February 4, 2020 At Work The Body Is a Place: An Interview with Lidia Yuknavitch By Cornelia Channing Two pages into Lidia Yuknavitch’s story “The Pull,” a young girl recalls her childhood as “the kind of story that makes your chest grow tight as you listen.” This would be a fitting description for most of the stories in Yuknavitch’s new collection, Verge, a bracing and frequently brutal book that explores the darkest margins of human desire in hybrid, fragmentary prose. As the title suggests, Verge is a book full of precipices. The protagonists include a child trafficking organs through an Eastern European black market, a teenage girl fantasizing about the men at a prison near her house, and a boxer with a threatening heart condition. Despite their differences, Yuknavitch’s characters share a certain precariousness. They are at moments of transition, standing on ledges of various kinds—emotional, societal, ethical and, in one case, literal—grappling with whether or not to jump. I first encountered Yuknavitch’s writing in college, when a friend thrust her memoir The Chronology of Water into my hands at a party. “You have to read this,” she insisted. “It broke my brain.” The book, which has developed something of a cult following, opens with Yuknavitch standing in the shower after the stillbirth of her daughter. The intimate account of sexual abuse and drug addiction is as formally innovative as it is harrowing. It broke my brain (and my heart), too. In addition to her memoir, Yuknavitch is the author of four novels, including the best sellers The Small Backs of Children and The Book of Joan. Verge is her first collection of stories. Yuknavitch writes about the body, particularly the ways bodies function as sites of emotional experience, intelligence, and memory. In an essay in The New Yorker, Garth Greenwell writes: “Yuknavitch’s sex scenes are remarkable among current American novelists, not just for their explicitness but for the way she uses them to pursue questions of agency, selfhood, and the ethical implications of making art.” Whether depicting sex or trauma or splendor, her writing is visceral. At several points while reading Verge, I found myself curled into a ball, my fingers gripping the pages so tightly they almost tore the paper. It was as if the words had crawled off the page and under my skin. For this interview, Yuknavitch spoke with me over the phone from her writing studio in Portland, Oregon, a room she describes as “a big mess full of all sorts of trinkets and talismans—bones, rocks, hair, weird shells, and other witchy things.” She was generous and precise, frequently pausing midsentence to clarify her use of a particular word or phrase. “The way we say things matters a great deal,” she explained. “But I’m longing for the day when we invent beautiful and agitating new words for all of it.” Read More
February 4, 2020 Dice Roll The Edison of the Slot Machines By Michael LaPointe Michael LaPointe’s monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. Original illustration © Ellis Rosen Tommy saw the solution in a dream. “I’m seeing myself from behind,” he recalled, “and I have [the tool] in my hand.” All through 1990, he’d been searching for a way to cheat the latest slot machines. He needed a new tool, something to replace the clumsy old instrument that had landed him in the penitentiary. Night and day in his Vegas apartment, he toiled on a Fortune One video poker machine. But no matter what he tried, some riddle in the guts of the unit would thwart him. Then, in the recess of sleep, the solution appeared in all its brilliant simplicity: a flexible piece of metal, wedged at the top, and some piano wire. “I woke up,” he told the History Channel, “actually got out of bed, and went and built it.” Tommy had found his answer: The Monkey Paw. * When a friend dropped by Ace TV Sales and Service in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1980, Tommy Glenn Carmichael was just an unremarkable repairman who moonlighted as a pool hustler. He had minor drug convictions and some juvenile mischief on his criminal record, but nothing about the thirty-year-old suggested that he’d one day stand among the most inventive cheats in gambling history. Carmichael’s friend had brought along some toys to tinker with: a Bally’s slot machine and a cheating device called the top-bottom joint. Of how his multi-million-dollar criminal enterprise got started that day, Carmichael simply said, “We got to playing around.” Triggering a payout with a top-bottom joint was a crude operation. A piece of guitar string comprised the “bottom” part of the tool. It went into the left corner of the machine, up against the circuitboard, and sent low-wattage electricity coursing through the unit. The “top” part was a piece of metal curved like the number nine. When inserted into the coin slot, it completed a circuit powerful enough to hot-wire the hopper, where the coins are kept. Jackpot. Read More
February 3, 2020 Arts & Culture The Closeting of Carson McCullers By Jenn Shapland Carson McCullers, 1959. Photo: Carl Van Vechten. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Carson and Reeves moved to North Carolina, first Charlotte, then Fayetteville, soon after they married. Reeves later claimed that during that time he wrote a collection of essays, but no one saw his work. Reeves, a writer who never wrote, was credited by numerous critics and reviewers throughout Carson’s life as the “real” Carson McCullers, the writer behind her books. There is no evidence to suggest even remotely that this might be the case. In Carson’s words, “I must say that in all of his talk of wanting to be a writer, I never saw one single line he’d ever written except his letters.” Reeves was working as a credit salesman, though he rarely came home with any money, and Carson stayed in their shitty apartment all day, trying to write but unable to hear herself think over all the fighting next door. She describes her new marriage as “happy,” but says that she was left alone in a house “divided into little rabbit warrens with plywood partitions, and only one toilet to serve ten or more people. In the room next door to me there was a sick child, an idiot, who bawled all day. The [husband] would come in and slap her, [and] the mother would cry.” Carson was living in one of her own grotesque fictions. Carson and Reeves had never quite reached a level of comfort with physical intimacy. Reeves had cheated on her with one of her friends, Nancy, which he told her their first night together. Their new marriage was already starting to disintegrate. So Carson went home, and Reeves stayed