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The Daily

January 19, 2021
Arts & Culture

Reading the Artifacts After the Capitol Riot

By Swati Rana

Portrait of Dalip Singh Saud by Jon R. Friedman (Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives)

As curators search the Capitol Building, cataloging and repairing the damage done by the January 6 riot, I read for news of a painting of Dalip Singh Saund that I saw two years ago when I visited Washington. On the landing of the East Grand Staircase, the portrait’s richly marbled frame is adorned with symbols of Saund’s immigration, education, and career. A plaque below the painting commemorates his historic election as the “First Asian American in Congress”—he represented California from 1957 to 1963. As reports emerge of how mob vandalism targeted, in particular, certain racialized objects within the U.S. Capitol, we need to reckon with the artifacts within its walls.

Images from the January 6 riot make clear the white supremacist terms upon which entry into the U.S. Capitol is premised. While these scenes are new and unprecedented, they are not an aberration. Those who make a study of U.S. empire, enslavement, genocide, segregation, and voter suppression know that the Capitol represents the illusion of democracy. To the extent that the rioters stand for antidemocratic, fascist, and racist principles, it is not surprising to see them inside the Capitol Building. They are a feature of the system. This is their house, and they write on its walls with impunity.

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January 15, 2021
This Week’s Reading

Staff Picks: Heaven, Hearing Trumpets, and Hong Sang-soo

By The Paris Review

Still from Hong Sang-soo’s Woman Is the Future of Man. © Arrow Films. Photo courtesy of MUBI.

I’m a big fan of the films of Hong Sang-soo, and something about them—their long, lingering scenes in bars, the conversations that trip over art and love and the differences between the sexes—feels particularly right for this moment when many of us are stuck indoors. Luckily, MUBI is running a series dedicated to his work, including 2014’s Hill of Freedom (a personal favorite, which follows a Japanese man as he wanders through Seoul trying to find a lost love, but is really about the unreliability of narrative) and 2004’s Woman Is the Future of Man (which I had never seen before), his first film to open theatrically in the U.S. Hong’s films are deceptively simple, seemingly a series of variations on a basic theme—romantic drama, alcohol, unreliable narrators—but there are always a few formal twists, a playful approach to the concept of linear time, to keep the viewer on their toes. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
January 14, 2021
First Person

No One Belonged Here

By Bette Howland

In 1974, Bette Howland (1937–2017) published her first book, W-3, which details her stint in a Chicago psychiatric ward. In the ensuing decade, Howland would release two more books and receive a MacArthur Fellowship. Soon, however, like many brilliant women of her era, she fell out of print. Thanks to the efforts of A Public Space Books, Howland’s work has resurfaced for contemporary readers; 2019 saw the publication of Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage: The Selected Stories of Bette Howland, and this week marks the reissue of W-3. An excerpt from W-3 appears below.

Bette Howland. Photo courtesy of A Public Space Books.

Iris had posted herself in the lounge with her cigarettes, emery boards, and stationery, writing letters on a silk-trousered knee. One hand fanned and fluttered the while, drying her nail polish. She was new to W-3; arrestingly tall, white faced, with frosted gray bangs and a black Nehru jacket buttoned to her chin. But her eyes were smeared; her pasted lashes sank like weights. In other words, like the rest of us, she seemed untidy. We were looking for such signs, of course: What’s wrong with her? Why is she here? “Here” being the small psychiatric ward of the sprawling university hospital.

On the windowsill there would be some withered, dusty plant, long dead, still wrapped in bows and silver foil from the florist’s: inmates received them rarely. Magazines accumulated all over the place, discarded heaps, old Times and Newsweeks mostly; no one read them. The cupboard was crammed—boxes of puzzles, games protruding from every angle. All those boxes would have tumbled down at once if anyone ever attempted to disturb them. No one ever did. Read More
January 14, 2021
Happily

We Didn’t Have a Chance to Say Goodbye

By Sabrina Orah Mark

Sabrina Orah Mark’s column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.

The Plague Doctor (Photo: Sabrina Orah Mark)

“I can’t find my plague doctor.” “Your what?” says my mother. “My plague doctor.” “I don’t know what that is,” says my mother. I text her a photo of my plague doctor in his ruffled blouse and beak mask sitting on my bookcase a few months before he disappeared. “I still don’t know what that is,” says my mother. “Forget it,” I say.

“If you want to find it then look for it.” “I am looking for it.” “Then look harder.” “I am looking harder.”

“It’s the strangest thing,” I keep saying. But I know it isn’t the strangest thing.

I tell everyone who will listen that I’ve lost my plague doctor. Nine months ago I wrote about seeing the small porcelain doll in a shop in Barcelona, and wanting him immediately. If he had been real his beak mask would’ve been filled with juniper berries, and rose petals, and mint, and myrrh to keep away a plague I thought belonged only to the past. This was ten years ago. My husband and I were on our honeymoon, and I thought I only wanted the plague doctor. I didn’t know I’d eventually need him, too. “You can’t be serious,” says my brother. “Who loses a plague doctor during a plague?” “I guess I do,” I say.

“We’ll find him,” says my husband. But we never do.

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January 13, 2021
At Work

Being Reckless: An Interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard

By Lydia Kiesling

Read an excerpt from In the Land of the Cyclops here.

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s newest release, In the Land of the Cyclops, is a collection of essays and reviews translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken and published in the United States by Archipelago Books. The title essay, first published in a Swedish newspaper in 2015, is an enraged response to a critic who asserted that Knausgaard’s depiction of a relationship between a teacher and a student in his first novel was pedophiliac. Knausgaard argues forcefully that explorations of all human impulses are necessary, and touches on many of the themes that have lately become associated with his body of work: Nazism—which forms a central plank of Book 6 of My Struggle—identity, literary freedom. While Knausgaard is a writer who is provocative in both the scope and the theme of his work, his politics resist neat categorization: “All my books have been written with a good heart,” as he puts it in this essay, perhaps conveniently. And despite the provocations of its title essay, the book is really a cabinet of Knausgaard’s curiosities. His interests lie in visual art, destabilized reality, meaning, and perception. There are pieces on topics as disparate as the photography of Sally Mann and Cindy Sherman, the perfection of Madame Bovary (“Madame Bovary is the perfect novel, and it is the best novel that has ever been written”), and Knut Hamsun’s Wayfarers. The Bovary essay seems to contain the key to the collection, to the extent that there is one: Knausgaard describes Flaubert’s book as a novel “which is about truth and which asks what reality is.”

About Francesca Woodman’s photographs, which he first dismissed, he changes his view: “Why did I find Francesca Woodman’s photographs, youthful as they were in all their simplicity, so relevant now, while those great paintings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suddenly and completely seemed to have lost their relevance to me?” A review of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, a novel by an author who is a byword for outrage, is about “an entire culture’s enormous loss of meaning, its lack of, or highly depleted, faith.”

The pandemic poses problems for book tours, and Knausgaard, according to his publisher, hates Zoom. We corresponded via email at the dawn of 2021.

INTERVIEWER

The title of your new collection is used as a derisive descriptor for Sweden. Sweden also appears at length in Book 6 of My Struggle, as a figure of scorn for what you describe as its failed, hypocritical social policies. In America, on the Left, there is a fantasy of a sort of single, undifferentiated “Scandinavia” that has wonderful social programs and proves that capitalism can exist along with strong social supports. But during the pandemic, Sweden made choices that did not seem to be in keeping with that reputation. How does the pandemic response align with or recalibrate your ideas about Sweden?

KNAUSGAARD

I would say that there was a certain one-eyedness in Sweden’s approach to the pandemic. They did it their own way without looking to other countries. Even when the death rate in the country was ten times higher than that of the neighboring countries, they continued to do it their way. Having said that, we don’t yet know for sure why some countries have been hit harder by the pandemic than others. But Sweden’s approach wasn’t out of character for sure.

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January 13, 2021
First Person

Almost Eighty

By Adrienne Kennedy

In the summer of 2011, three months before her eightieth birthday, the playwright Adrienne Kennedy reflected on her life in the unpublished essay “Almost Eighty.” Now, nearly a decade later, with Kennedy’s ninetieth birthday right around the corner, the piece has finally been published in He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box and Other Plays, which Theatre Communications Group released in November. The essay appears in full below.

Adrienne Kennedy’s mother, Etta Hawkins (née Haugabook), 1928, while a student at Atlanta University. Photo courtesy of Adrienne Kennedy.

At almost eighty, I wondered if I could find reasons to live.

I kept begging my son to print out pages of my mother’s scrapbook, which was on his computer. Why?

All I knew was my eightieth birthday was in three months, and I was extremely sad. I had been at his family house in Virginia for a month, the month of June. For the first time I could not see how I was going to financially maintain my apartment in Manhattan, my beloved apartment on West Eighty-Ninth Street, an apartment I’d had for twenty-nine years, despite commuting to California and Boston, my precious home near the Hudson.

I seemed to lack energy, purpose. Dreams.

“Please print out mother’s scrapbook,” I begged. He was busy. The scrapbook was in the middle of other documents.

I didn’t know why but I kept begging. I wanted to see that scrapbook, started in 1926. I wanted to see all the glued-on photographs and programs that filled the pages until 1928. And from 1928 to 1954 all the photographs and newspaper articles that were stuck inside the pages of the scrapbook.

I’d already decided if I can’t find reasons to live, then what’s the point?

What can I embark on at eighty?

What could I possibly embark on?

“Embarking” had always been one of my mental mainstays.

Finally, Adam printed out my mother’s scrapbook that she started when she was a student at Atlanta University, 1926–1928. I felt it was my compass. My beautiful compass. Read More