February 19, 2020 Happily Fairy Tales and the Bodies of Black Boys By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Joseph Martin Kronheim illustration for Tom Thumb, circa 1850s Noah, my eight-year-old son, and I go to Target. He is carrying a little stuffed monkey, and as we walk through the automatic doors he puts it under his shirt. “No, no,” I say. “Bondo is shy,” he says. “I told him I’d keep him safe.” “No, no,” I say. Under Noah’s shirt, Bondo could be anything. He could be wild and alive. He could be something that doesn’t belong to him. He could be a bouquet of flowers or a gun or a book of fairy tales about the bodies of black boys. “Why?” he asks. “Why,” I answer, or I start saying something and then stop, or I say “because it isn’t safe,” or I say “I love you,” or I say “here, let me hold him.” A few days later, a friend posts on Facebook that her nine-year-old black son is now riding his bike to the supermarket by himself. “We have talked to him,” she writes, “about using a bag for the items he’s bought, not his pockets, keeping his receipt in his hand as he leaves the store, keeping his hands out of his pockets while shopping, taking his hood off.” I imagine it continuing, “we have given him invisibility powder, we have made wings for him out of the feathers of ancient doves, we have given him the power to become a rain cloud and burst, if necessary, into a storm.” When I was a child I could’ve hidden a house under my dress, and all I would’ve been was a girl with a house under my dress. As my sons grow, the American imagination grows around like them like water hemlock. Poisonous and hollow. My sons’ skin is light. So the hemlock may not grow as thick as it would for a darker boy. I look for a fairy tale about the bodies of boys. There is Pinocchio, but he’s wooden. And Peter Pan, although magical, is only the thin memory of a boy. There is Jack and his bean stalk, but Jack is more wish than body. And then I remember Tom Thumb who, like the body of the black boy, is caught inside a swallow cycle. Read More
February 19, 2020 Arts & Culture Russia’s Dr. Seuss By Anthony Madrid Let me tell you something about children’s poetry: people tend to create it for the right reasons. I was taught this concept in connection to medieval lyric poetry. My teacher’s point was that art made in the modern world is under scarcely any obligation to be good. It can be interesting instead, or new. Or it can “bear witness.” Being good—actually good—is even considered a little passé. The minute you bring a six-year-old into the picture, though, everything changes. She doesn’t care whether what you’re doing “serves as a useful critique.” She wants it to be good. Consequently, if I’m in a used bookstore and I see a book called Thai Children’s Poetry or Setswana Children’s Poetry or Inuit Children’s Poetry, I pretty much buy it on contact. One wants to know: Does Botswana have a Dr. Seuss? Does Thailand? ’Cuz if they do, I need to know about it. Russia had a Dr. Seuss. Same deal as ours, except his hot decade wasn’t the fifties; it was the twenties. There’s a lot to be said here. Name: Kornei Chukovsky. Dates: 1882 to 1969. Number of supremo-supremo classic children’s books to his credit: ten or twelve. His stuff is a lot like Green Eggs and Ham: about that long; rhymes bouncing around like popcorn; no real point in sight. (Of course, like with everything else, you can carry whatever point you like into his books and then pretend you found it there. It’s like cops planting weed in people’s cars.) Chukovsky’s backstory is pleasant. He was a young father; his son was sick. I think he had dysentery, I’m not sure. Somehow, everyone thought the family doctor was the only one would could be consulted, so Chukovsky wound up on a train in the middle of the night with that poor kid, age like four or something, sick and moaning. To take the kid’s mind off the horribleness, Chukovsky got him engrossed in some kind of collaborative improvisation game, rhyming like crazy around a story of a crocodile who comes to Saint Petersburg and eats a dog and then a cop or something… there’s a war … the crocodile runs around … Chukovsky’s kid was just a teeny thing, but he knew inspiration when he saw it. He forgot all about his guts and helped Mozart compose his first symphony. Next day, the two of ’em knew that what they’d made was too good to let go off, so they sat at a table and reconstructed what they could. Chukovsky took that reconstruction, fixed it up, made it make sense, and voilà: ready for the printer. I’m doing all this from memory. Read More
February 18, 2020 Redux Redux: My Prose Was from the Heart By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Simone de Beauvoir. Valentine’s Day may be long past, but this week at The Paris Review, we’re still preoccupied with the wretchedness of desire. Read on for Simone de Beauvoir’s Art of Fiction interview, Akhil Sharma’s short story “The Well,” and Randall Mann’s poem “Evidence.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast! Simone de Beauvoir, The Art of Fiction No. 35 Issue no. 34 (Spring–Summer 1965) DE BEAUVOIR Love is a great privilege. Real love, which is very rare, enriches the lives of the men and women who experience it. INTERVIEWER In your novels, it seems to be the women—I’m thinking of Françoise in She Came to Stay and Anne in The Mandarins—who experience it most. DE BEAUVOIR The reason is that, despite everything, women give more of themselves in love because most of them don’t have much else to absorb them. Perhaps they’re also more capable of deep sympathy, which is the basis of love. Perhaps it’s also because I can project myself more easily into women than into men. My female characters are much richer than my male characters. Read More
