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
February 14, 2020 At Work Learning to Die: An Interview with Jenny Offill By Rebecca Godfrey “All around us things tried to announce their true nature,” observes Lizzie, the heroine of Jenny Offill’s new novel, Weather. “Their radiance was faint and fainter still beneath the terrible music.” In Weather, as in her groundbreaking novel Dept. of Speculation, Offill captures both the “terrible music” and the “quiet radiance” of contemporary life. She allows us to see the world anew, as a place where we can—and must—encounter both discord and poetry. Lizzie, a librarian “not young or pretty enough to matter,” moves through a stunned city during and after an election. As she grows “edgy and restless,” she listens to podcasts and lectures about glaciers, and to the seemingly trivial worries of Uber drivers and competitive mothers; she meditates with Buddhists before watching TV shows about extreme shopping and drug addicts ambushed by their families. Like the Wife in Dept. of Speculation, Lizzie is a keen, often hilarious observer, fiercely intelligent but utterly ignored and relatively powerless. Yet Lizzie attempts, even achieves, something heroic by the novel’s end. She sympathizes with the flawed and the flailing; she investigates and instigates survival strategies, and, like Offill herself, she finds the “quiet radiance” despite it all. Offill and I live close to each other in the Hudson Valley. Reading Weather, I recalled two moments where her presence had shifted something from the ordinary to the beautiful and then to the terrifying. In the first, we went for a walk on a route that was private and, to me, unknown. She had said something about a beach, but I thought this must be an exaggeration, as the landscape around us is forests and hills. Yet when we broke through the clearing, there was not only a beach but a small island and a cove set off from the rest of the Hudson. Something shimmered in the water; I thought it might be a bird. Instead, a naked woman rose out of the water and began to swim toward us. My daughter screamed with joy, thinking she’d at last seen a mermaid. Jenny shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, This is where I live. Strange things happen. Years later, as she drove me home from a party, I mentioned that I was having trouble breathing but it was likely nothing, probably an allergy to dust in my attic or pollen in the fields. I might have ignored the fact that I was often winded and dizzy, but Jenny insisted I go the ER in a manner that felt somehow sage and inarguable. When I went to the hospital the following day, the doctors discovered a collapsed lung and something “suspicious.” All around us things tried to announce their true nature. Recently, I emailed Jenny to ask about post-Trump anxiety, preppers, and how the novel, and the author, can create quiet beauty in a time of terrible music. INTERVIEWER Was there a particular moment that led to the inception of this novel? OFFILL The novel came out of years and years of talking about extinction and climate change with my friend, the novelist Lydia Millet. At a certain point, all of it just added up and I thought, what is wrong with me that I still think about this so abstractly, that I still don’t feel it? So in a way the process of writing Weather was about trying to move from thinking about what is happening to feeling the immensity and sadness of it. I was also struck by an article I read about how a well-known British environmentalist, Paul Kingsnorth, was walking away from years of campaigning because he believed hopes were being raised falsely that we could still stop or contain the climate crisis. The article was rather glibly titled “It’s the End of the World as We Know It … and He Feels Fine.” In fact, he went on to found a group for artists and writers called Dark Mountain. You can read their manifesto here. It begins quite chillingly with this passage: Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die. The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too carefully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives. What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end. A very early draft of Weather had the working title “Learning to Die.” Read More
February 14, 2020 Look The Photographer and the Ballerina By The Paris Review When the photographer Sayuri Ichida moved to New York in 2012, she found herself plunged into an ice bath of alienation, depression, and regret. Born and raised in Japan, she struggled to settle into a groove in this unfamiliar city. Ichida’s friendship with the New York Theatre Ballet dancer Mayu Oguri, who also hails from Japan, bloomed out of a shared sense of displacement. Featured in the Fall 2019 issue, their ongoing visual collaboration sees the performer assuming ballet positions throughout the city—a clever take on the experience of immigrants trying to find their place in a foreign country. Below, a new set of images shows Oguri, thirty-three weeks pregnant, venturing out into the city once more. Read More
February 13, 2020 Arts & Culture How to Leave Your Lover with Lemons By Chantel Tattoli This Valentine’s Day, we bring you a bit of turn-of-the-century breakup slang. Postcard, originally mailed in Michigan on February 13, 1909 Back when my husband was my boyfriend, he mentioned an antique postcard that he’d picked up and mailed to his parents. On it, a man’s outreached hands held green and yellow oviform fruits; the type read “A Lime and a Lemon With My Compliments.” Andy didn’t quite understand the card, he told me, but it had amused him, and he wondered what had become of it. That was early in our relationship. I was eager to be lovable. Shopping eBay for another copy for him, I scored two, both showing a crateful of citrus. “This Box of Oranges, with my Compliments, from Florida,” went one; “This Box of Grape-Fruit With My Compliments From Florida,” went the other. I’m from Florida, so the postcards were on-target, and next visit home I sent them out to desired effect. Vitamin C protects the body against scurvy—that was the meaning in my mind. You offered lemons to people you approved of to keep them prime. Neither of us yet knew the true meaning behind the phrase “handed a lemon.” Recently, I bought Andy a manual citrus press, and went back online to find a vintage postcard to accompany the present. That’s where it all began. Read More