January 31, 2020 The Last Year The Phone Call By Jill Talbot Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces the moments and seasons before her daughter leaves for college. This essay marks the end of the winter series. The column will return again in March, and then again in the summer. After driving fifty miles on US 380 to McKinney, I take I-75 south toward the Ridgeview exit. I’m on my way to the cemetery, silk red roses in the passenger seat. In three days, it will be three years since my phone rang at nine twenty on a Saturday morning. My mother, telling me my father was gone. I take a right toward the cemetery and follow the winding path to the tree. I park beside it. As the first anniversary of my father’s death approached, my mother asked me to put roses on his grave: “I want him to have them for the day.” She wasn’t well enough to do it herself—the cancer, diagnosed not long after his death, had taken its last turn, though we didn’t know it then. When she died, fourteen months after my father, I swiped through the photos on her phone and found his grave, its mound of funeral flowers. He was buried on the first of February, and the dates on the photographs showed she had driven the hour there on the second, the third, the fourth, and the fifth. Disbelief, I imagine, and the need to convince herself it was true. Read More
January 30, 2020 Arts & Culture An Apartment on Uranus By Paul B. Preciado A montage of the solar system, including the Galilean satellites. Image courtesy of NASA. Map pin courtesy of Kilroy 2525 (CC0) on Wikimedia Commons. As the years passed, I learned to think of dreams as an integral part of life. There are dreams that, because of their sensory intensity, their realism or precisely their lack of realism, deserve to be introduced into autobiography, just as much as events that were actually lived through. Life begins and ends in the unconscious; the actions we carry out while fully lucid are only little islands in an archipelago of dreams. No existence can be completely rendered in its happiness or its madness without taking into account oneiric experiences. It’s Calderón de la Barca’s maxim reversed: it’s not a matter of thinking that life is a dream, but rather of realizing that dreams are also a form of life. It is just as strange to think, like the Egyptians, that dreams are cosmic channels through which the souls of ancestors pass in order to communicate with us, as to claim, as some of the neurosciences do, that dreams are a “cut-and-paste” of elements experienced by the brain during waking life, elements that return in the dream’s REM phase, while our eyes move beneath our eyelids, as if they were watching. Closed and sleeping, eyes continue to see. Therefore, it is more appropriate to say that the human psyche never stops creating and dealing with reality, sometimes in dreams, sometimes in waking life. Whereas over the course of the past few months my waking life has been, to use the euphemistic Catalan expression, “good, so long as we don’t go into details,” my oneiric life has had the power of a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. During one of my recent dreams, I was talking with the artist Dominique González-Foerster about my problem of geographic dislocation: after years of a nomadic life, it is hard for me to decide on a place to live in the world. While we were having this conversation, we were watching the planets spin slowly in their orbits, as if we were two giant children and the solar system were a Calder mobile. I was explaining to her that, for now, in order to avoid the conflict that the decision entailed, I had rented an apartment on each planet, but that I didn’t spend more than a month on any one of them, and that this situation was economically and physically unsustainable. Probably because she is the creator of the Exotourisme project, Dominique in this dream was an expert on extraterrestrial real-estate management. “If I were you, I’d have an apartment on Mars and I’d keep a pied-à-terre on Saturn,” she was saying, showing a great deal of pragmatism, “but I’d get rid of the Uranus apartment. It’s much too far away.” Awake, I don’t know much about astronomy; I don’t have the slightest idea of the positions or distances of the different planets in the solar system. But I consulted the Wikipedia page on Uranus: it is in fact one of the most distant planets from Earth. Only Neptune, Pluto, and the dwarf planets Haumea, Makemake, and Eris are farther away. I read that Uranus was the first planet discovered with the help of a telescope, eight years before the French Revolution. With the help of a lens he himself had made, the astronomer and musician William Herschel observed it one night in March in a clear sky, from the garden of his house at 19 New King Street, in the city of Bath. Since he didn’t yet know if it was a huge star or a tailless comet, they say that Herschel called it “Georgium Sidus,” the Georgian Star, to console King George III for the loss of the British colonies in America: England had lost a continent, but the King had gained a planet. Thanks to Uranus, Herschel was able to live on a generous royal pension of two hundred pounds a year. Because of Uranus, he abandoned both music and the city of Bath, where he was a chapel organist and director of public concerts, and settled in Windsor so that the King could be sure of his new conquest by observing it through a telescope. Because of Uranus, they say, Herschel went mad, and spent the rest of his life building the largest telescope of the eighteenth century, which the English called “the monster.” Because of Uranus, they say, Herschel never played the oboe again. He died at the age of eighty-four: the number of years it takes for Uranus to go around the sun. They say that the tube of his telescope was so wide that the family used it as a dining hall at his funeral. Read More
