December 23, 2019 Best of 2019 What Was It About Animorphs? By James Frankie Thomas We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! How do I convey the overflowing surplus of books in the nineties? They had their own aisle in every supermarket and spilled over into the checkout lane so you could impulse-buy them along with gum and nail clippers. Their pages were off-white and delicate as Pringles, their covers so shiny they were almost slimy, and they became polka-dotted by your fingerprints as soon as you touched them. They weighed, and cost, approximately nothing. What were they about? What weren’t they about? There was a tie-in novelization of every Hollywood movie, plus one tie-in novelization of a tie-in TV show of a Hollywood movie. There was an extremely pink series in which Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen solved low-stakes mysteries (fictional, presumably, though it wasn’t totally clear). There was a ubiquitous best seller that was just two hundred pages of a little boy being brutalized by his sadistic and increasingly creative mother; then there was a sequel, and another sequel. “You insatiable little book-suckers,” the publishing industry sneered, chucking chicken soup at a dozen newly identified subtypes of soul, “you’ll read anything, won’t you?” For children’s books in particular it was an era of quantity over quality, an unremitting glut. In those pre–Harry Potter days, a typical “series” meant hundreds of books churned out on a monthly basis by teams of frantic ghostwriters. You could order them by the pound. Often they came with a free bracelet or trinket, as if resorting to bribery. There were 181 Sweet Valley High books, 233 Goosebumps books, and so many Baby-Sitters Club books that their publisher, Scholastic, has never made the full number public (by my count it was at least 345 if you include all the spin-offs)—and they were all, to a certain degree, disposable crap. But then there was Animorphs. Read more >>
December 20, 2019 Best of 2019 The Paris Review Staff’s Favorite Books of 2019 By The Paris Review Lydia Davis. Photo: © Theo Cote. Was it worth plowing through this year, after all? The jury has a few more days on that, but a compelling argument came in last month, when Lydia Davis’s Essays One hit the shelves. Even just as a physical object, it is delightful: a small, pleasantly chubby book, the jacket a grassy and somehow optimistic green, the design unadorned, as though there is nothing more you need to know than title and author. (It makes a nice companion to her collected stories—similar in size and shape, green against orange.) The delights continue inside. Davis is speaking of reading Lucia Berlin when she writes, “This is the way we like to be when we’re reading—using our brains, feeling our hearts beat,” but the phrase applies well to this book: it’s an experience in an active, alive sort of reading, sensitive and attuned. Sitting with the book felt as though someone had come in to gently adjust my antennae, helping clarify signals in what had seemed just noise. And in any case, this book is part promise: that One in the title, those notes in the preface—there is more to come. —Hasan Altaf Read More
December 20, 2019 Arts & Culture A Bridegroom Called Death By Julia Berick Crystal Lucas-Perry and Jonathan Hadary in A Bright Room Called Day (2019). Photo: Joan Marcus. Upon hearing I was seeing the new production of Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day, a friend asked if I thought the playwright would be in attendance. I pictured him back in the sound booth scribbling notes, some kind of light playing on those perfectly round glasses. I pictured him there, not basking—for Christ’s sake, he’s a writer—but questioning. Kushner, after all, is an indefatigable rewriter, and the temptation of tinkering with a major revival at the Public Theater could have proved impossible to resist. Kushner wasn’t in the wings that night, though. He did his rewrite from the stage. In this divisive revision of his first play, Kushner has inserted a version of himself, played by the actor Jonathan Hadary. Written in 1985 when Kushner was twenty-six, A Bright Room Called Day is, according to the program materials, what first caught the eye of Kushner’s artistic director and longtime collaborator Oskar Eustis. It’s clear why: the play is near catastrophic in its precocity. But it is also a young man’s play. It is didactic and referential, polemical and pedantic; the reviews over the years have said as much. A Bright Room Called Day presents a group of liberal, bohemian, and decidedly human friends in Berlin in 1932, just as the noose is beginning to tighten. They are Marxists and Trotskyites, some more than others. There is plenty of ideological ping-pong, which is great if you love Marxist ideology or ping-pong. But, as though it wasn’t Brechtian enough, the action is interrupted by a character named Zillah, who makes clear the connection between the Reagan era and the twilight years of the Weimar Republic: the heartbreaking swing of the working class from the Left to the Right. Zillah serves as a metafictional commentator who engages Kushner’s fascination with verfremdungseffekt, the Brechtian antitheater craft of undoing the “magic” of the stage. Read More
