April 24, 2020 Department of Tomfoolery Our Motto By Maira Kalman © Maira Kalman I am upstate with my son, Alex, and his wife, also named Alex. Like everyone else on planet earth, we are thinking nonstop about the future. The economy. The forces of good and evil. About the meaning of time and, of course, life and death. There is also another subject on my mind: paper towels. Specifically Bounty Select-A-Size paper towels. This is not a new interest for me. I have loved Bounty Select-A-Size for a long time. I have always been impressed and dazzled by this bit of American language and American ingenuity. You can choose the size of the paper towel you need. Not too much, not too little. How did we function before this? The promises, slogans, and jingles of American products have populated my life since I arrived in this country in 1954. Every one of us has their favorites. PLOP PLOP FIZZ FIZZ OH WHAT A RELIEF IT IS; YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE JEWISH TO LOVE LEVY’S; I KNOW YOU HAVE A HEADACHE, BUT DON’T TAKE IT OUT ON HER; LIKE A GAL NEEDS A GUY, LIKE AN X NEEDS A Y, LIKE ALMOST ANY FOOD NEED RITZ. I want to know who invented Select-A-Size? When? Why? And when did Brawny come up with their competitive Tear-A-Square? Which is not bad. Poetry in motion. Last night, with a lull in my schedule, I wrote an email to Procter & Gamble, the parent company of Bounty. I acknowledged that in such dismal times my question might seem frivolous, but asked if they could supply the answer. I received an immediate auto-response. If I was a journalist with an urgent deadline… but if not… Since I was in the latter category, I did not expect a response. But still I woke up in the middle of the night to check my email, just in case they had written back. I imagined a P&G archivist/historian of all paper products, alone in a huge building, responding with precision and thoughtfulness to my query. Alas, still no reply. Read More
April 23, 2020 Re-Covered Re-Covered: A Black Female Beat Novel from the Sixties By Lucy Scholes In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. When I read the extract from the writer and activist J. J. Phillips’s novel Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale in Margaret Busby’s groundbreaking Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present (1992), I immediately knew that I had to track down a copy. Phillips’s writing is raw, but it’s astonishingly lyrical, too, mesmerizingly so. Later, trying to find out more about the book, I came across the novelist and academic John O. Killens’s verdict in Ebony magazine, congratulating Phillips for having “captured the beauty of Negro language and put it down without fear.” This is all the more impressive a feat considering she was only twenty-two years old when this, her debut novel, was first published in 1966. Reading Mojo Hand in its entirety only confirmed my initial impression; it was unlike anything else I’ve read. It was also a book I’d never heard any mention of outside Busby’s anthology, which seemed particularly bewildering given its strange, unique power. I quickly came to agree with the American historian, novelist, music critic, and longtime Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff, who, in 2015, described it novel as “the most neglected book I know.” Perhaps this disregard has an explanation. Reading it today, it’s clear that Phillips was a writer ahead of her era, and Mojo Hand, as summed up by the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Carolyn Kizer, was simply “too rich a mix for the time in which it appeared.” Read More
April 23, 2020 First Person Betraying My Hometown By Yan Lianke The Longmen Grottoes scenic area in Luoyang, China, near the Yi River, located in Henan Province. Photo: © Dan / Adobe Stock. Some people spend their entire lives in their own home, village, or city, while others spend their lives elsewhere. There are also some people who end up constantly traveling back and forth between home and another place. When I was twenty, I left home to join the army. This was the first time I took a train, the first time I watched television, the first time I heard about Chinese women’s volleyball, and the first time I had the chance to eat limitless amounts of dumplings and meat buns. It was also the first time I learned that there were three categories of fiction: short stories, novellas, and novels. It was also back in 1978, while I was living in the military barracks, that I became enthralled by the solemnity and even the smell of China’s literary journals, People’s Literature and Liberation Army Literature and Arts. It was around this time that I happened to see, on the cover of a book in the city library, a picture of the blue-eyed Vivien Leigh. I was shocked by her beauty, and for several minutes I stared dumbfounded at the picture. I couldn’t believe that foreigners looked like this, that there could be people in this world who appeared so different from us. So I checked out all three volumes of the Chinese edition of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, each of which had a cover with a picture of Leigh from the film adaptation, and over the course of three nights I finished the entire thing. I had assumed that the rest of the world’s fiction was identical to the revolutionary stories and the Red Classics that I had read, and this was how I came to realize how limited and warped my understanding of literature was. Read More
April 23, 2020 At Work Laughter as a Shield: An Interview with Souvankham Thammavongsa By Cornelia Channing I first reached out to Souvankham Thammavongsa for this interview in February, which feels like a lifetime ago. That was back when we were all still going to work and seeing movies and hugging our friends and family with impunity. Though only a few months have passed, that now seems like a bygone era. A bygone world, really. In Thammavongsa’s new book, How to Pronounce Knife, she draws upon her childhood as the daughter of Laotian immigrants to tell fourteen stories, each an exploration of foreignness and belonging. In one story, an aging widow falls in love with a much younger man; in others, a child recalls learning that the earth is round, and a Lao woman teaches herself English by watching daytime soap operas. In sparse prose braced with disarming humor, Thammavongsa offers glimpses into the daily lives of immigrants and refugees in a nameless city, illuminating the desires, disappointments, and triumphs of those who so often go unseen. Over the past week, while cooped up at home, I reread the slim collection and found that, like so many things, it resonates differently in isolation. Moments I had thought lighthearted on first reading now struck me as heartbreaking. Lines that had been out of focus suddenly came into sharp relief. A wistful description of fermented fish sauce nearly brought me to tears. On rereading, I also noticed—perhaps