in North Carolina. She returned to her parents’ house in Columbus, Georgia, to begin a new book, “The Bride of My Brother,” her original title for The Member of the Wedding. Shortly thereafter, in what would become a pattern of reversals for them, separating and reuniting, Carson and Reeves used the advance from her first book to move to New York. Reeves chose to sail first from Charlotte to Nantucket with his old roommate (“roommate”?) Jack Adams. Carson rode the bus by herself. She spent the publication day of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, June 14, 1940, in a boardinghouse room, “cut off and lonely.” When the book appeared the reviews were staggering, especially for a twenty-three-year-old writer. They called her a child, baby-faced, and then in the same breath called her the new John Steinbeck. Richard Wright compared her to Faulkner, commending her “astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.” In an ad for the book in the New York Times, T. S. Stribling called it “the literary find of the year.” Read More
February 3, 2020 Corpus The Artifact By Jordan Kisner In her new column, Corpus, Jordan Kisner examines the stories our bodies tell. I saw a lot of dead bodies in 2018. I was researching a story about medical examiners, and in so doing inadvertently saw autopsies and death scenes and the inside and outside of a lot of corpses. It was an entirely different kind of encounter with the human form for me: so many opened rib cages, sculptural and bloody, and so many surprises. There is a delicate bone shaped like a horseshoe hidden in the cartilage at the throat. The uterus, fierce red, is startlingly pretty when lifted into the light. The dura mater, a membrane that sheaths our brain and spinal cord, clings so stubbornly to the inside of the skull that you need a tool like a chisel to scrape it out. The empty skull echoes. Skin eventually turns colors, swells, splits, peels back like curled paper. What does a person still living inside her body do with this knowledge? What does a body mean? Nearly all of the corpses, at the moment I saw them, were in a medical examiner’s office, where the bodies are kept naked, toe-tagged, and supine, arranged on metal gurneys. Any clothing or belongings they arrived with rests in brown bags beside them. There’s a standardization to bodies kept in the morgue—the body becomes an item that has entered a bureaucratic system in order to be organized, studied, catalogued, and released. Corpses in this context are something like people, but they are also like books in a library. Read More
January 31, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Gossip, Ghosts, and Growth By The Paris Review Alma Mahler and her husband, Gustav, 1909. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Sometimes you just want to read something juicy, and Cate Haste’s Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler delivers that in spades. Alma is remembered primarily as the wife and muse of three major cultural figures in fin de siècle Vienna: the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, and the novelist and poet Franz Werfel. But Haste’s biography reveals a woman with artistic ambitions of her own, sidelined in no small part because of the social expectations of the time. To be perfectly honest, though, I read this book for the gossip, of which there is plenty. Haste has a knack for capturing Alma’s world in all its art house fervor. Alma’s first kiss is with Klimt (she refuses his sexual advances by quoting Goethe’s Faust). During the birth of their second child, a panicking Gutav tries to soothe Alma’s pains by reading Kant aloud to her (it doesn’t work, unsurprisingly). Gropius and Alma exchange extremely explicit letters concerning their sexual fantasies (including possibly the most florid description of a blowjob I’ve ever read). We haven’t even reached the second half of the book, which includes Alma’s intense, sadomasochistic affair with the Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka (culminating in Kokoschka creating a lifelike doll of Alma and dragging it around Vienna before beheading it) as well as her dalliance with and subsequent marriage to Werfel, whom she helps escape Austria by foot in a perilous journey on the eve of World War II. Alma herself comes across as wildly unpleasant—she’s a monarchist and Hapsburg supporter who’s constantly getting into fights with Werfel, a committed communist; she makes frequent anti-Semitic remarks despite two of her husbands and most of her closest friends being Jewish; she constantly criticizes her daughter for marrying for love (five times) instead of marrying geniuses. But Haste portrays Alma Mahler in all her whirring and feverish complexity, and the result is as engrossing as it is jaw-dropping. Read it and you, too, can know entirely too much about the sex lives of almost every major artist, composer, and writer in early-twentieth-century Vienna. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
January 31, 2020 First Person Going Blind at the Border By Marcelo Hernandez Castillo © Lenspiration / Adobe Stock. I don’t know why I went temporarily blind in Tijuana while waiting to cross the border in 1993. It didn’t happen all at once. It wasn’t like someone suddenly turned off the lights. First it was the colors that started fading, then it was the shapes, and then shadows altogether. Or maybe not in that order. I could explain the colors leaving, I knew that the world sometimes did that—seemed grayer than usual. I thought it was clouds. I thought the gray came from the walls themselves, and the dried trees and the loose dirt. Maybe that’s just what Tijuana looked like. But it was shapes I could not explain. Their edges softening into the empty space around them until I couldn’t tell where one thing started and another ended. I could see something was more of itself closer to the center, and less of itself farther out—a gradient. Maybe the soul wasn’t just one thing but an assortment of many little things huddled together, like penguins keeping warm in a blizzard. Or like a flock of birds packed so tightly in a tree that you think they’re all just leaves, until a loud noise startles them and they shudder the bare limbs loose. The things in front of me slowly became less and less of themselves, but they stretched out nonetheless, beyond the edges of themselves, as if they no longer wanted to be whatever it was that they were put on this earth to be—as if they too wanted to get a little farther north. Even the sky no longer felt distant but rather like it began right above my head. And didn’t it? Read More