December 19, 2019 At Work What Is Hip-Hop if Not Poetry: An Interview with Jaquira Díaz By Rebecca Godfrey “Why are you so drawn to terrible people?” the author Jaquira Díaz was once asked. “How come all the people you write about are in prison?” Fortunately for readers, Díaz was never discouraged by such notions of literary propriety. “Terrible people” in the eyes of some—runaways, addicts, criminals, child killers—are not merely the people she’s drawn to, they’re the subjects of her remarkable, heartrending debut memoir, Ordinary Girls. As she portrays her life growing up in Puerto Rico and Miami, Díaz introduces us to a range of unruly women—her mother; her “reckless and unafraid” schoolgirl friends, Chanty, Boogie, and China; and her younger self, a bright girl who learns and loves to “fight dirty,” who moves uneasily through juvenile detention centers, the military, and, ultimately, academia. Though she explores her own coming-of-age, Díaz is, above all, interested in the girls, not the girl. She avoids the often unbearable solipsism of memoir by turning her fierce and compassionate gaze on the lives of her friends, tracing the tropical fervor of their adolescence, the moments they break free, the moments they offer each other loyalty and joy. The memoir is rife with a rare energy; it’s never staid or sorrowful or sordid. Díaz excels at capturing the pulse and beat of life. Even in the bleaker moments of the book—Díaz’s suicide attempts and drug binges, the mystery surrounding a neighborhood mother accused of killing her three-year-old son—Díaz’s voice is steadfast, unflinching, yet mournful and lyrical. At one point, she recalls the bravado of herself at sixteen, “like a rabid animal … Macho Camacho in the right … Joe Fucking Frazier at Madison Square Garden” in the “fight of the century.” Swift and startling, Díaz compells us to watch the fighters, to know the elation and risk of survival. After speaking with Díaz on a “Mean Girls” panel at the Center for Fiction this summer, I wanted to continue our conversation about violence, young girls, and new literary forms. I caught up with her over email while she was back in Miami on her book tour. INTERVIEWER In Ordinary Girls, your depiction of coming-of-age in Miami is so vivid and rich. The book is full of specific details—dancing to “Pop that Pussy,” drinking orange sodas at Miami Subs, wearing oversize T-shirts over bikinis, listening to Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. How did you excavate that? Was it from memory? Or did you draw on journals and other sources from the time? DIAZ I’m still friends with all the girls in the book, the ones who survived, and we often talked about these things. I was part of a group of girls that took lots of pictures. My friend Flaca took photography in high school, and worked in a photo lab, so she always had a camera, and later a camcorder. So much of our adolescence was recorded because of her. But we were all kind of obsessed with documenting our lives. We all had diaries, slam books, scrapbooks. We had a huge shared diary we passed to each other where we wrote entries, and we’d keep it for a few days, then pass it on. I also wrote so many letters to my friends. I was always writing, taking notes. I already believed myself a writer, and was always sketching out ideas. I thought I would write about my life, even though I didn’t even know what memoir was. INTERVIEWER Why did it feel important to you to portray the music and style of your friends? Why was it important for you to include details of youth culture, of style and music that are so often absent from “literary” work? DIAZ Ordinary Girls is in some ways about navigating a certain kind of black and brown girlhood. So many of the details that were present during our girlhood are erased or disparaged in our literary culture. The details of my life are the details of a working-class life, of growing up in poverty in Miami Beach and in the Puerto Rican housing projects. The music I reference, the music that was the soundtrack to my life, was music of the streets. Hood culture is not considered high art, but what is hip-hop if not poetry? 2Pac was a poet. So was Nas. The old salsa I grew up on was made up of storytelling and myth and poetry. Héctor Lavoe and Willie Colón and Lucecita Benítez were storytellers and poets as well as singers. Music taught me to write sentences. I learned more about writing from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill than I ever learned from Hemingway. Read More
December 19, 2019 At Work Now’s The Time: An Interview with David Amram By Gary Lippman Jennifer Hasegawa, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. One of the highest compliments in my lexicon of praise is the term lebenskuntsler, German for “an artist of life”—and high in my pantheon of the lebenskuntslers I’ve known is the musician/composer/conductor David Amram. Still flourishing at age eighty-nine, Amram has an impressive resume. As the New York Philharmonic’s first composer-in-residence, for which he was chosen by Leonard Bernstein, he has created funky jazz numbers as well as classical symphonies and concertos. Then there is the rich music Amram has written for Arthur Miller’s plays, including After The Fall; for Joe Papp’s earliest Shakespeare in the Park productions; and for legendary films such as Elia Kazan’s Splendor In The Park and John Frankenheimer’s Manchurian Candidate. But Amram does far more than write scores (or “figure out which correct notes to choose and then write them down on each day’s new empty page,” as he puts it). He’s often on the road, teaching students of all ages, leading orchestras, “sitting in” with any musician who asks him to, and performing his own public concerts. These “Amram Jams” can last up to five hours, and feature Amram scat-singing improvised songs along with a diverse array of guest artists. Amram has jammed with local musicians from all over Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East, becoming, according to the New York Times, “multicultural before multiculturalism existed.” True to the title of his seminal 1971 double album No More Walls, he has played Latin music to audiences in China, played Kenyan music in Latvia, and worked frequently with Native American artists. This last connection led, in 1977, to The Trail of Beauty, a piece for mezzo-soprano, oboe, and orchestra whose libretto featured traditional indigenous texts. Amram frequently plays the piano, the penny whistle, the French horn and the Spanish guitar, but he can also coax melodies from the shanai and the dumbeg and other instruments that few Americans have heard of, much less heard. During his daily life he even wears some of these instruments around his neck, along with amulets and other gifts he’s received. Over the decades, Amram has preserved his artistic adventures in three memoirs: Vibrations (1968), Offbeat: Collaborations with Kerouac (2002), and Upbeat: Seven Lives of a Musical Cat (2008). He’s currently working on the fourth, to be entitled “David Amram: The Next Eighty Years.” Born in Philadelphia in 1930 to a Sephardic Jewish family, Amram was raised on a dairy farm in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, where, he says, his father was a major ethical influence and where he loved hearing “the old hog callers, who excelled in this special style of performing art,” he writes. “Whether or not they impressed any hogs, these farmers made me see that you can find music and beauty anywhere if you pay attention. They also made me see that you can transform anything into a form of expression all your own.” After studying history at George Washington University, serving as a soldier with the Seventh Army in Europe, and working as a busboy, a soda jerk, a janitor, a gym teacher, a moving man, and an amateur boxer, Amram wound up in postwar Paris, where he spent time in cafes with George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen as they created The Paris Review. Back in New York, he joined Charles Mingus’s band. Around 1959, Amram acted alongside the writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso, as well as the painter Larry Rivers, in Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s groundbreaking short film Pull My Daisy (for which Amram also composed the soundtrack). This “promising young composer,” as he now waggishly describes himself, has made music with Bob Dylan, Charlie Parker, Johnny Depp, Willie Nelson, Thelonius Monk, John Prine, Frank McCourt, Dizzy Gillespie, Paddy Chayefsky, and Patti Smith. Apart from kunst, Amram is equally impressive with the leben part of the lebenskuntsler equation. He’s been an indefatigable social activist, a prodigious raconteur, and, as the critic Nat Hentoff aptly phrased it, “a ubiquitous deliverer of good cheer.” Recently I visited Amram at his home in Beacon, New York, which overflows with books, CDs, framed photos, DVDs, instruments and awards. We had a long and lively conversation, presented here in condensed and edited form. —Gary Lippman INTERVIEWER Are you surprised to find yourself nearing the age of ninety? AMRAM You bet! I never thought I’d make it to thirty. We came up in the “live fast, die young” era. But contrary to the old saw, turning eighty-nine didn’t happen quickly. Anyway, I don’t have time for old age to catch up with me. The title of Charlie Parker’s great 1945 anthem “Now’s The Time” remains my mantra. People are already planning celebrations for my ninetieth birthday in different cities around the world. So I am eating extra vitamins and trying to get at least one good night of sleep a week to be ready. Read More
December 18, 2019 Devil in the Details A Figure Model’s (Brief) Guide to Poses through Art History By Larissa Pham Larissa Pham’s column, Devil in the Details, takes a tight lens on single elements of a work, tracing them throughout art history. It paid $12.50 an hour with clothes on, $25 with clothes off. The choice, I figured, was obvious. My friend Gabriel had turned me on to the gig in college. We were always on the lookout for work that required minimal effort for maximal reward. And the job was easy, Gabriel assured me. All I needed was a robe, some slippers, and to shave, but only if I wanted to. The first class, I was nervous. I had scraped off all my body hair with a razor, praying that my period wouldn’t arrive in the middle of Introductory Drawing, surrounded by Yale freshmen—I imagined that seeing a naked woman in a curricular context would be traumatizing enough. I timed my shower for a few hours before class, enough time for my hair to dry but not enough, I hoped, for me to accumulate any malodorous sweat. My worst fear was of being too bodily, of grossing out my classmates. But after a week or two on the job, I realized, none of that mattered. All the students were focused on their drawing skills, not my errant pubes or pits or back-of-knee sweat. Some of the professors I worked with gave instruction, to varying degrees of specificity. There was the hot professor, for example, who asked for elbows akimbo, figure-four knees, poses with lots of negative space. There was the class that took place right before Halloween, so they dressed me up in a trash bag and put Gabriel in a plague-doctor mask. And then there was the professor who, long after costume party season had ended, handed me two wooden dowels and asked me to act like a dominatrix. For the most part, though, they all let me do I wanted, and I came to see myself—if I may be so bold—as a coteacher of sorts, guiding the class with each pose. I’d attended drawing classes myself, and knew how much more fun it was to work from a model who had a grasp of dynamic poses, how it isn’t the look of the model that matters but how the model moves. Conveniently, my education—what little of it I hadn’t squandered by frying my brain with party drugs—provided a repository for dynamic poses: the sculptures and statues of art history. Here, from a former figure model and art history major, is a brief guide to figurative sculpture through the ages, should you ever find yourself naked but for a robe, slippers, and in need of a shave—but only if you want to. Read More