February 18, 2020 Arts & Culture Harry Mathews’s Drifts and Returns By Daniel Levin Becker Harry Mathews. Photo: Curt Richter. There are two ways, at least, into “Cool gales shall fan the glade,” the last poem Harry Mathews completed and the first one included in Harry Mathews Collected Poems: 1946–2016. One is to read it as a twilight soliloquy: a wandering rumination on a long life richly lived, filled with loves and lusts and leisure and loss, shaped by many wandering ruminations before this one. Another is to read it as an experiment on a French fixed form from the fourteenth century called the sestina, with the supplemental rule that the words concluding each line, instead of merely repeating in spiraling permutation, add a letter and rearrange themselves into new words with every stanza: at becomes fat becomes fast becomes feast. These two ways are not mutually exclusive, I don’t think; perhaps, to hear Harry Mathews in the poem as I hear him, it is necessary to travel both at once. This is to say that I read Harry Mathews as uniting the liberation of rules with the discipline of desire, much as Raymond Queneau once praised Raymond Roussel for uniting the madness of the mathematician with the rationality of the poet. If I prize this sense of poles joined, of apparent contradictions reconciled, over other approaches to his writing, it’s because it was under the sway of those Raymonds—both of whom bore an outsize influence on Harry’s life and work—that I became a Mathews reader in the first place. I came to the Oulipo, the Parisian atelier of literary mischief that Queneau cofounded in 1960 and in which Harry planted an American flag in 1973, enchanted by its committed exploration of form and procedure, its willingness to find poetic potential in the unsentimental machinery of language. But in Harry’s work, first his eloquently hallucinatory novels and then his essays and poems and translations, I found that not even the resolute embrace of empirical constraint repressed this aura of lusty, extravagant, insatiably curious humanity. A throw of the dice, to paraphrase Mallarmé, never seemed to abolish that fetching madness. Read More
February 18, 2020 Revisited Be Yourself Again By Amina Cain Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Amina Cain revisits Jean Genet’s The Maids. When I was writing my novel Indelicacy, I felt myself in conversation with Jean Genet’s play The Maids. First performed in Paris in 1947, the play is loosely based on the story of the infamous Papin sisters, who murdered their employer in 1933 in Le Mans, France. I’ve never seen the play performed, though I’ve watched the film version from 1975, directed by Christopher Miles. When I first read The Maids, I wasn’t interested in the idea of murder but in Genet’s highly charged representation of the two sisters, their crazed relationship to each other, as well as to their “Madame,” and in the depiction of class warfare in a domestic space. More recently, I’ve been thinking, too, about its mad circling of artificiality and authenticity, two sides of the same coin. In their roles as maids in the rooms of Madame’s high-class apartment, Solange and Claire become unhinged, especially when they are there alone. They are free then to do as they like, and the desire for another reality, and the level to which they pitch that desire, drives them into an electrifying realm of fantasy and performance. It feels as if this is what the end of fantasy looks like, if you follow it as far as it can possibly go. And if the fantasy is as filled with bitterness and rage as the sisters are, then it feels like it will explode. In the past year I’ve become somewhat obsessed with the idea of authenticity. This is partly because I feel at times I have lost sight of my authentic self, and I want more than anything to come close to it again. For me, authenticity means that how I act and what I say, and how I actually feel around others, are aligned, that I am connected to myself and to another person at the same time. I want my writing to be authentic, too, for every sentence to reach toward honesty and meaning. Genet manages in The Maids to come up to the very edge of this, in that nothing is held back, everything is expressed, everything breaks the surface and is free. This is especially true within the sisters’ performance, what they call “the ceremony,” in which they take turns playing each other, and Madame, and play at cruelty and revenge. Because of this sense of freedom, this reach toward liberty, the play feels oddly clean, satisfying. Read More
February 14, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Swans, Sieves, and Sentience By The Paris Review The male swan ensemble in Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake. Photo: Johan Persson. When I was a dancer, performing Swan Lake was a rite of passage. My memories of doing so, though, involve only pain—the pain of standing in regimental lines for impossible stretches of time, of finding the will not to walk offstage. Swan Lake epitomizes balletic femininity as much as it does the exploitation of the female body in dance. But Matthew Bourne’s adaptation, which recently concluded a two-week run at City Center, challenges the ballet’s traditional gendering by featuring a cast of male swans. Setting Swan Lake in Kensington Gardens after dark, Bourne evokes the London of Henry James or Robert Louis Stevenson—where a man walking alone at night might come face to face with the supernatural, if not his own psyche. Bourne’s men pound the ground and heave collective, audible breaths. Their movements accentuate the weight of the physical body rather than creating an illusion of birdlike lightness. I am always wary, however, of Bourne’s indulgence in spectacle. Scenes set in present-day London are so saturated with cinematic gimmicks, so staged for a laugh, that their humor undercuts the psychological and choreographic complexities of the darker sections. That said, the Royal Ballet principal Matthew Ball’s performance as the Swan/Stranger was one of the best New York has seen in years. Bourne’s Swan Lake, kitsch aside, is a testament to the choreographer’s ingenuity and to the enduring allure of the ballet itself. —Elinor Hitt Read More