April 20, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Carl Phillips By Carl Phillips 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. Read More
April 20, 2020 First Person Loneliness Is Other People By Katharine Smyth I’d never met Ian in person; we matched on a dating app in January, one week before he flew to China to start teaching cultural studies at a university in Hong Kong. We continued to message, and it was Ian who, on Valentine’s Day, first introduced me to the term social distancing. His school had recently moved to online learning, around the time that shops and restaurants began to shutter, and he was lonely; he described life in Hong Kong as a kind of super future, one in which the social fabric had broken down and citizens were living on a fault line. He lamented the impossibility of making new friends or dating in what he called the old analog style; he sent me an article from the South China Morning Post about the way we wither without touch. He appeared relatively cheerful, though, and he had come to embrace the life of an ascetic, running twenty kilometers a day through the verdant hills of Hong Kong and mastering his split-legged arm balance with the help of Fiji McAlpine, his virtual yoga instructor. Back then the virus had seemed, to me at least, a threat unique to China. Social distancing would make a good novel title, I joked, never imagining that Americans would be doing the same in a matter of weeks, that the phrase would soon be joining so many others—community spread, an abundance of caution, flattening the curve. But then the book event for which I had driven to my mother’s Rhode Island summerhouse was canceled, and with it much of life in New York City, and while I was used to, even thrived on, long solitary stretches—the previous winter I had opted to seclude myself for sixty days, leading an existence that was almost indistinguishable from my existence now—the growing realization that this time around I had no choice gave rise to a powerful, panicky loneliness. Coronavirus and the isolation it imposed, coupled with uncertainty about the future, about how long such radical withdrawal would last, was the clearest distillation yet that, some four and a half years after my divorce, I was still utterly alone. Read More
April 17, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Creations, Croissants, and Crutchfields By The Paris Review Alia Volz. California is rife with personal histories of various sorts—so many that one wonders if there’s anything yet to be discovered about the Golden State. Enter Alia Volz’s new memoir Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco, a beautiful evocation of the Bay Area in the years before tech bros and big money changed the city. During the wild and woolly seventies, Volz’s mother founded Sticky Fingers Brownies, a company responsible for delivering upward of ten thousand illegal cannabis edibles per month to San Francisco consumers. Like Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, this is a narrative about a time that is now gone: San Francisco as circus, where pot was both ubiquitous and as illegal as heroin. Under Volz’s careful attention, all of it—the era, the place, and her own parents—is rendered clear, bright, and beautiful. —Christian Kiefer Read More
April 17, 2020 Comics The Phony Warrior By Yoshiharu Tsuge The below is an excerpt from The Swamp, the first in Drawn and Quarterly’s new series of books by the acclaimed comics artist Yoshiharu Tsuge (translated from the Japanese by Ryan Holmberg). In keeping with the customs of manga, both the panels and the text are intended to be read from right to left. Read More
April 16, 2020 On Music How Pop Music Broke the Gender Binary By Sasha Geffen Ma Rainey in 1917. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The gender binary cannot really be broken because the gender binary has never been whole. It has always limped along in pieces, easily cracked by a brief foray into the historical record. The Christian colonialist construction of men as inseminating subjects and women as reproductive objects does not extend into ancient history, nor does it govern every facet of the present. Masculinity and femininity, so much as they refer to certain strategies for moving through the world, have never neatly corresponded to the two types of bodies defined in the opening passages of the Bible. Even human bodies don’t hold true to the popular myth of strictly dimorphic sex, as anyone in the intersex community can tell you. There have always been more than two genders, and music and gender nonconformity have gone hand in hand since long before pop music emerged as a product—since before the concept of “product” existed. But the patriarchal order, in order to survive, needs to brand threatening ideas as artificial, superimposed, harmful, and new, so as to distract from the underlying truth: that patriarchy itself is artificial, superimposed, harmful, and not nearly as ancient or universal as it pretends to be. Hardly the natural order of the human being, patriarchy relies on the illusion of its own inevitability to survive. The notion that only two genders exist, and that each gender prescribes specific behaviors, movements, and relations, has always been undercut by a thriving spectrum of deviant expressions that white capitalist patriarchy seeks to erase. When European settlers devastated the Americas, they “looked to the existing sexual and gender variance of Indigenous people as a means of marking them as racially inferior and uncivilized: a justification for a forever unjustified genocidal conquest,” wrote Michael Paramo. During the era of American slavery, white men and women similarly clung to the gender binary to distinguish themselves from the racialized people they were brutalizing, stamping out expressions of gender that didn’t fit into the white Christian patriarchal mold as part of a long campaign of hellish state-sanctioned violence. Read More
April 16, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Mary Szybist Reads Amy Woolard By Mary Szybist 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. “If By You You Mean We” by Amy Woolard Issue no. 230 (Fall 2019) The apples are early this year, & the grass is late. The taxi is Early & the past is late. The fist is late. The tooth—like the news Of the tooth—broke both early & late. I’m telling you: this all Really happened. I had a love I ripped through like it was bread. I had bread & cheese, apples & sugar on my every plate. A sugar rose on my every cake. A love like a water Ring soaked into the grain of my kitchen table. Sugar, I don’t need it Refinished. The way it happened, I was my own witness. When we was Together / everything was so grand. I love you like the fifty-two bones of the feet, The fifty-four of the hands, the hell & the fast foam from a high-water wave Smoothing itself toward me like a flu passed through a kiss. I couldn’t Keep anything down. So happened it was my bread & butter for years To turn the tables of this town. I didn’t know a morning That wasn’t the end of my night. I came in through your basement Bedroom window. I brought a love like two forkless fists stuffed With lemon cake. A love like the house spider that crawls in & then out of your open mouth during sleep, leaving only your waking Tongue & its hustled memory of caught snowflakes from an early flurry. Mary Szybist is the author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry.