December 10, 2019 Happily The Silence of Witches By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Edmund DuLac, illustration for The Little Mermaid, 1911 I have a dream my mother is standing at my front door crying. Her hair is wet and tangled in seashells. She’s read a story I’ve written. “How could you,” she says. “Your own mother.” She opens her coat and out march my husband, his daughters, my brothers, my sons, my father. I try to run away but they catch me by the collar. “How could you, how could you, how could you?” they chant. “Your very own mother! Your very own us!” I’ll stop writing. I’m sorry. And I do. I stop forever, and instantly my lips and hands are dotted with mold. White threads spread across my face where mushrooms begin to swell. I grow wild with silence. “Oh, for god’s sake,” says my mother. “Forget it. Enough with the drama.” “But my silence is real,” writes Maurice Blanchot. “If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on.” Of all the silences in fairy tales, the most pronounced is the Little Mermaid’s. For a potion that will turn her into a human, she pays the sea witch with her tongue. In Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” the sea witch lives where no flowers or sea grass grow, where “all the trees and bushes were polyps, half animals and half plants.” It’s the sea witch’s silence, her exile, her house built from the bones of shipwrecked humans, the toad feeding out of her mouth, and the snakes sprawled like illegible cursive “about her great spongy bosom” that is the silence of poets. It’s Blanchot’s silence. It’s the silence of outsiders and mothers. Once kept it will run ahead, and wait for all of us to catch up. And as it waits, it will grow. The Little Mermaid’s silence is the silence of children. But the sea witch’s silence is the silence of an old woman with a story no one will ever know. The first silence is soft and lovesick and melancholy like sea foam. The second silence surrounds you like water surrounds a drowning woman, transparent and cruel. It’s been a difficult year. My stepdaughter moved in for seven months and then moved out. She left Mavis, her pet tarantula, behind. My husband and I argued more than ever. My grandmother died so I couldn’t call her up to ask her advice. In an act of grief I bought a yellow rotary telephone for my desk. It’s plugged into nothing. Sometimes I just hold the receiver up to my ear and listen. Sometimes I talk. As the date of my stepdaughter’s departure grew closer, I practiced politely biting my tongue. There was so much to say, but I said nothing. I bit and I bit. “Peace,” I once wrote in a story about daughters, “is what pain looks like in public.” Read More
December 9, 2019 Line Readings Comics as System By Ivan Brunetti In his new 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. Pictures and words, pictures as words, words as pictures, neither quite pictures nor words: comics are self-contained systems, worlds unto themselves, answering to no one. From one panel, to one page, to one sequence, to one story, to one book, each level of a comic holds a small universe, and each small universe folds out into a larger universe. These systems need basic parameters and a modicum of internal consistency so that they can function not unlike language, but they are also dynamic, fluid, unstable, imperfect, flexible, and open-ended … not unlike language. As we decode them, they reconstitute themselves in our brains as narrative (or poetry, or both). In any one panel, or the spread of two panels, or any given sequence, we glimpse the entire book in microcosm. Consider the above panel from Mark Beyer’s 1987 book Agony. What exactly is happening in this strange image? And, stranger still, why is it possible for us readers, with relative ease, to figure it out? Read More
December 9, 2019 Arts & Culture The Only Untranslatable American Writer By Brian Evenson Gary Lutz (photo: Carol L. Steen) About a decade ago, I was in Paris with a gathering of French translators and editors, talking about Gary Lutz’s work. Several of them had, at one time or another, tried to translate him, and all of them—some after months of trying—had found this to be impossible. Lutz’s work was too deftly sewn into the English language to be picked free of it. Each story is so much about the specific tonal, sonic, and rhythmic relationships within English, and so much about torquing a given historical moment of that language by injecting it with archaisms and oddity, that to reproduce it in French just didn’t work. It was, one translator told me, more exacting than poetry, and infinitely more complex. “Technically I could translate it,” he told me. “I did translate several pages of it. But, then, rereading it, I realized it had, somehow, when I wasn’t looking, escaped. Then I retranslated those pages a different way. Still it was gone. I could try again, but no. Lutz will always escape.” These were translators who relished a challenge. They had, between them, translated the likes of Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers, Mark Z. Danielewski, William H. Gass, and David Foster Wallace. One of them had translated a story of mine that contained a list of more than a hundred varieties of barbed wire, arranged to create certain sonic patterns. “What other American writers are untranslatable?” I asked. They shrugged. “Just him,” one of them finally replied. So when I say that Lutz is unique, I mean this in a much more serious way than how the term is usually applied to writers. Read More
December 6, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Battle Hymns, Boarding Schools, and Bach By The Paris Review Sarah M. Broom. Photo: Adam Shemper. Over the holiday weekend, I devoured The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom’s remarkable and deeply researched memoir about her family’s New Orleans home. The youngest of twelve siblings, Broom grew up in a lively—and at times chaotic—shotgun-style house in the neighborhood of New Orleans East. Bringing together oral history, archival research, and first-person narrative, Broom weaves a multigenerational story of place that celebrates and complicates one of our nation’s most mythologized cities. “The Yellow House was witness to our lives,” writes Broom. And indeed, the house itself is essentially the protagonist of the story, a living organism animated by the decades of life that course through it like a pulse. Broom is an uncommonly thoughtful archaeologist of her own past, uncovering fragments of near-forgotten stories, dusting them off, and delicately piecing them back together. What emerges is an astonishing and kinetic portrait of the way places shape, and are shaped by, the people who love them. —Cornelia Channing Read More
December 6, 2019 Arts & Culture Curled Thyme By H. D. In this previously unpublished essay, the legendary Imagist H.D. muses on the Greek bucolic poet Theocritus. Photo of H.D. taken from a postcard inscribed “To Marianne Moore, H.D.,” ca. 1921. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Where the Greek voice speaks there are rocks. But these Sicilian rocks of Theocritus, particularly of the twentieth Bucolic with which I specifically deal, are sunk a layer beneath rich soil. Theocritean rocks are covered with earth, rich loam and successive sun-baked, sun-broken and un-crumbled layers of oak leaves, blades of rank grass and reeds and many feathery, dusty, dried, and broken herbs and flowers, witches’ herbs and vine leaves and withered berries of grapes. Only by study of this surface, ripe, rich, decadent only in the sense in which a brittle sun-baked July leaf is decadent, do we realize the real quality of those rocks … Greek even if once-removed, