San Francisco’s City Arts & Lectures, back when it was still at the Herbst Theatre. Ricky seemed a bit weary that night, and as we waited backstage to go on, I found myself thinking about all the hundreds of times that he must have stood there like that, in the darkness, listening to the murmur of the house, waiting for the curtain to open and the footlights to come up.

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February 11, 2019
At Work

You Are in the Middle of Time: An Interview with Mariana Dimópulos

By Jennifer Croft

Mariana Dimópulos

Mariana Dimópulos’s novel All My Goodbyes, translated by Alice Whitmore, is a tale of murder in Patagonia and of wanderlust, or rather, a lust for an arrival that never quite happens. In crisp prose that is often as catchy as a pop song, the narrator jumps between Buenos Aires, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Málaga, and between maturity and youth, lovers and friends. The novel is written in bursts varying in length from a paragraph to a few pages, moving through time and place. These vignettes, or snapshots, or ruminations, or lines of dialogue, are linked not by chronology or geography but by theme—sometimes obliquely. The result is a powerfully propulsive journey that is both circular and suspenseful. I read the whole (admittedly slim) book without putting it down, on a flight from New York to Los Angeles.

I got in touch with Dimópulos over email in order to ask her some questions about her work. We did the preliminaries in Spanish and agreed to do the rest in English; Mariana is an accomplished translator from German and evidently something of a polyglot.

INTERVIEWER

In this book, you write: “My freedom always implies the slavery of another. So, my heart asks (and at heart I’m no good): if I enslave myself, does that mean someone else is set free?” Can you talk a little bit about what this means?

DIMÓPULOS

Since my early years, I’ve been interested in how people live and how the social differences between people come to be. The world is far from being a fair place. The sentence you are pointing at is an intended fallacy, and its answer is no. There is no perfect balance between two constants—free people and enslaved people—and there is no personal, isolated solution to the problem of inequality. But if you are young, like the protagonist, and you have a critical vision about how our world is built, with its contradictions and conformism, then you may think in this way.

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February 11, 2019
Arts & Culture

Loitering Is Delightful

By Ross Gay
Ross Gay. Photo: Natasha Komoda.

I’m sitting at a café in Detroit where in the door window is the sign with the commands

NO SOLICITING

NO LOITERING

stacked like an anvil. I have a fiscal relationship with this establishment, which I developed by buying a coffee and which makes me a patron. And so even though I subtly dozed in the late afternoon sun pouring in under the awning, the two bucks spent protects me, at least temporarily, from the designation of loiterer, though the dozing, if done long enough, or ostentatiously enough, or with enough delight, might transgress me over.

Loitering, as you know, means fucking off, or doing jack shit, or jacking off, and given that two of those three terms have sexual connotations, it’s no great imaginative leap to know that it is a repressed and repressive (sexual and otherwise) culture, at least, that invented and criminalized the concept. Someone reading this might very well keel over considering loitering a concept and not a fact. Such are the gales of delight.

The Webster’s definition of loiter reads thus: “to stand or wait around idly without apparent purpose,” and “to travel indolently with frequent pauses.” Among the synonyms for this behavior are linger, loaf, laze, lounge, lollygag, dawdle, amble, saunter, meander, putter, dillydally, and mosey. Any one of these words, in the wrong frame of mind, might be considered a critique or, when nouned, an epithet (“Lollygagger!” or “Loafer!”). Indeed, lollygag was one of the words my mom would use to cajole us while jingling her keys when she was waiting on us, which, judging from the visceral response I had while writing that memory, must’ve been not quite infrequent. All of these words to me imply having a nice day. They imply having the best day. They also imply being unproductive. Which leads to being, even if only temporarily, nonconsumptive, and this is a crime in America, and more explicitly criminal depending upon any number of quickly apprehended visual cues. Read More
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February 11, 2019
Feminize Your Canon

Feminize Your Canon: Isabelle Eberhardt

By Emma Garman

Eberhardt in 1895, photographed by Louis David

When the Swiss-Russian writer and explorer Isabelle Eberhardt died in the Algerian Sahara in 1904, she was physically ravaged. She was only twenty-seven, but heavy smoking, drinking, and drug use had taken their toll, as had poor nourishment. On her travels she’d carried a gun, but not a toothbrush, and so she had lost her teeth. She suffered from malaria and possibly syphilis, and just before her death had spent weeks hospitalized with fever. An assassination attempt a few years earlier, when a religious enemy attacked Eberhardt with a sword, had nearly severed her arm and left her in constant pain. Despite her youth, her body could no longer carry on. Her strange and brilliant mind, though, was immortalized by the travelogues, journalism, and fiction she left behind. “No one ever lived more from day to day than I, or was more dependent upon chance,” Eberhardt wrote shortly before her death. “It is the inescapable chain of events that has brought me to this point, rather than I who have caused things to happen.”

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