January 30, 2020 Line Readings Comics as Poetry By Ivan Brunetti In his column, Line Readings, Ivan Brunetti begins with a close read of a single comics unit—a panel, a page, or a spread—and expands outward to encompass the history of comics, and the world as a whole. Comics are often likened to short stories and novels, or (more improbably) animated films, but in a sense they are also a kind of poetry, an incantation beckoning us to enter their world. The simplicity of their superficial concision can reveal surprising density, layers, and multivalence. In a poem, lines might form and fill a stanza, which literally means “room”; and so it is with comics, where panels could likewise be thought of as stanzas. Rows, columns, and/or stair-steps of panels, in turn, structure a page (or an entire story) of comics and give it its particular cadence. Even the simplest grid tattoos its rhythmic structure onto the page. The one-page story “Jump Shot” by Lynda Barry (1988), an installment of her comic strip series Ernie Pook’s Comeek, comprises, to put it into the simplest, crudest terms, a large square box subdivided into four smaller square boxes. Inside each box is a view into one room, containing just one character, a young girl, in successive moments. This is as elemental as comics get: one character in one space, in one continuous action, spanning just a few panels, all housed within an evenly sectioned grid. However, even an element contains vast inner spaces and subatomic particles elusively whizzing and whirring within it, and this seemingly simple strip is, in fact, quite complex and nuanced. While the name of the young girl is not mentioned here, we nonetheless are invited to see what she sees, imagine what she imagines, and feel what she feels. And amazingly, we do. How is this accomplished in just four panels? Before we begin reading the strip, we visually absorb the entire story as a whole, and there isn’t much in the way of action: two somewhat static panels, one close-up, and only one panel showing movement. At first glance, it all appears very … small. But is it? Read More
January 29, 2020 On Poetry The Other Billy Collins By Anthony Madrid William Collins (1721-1759) Let me tell you something. The eighteenth century was just straight up not a good time for poetry. Of course, there are exceptions; we’re talking about a hundred years (or, if you’re in graduate school, we’re talking about 160 years). Still, the principle is essentially sound. 1700–1800: bad poetry. Well, “bad.” Better say unreadable. Some inventive genius could probably set up a pay schedule where the big eighteenth-century poets get their fair share of huffin’-and-puffin’ adjectives. But adjectives aside, the desire to read the stuff is small, vanishingly small. It wasn’t a bad century for prose. Swift, Fielding, Sterne, Johnson, Gibbon, Boswell. Or zoom in close: Have you ever looked at Elizabeth Carter’s translation of Epictetus? Or Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters? Anybody today’d be damn proud to be compared to any of those cats. Whereas, if somebody compares your poetry to that of Thomas Gray, you are being made fun of. So why in the world do I read eighteenth-century poetry. Am I a pervert? Do I like things that should not be liked? Answer: I’m no different from you, when it comes to taste. The difference between us is I’m interested in escaping my own perspective as to what’s good and bad in poetry. I want to know what in the world those wigged heads saw in Shenstone, Young, Akenside, Lyttleton… You don’t care about that. You don’t have a whole lot of time for poetry in the first place, let alone stuff nobody’s read in 150 years. Unless … maybe you’re a little bit like me, after all? Maybe you’re afraid the poetry that you yourself are writing—though esteemed and popular now—will one day be a prompt for baffled speculation. “What in the world did those fapoons in the twenty-first century think poetry was for anyway?” Read More
January 29, 2020 Freeze Frame Yasmin Ahmad’s Multicultural Malaysia By Tash Aw In Tash Aw’s column, Freeze Frame, he explores his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema. In this installment, Yasmin Ahmad’s Orked trilogy. Still from Yasmin Ahmad’s Mukhsin (2007) In the heart of the old town in Ipoh, Malaysia’s third largest city, a cluster of colonial-era shophouses has been saved from destruction and, over the last decade or so, reincarnated as a hipster enclave. Boutique hotels with concrete and plywood interiors and cafés serving single origin coffee sit next to kopitiam, the traditional eating houses of Malaysia. It’s a beguiling cocktail of history, modernity, and multiculturalism that seems to perfectly embody the youthful energy of the country. Nestled in a back lane in one of the most touristy parts of town is a small crowdfunded museum dedicated to the work of the filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad, who, at the peak of her powers in 2009, died from complications arising from a stroke. In the first decade of the new millennium, she had made six feature-length films in the space of six years. She was only fifty-one when she died. A picturesque city with a heavily ethnic-Chinese, largely Cantonese-speaking population, Ipoh is the setting for two of Ahmad’s most loved films, Sepet (2004) and its sequel, Gubra (2006). (A prequel, 2007’s Mukhsin, is set in a rural town a hundred miles south). Away from the frenetic and sometimes overwhelming rhythms of life in Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh is the perfect place to understand why Ahmad’s films left such an indelible mark on the emotional consciousness of many Malaysians. Its leafy middle-class suburbs blend happily into a compact city center whose architecture—less a victim of rampant real estate development than in other major cities—reflects the country’s rich mixture of ethnicities with their distinct languages and cultures. Here, the effects of Malaysia’s racial politics still feel secondary to the easy harmony of everyday life. The three films that make up the loose trilogy revolve around a young woman called Orked and her quest for love, identity, and independence. Ethnically Malay, religiously Muslim, Orked has—according to her Malay friends—an unhealthy interest in Chinese people and culture, by which they mean Chinese Malaysians, who account for the country’s largest minority, rather than anyone from the mainland. Orked idolizes Takeshi Kaneshiro, the Japanese Taiwanese screen idol, and has watched Fallen Angels several times over. With her wisecracking friend Lin, she goes to the street market one day to buy more of his films, and at the counterfeit DVD stall, she meets a young Chinese vendor, Jason. It is love at first sight. Wrapped in the framework of a comic teen melodrama is a constantly unsettling examination of race and class distinctions in Malaysia. Watching these films again, in a country made increasingly anxious by the politicization of racial differences, I’m reminded of the confrontational quality of Ahmad’s films, of the uncomfortable nature of hearing the same things delivered on screen that people say in real life. The casual racism that Malaysians live with on a daily basis takes on a distinctly threatening tone when captured on film, even if the film purports to be a teen romance. Sepet is the Malay word for “slit-eyed,” a term that Orked’s ethnic-Malay friends use to describe Jason and other Chinese characters, so we know from the outset that the two young lovers have a tough time ahead of them. But this is more than just a formulaic story of Montagues and Capulets: in a country like Malaysia, Ahmad’s portrayal of innocent interracial love represents a challenge to the official narrative of nationality and belonging. I was six years old when I first heard the expression Cina babi (Chinese pig); balik Tongsan (go back to China) followed soon after. At first I thought that these things were being said to a random passerby from Beijing; I had no idea they related to me. By the time I understood fully what they meant, the idea of being Chinese, and somehow distanced from the idea of Malaysian-ness, had become so much a part of myself that I thought about it as little as I did the birthmark on face. And yet, at the same time, I felt fully embedded in Malaysian life—in its cultures, languages, and history. What was I to do with this split personality? Listen to the official narrative that had me down as a migrant, or guest, or carry on living life as any ordinary Malaysian? Watching Ahmad’s films for the first time, I felt as though the dichotomy that was me, and so many other Malaysians, was finally being articulated on screen. Read More
January 29, 2020 Arts & Culture The Elena Ferrante in My Head By Katherine Hill Tudor Washington Collins, Woman standing on rock looking out to sea, 1949, silver gelatin dry plate. Courtesy of Auckland Museum, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)). Elena Ferrante is a fictional character, one of my favorites: a disembodied person in my head, a mind inside my mind. She occupies a large, elastic space in there, in the same neighborhood with a lot of my real friends and mentors and everyone else with whom I have ever seriously corresponded, even though she’s never written anything that’s strictly just for me. She’s one of my Lilas: a sometimes-close, sometimes-distant friend and rival, who keeps winning by being smarter. It’s easy for me, as a reader of Ferrante and as a writer and friend to writers myself, to imagine the woman who wrote Ferrante’s books confiding her secret in me. The novels are already a confidence shared intimately with every reader, no two exchanges alike. It’s also easy because this author has shielded her name, body, and biography from public knowledge, but not her persona, which coheres across the letters and interviews collected in Frantumaglia and in her weekly column for the Guardian. The persona is visible even in the novels themselves, which share so many features and preoccupations. Read More