because I have been feeling claustrophobic—just how spacious the stories are. Though short enough to read in one sitting, they feel vast in their scope, offering ample room to wander. In this surreal moment, when so many of us are confined within cramped homes and cluttered minds, this book is a welcome reminder that, given the right attention, even the smallest spaces can feel expansive. In addition to writing fiction, Thammavongsa is an accomplished poet and essayist. She has published four acclaimed books of poetry. This is her first collection of short stories. Our interview was conducted over the phone between Toronto and New York, just days before COVID-19 sent the world into lockdown. We spoke about language, laughter, and our shared love of country music. INTERVIEWER Many of the stories in your collection are concerned with language, both translation and mistranslation. Which languages were spoken in your house growing up? THAMMAVONGSA It is a bit confusing. I was born in a refugee camp in Thailand. Most people are recognized as a citizen by the country they are born in, but in a refugee camp, you are considered stateless. So although I was born in Thailand, I am not Thai. My parents are Lao and immigrated to Canada when I was very young. I grew up in Toronto, near Keele Street and Eglinton Avenue West. In our neighborhood, it was not a big deal to be a refugee. Almost everyone was. We spoke Lao at home. I spoke English at school, but almost never used it with my parents. I think from a very early age, I was aware of the power of language. In our house, English didn’t have the same potency as Lao. I could cuss in English, for example, and it meant nothing. Whereas, in Lao, language like that could cut deeply and be vicious. English never held the same weight. Nothing anyone has ever said to me in English could hurt like that. And English took something away from my parents, too. It wasn’t their native tongue, and seeing them use it diminished them somehow—their authority, their sense of humor, their brilliance. The languages are so different. Read More
April 22, 2020 Arts & Culture The Writer’s Obligation By Wayne Koestenbaum © Layn / Adobe Stock. The writer’s obligation in the age of X is to pay attention. Dreamed last night of a senile woman who’d taken up piano-playing; dementia had etherealized her features. Like a seasoned, reputable coach, I stood behind her while she fumbled through Schubert. The writer’s obligation in the age of X is to remember the history of song, and to remember the reasons that troubled people have looked toward song to relieve pain and to organize, with other sufferers, in resistance. * With curiosity and reverence, I pulled down, from the shelf, the legendary No More Masks!: An Anthology of Poems by Women, the original paperback edition, 1973, edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass. The writer’s obligation in the age of X is to revisit books to which we have ceased paying sufficient attention, books we have failed adequately to love. * On a transcontinental flight I read Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable. I wanted to live in the crevice where words broke down, and where matter arose to compensate for the loss. Some words I found in The Unnamable: “grapnels,” “apodosis,” “sparsim,” “congener,” “paraphimotically globose,” “circumvolutionisation,” “inspissates,” “naja,” “halm,” “thebaïd.” These words—obstructions in the throat—seemed specimens of rigorous, refined accounting, of a system so late-stage, so desolate, it could only satisfy description’s mandate by lodging in words virtually never used. And, while 39,000 miles in the air, I imagined an island where the only currency, for the stricken inhabitants, gumming their porridge, was the obsolete word, the rare word, the word stigmatized, in the dictionary, as “literary.” I was imagining an island—call it the planet Earth—after most of it was rendered uninhabitable, where there were no words or only the most elementary words or only the most obscure words, only those words so specific, so paraphimotically globose, that they could function in this new, eviscerated terrain. Imagine, then, an ecology of language, where only “cang” and “ataxy” can make the rivers flow, where only “serotines” and “naja” can serve as verbal cenotaphs for the missing bodies, whether made of words or of matter, that failed to arrive at this final, spectral island. If we don’t live on that island now, we may, one day, and we might not be “we” any longer; we might be sparse tuft or diatomaceous phlegm. Read More
April 22, 2020 Inside Story Inside Story: What Spot? By Jenny Boully In our new column, “Inside Story,” parents share the books they are reading with their children to get through these times. Like many things I love, What Spot? entered my life through happenstance: my son just happened to pick it out of the pile of books in his preschool classroom; my son just happened to have the one teacher who sent books home each week; he just happened to secure a last-minute spot at this preschool. If it were not for this seemingly fateful chain of events, I do not think I would have ever come across this charming tale of wonder and fear and empathy. All of these emotions feel re-created on the book’s cover, which magnifies and directs your attention to the period of the question mark, which appears target-like, a red dot encircled by other circles. Written by Crosby Bonsall for the “I Can Read!” series, which Harper Collins launched in 1957 with the publication of the now-classic Little Bear, by Elsa Holmelund Minarik, What Spot? is now out of print. Rather than trust that my son would be able to choose the same book each week, I bought a used copy. It arrived well-loved, with damaged pages, signs of its former life. I delighted in seeing my son pretend to read the book aloud on his own, so simple was its two-syllable, incredulous refrain, punctuated by a question mark that seems conjoined to an invisible exclamation point. Two days before we entered the stay-at-home phase of our lives, my son went on a field trip to see a production of The Princess and the Pea. His teacher sent us a PDF that explained to children how to prevent coming into contact with the coronavirus. She told us she read the poster to the children to reassure them. She also reassured us, saying that she would have the children wipe down their theater seats and wash their hands. Time was once less abstract, more palpable. I once could ask how school was. I could say tell me about the play. I could let my children know what they would need for school the next day. I could pack lunches and backpacks. I could check my work email after sending them off. I could have a day, a day that was measured and complete, one that I did, indeed, measure out with coffee spoons. Now, my children and I dream the dizzy dreams that manifest in between reality and a life once lived. Read More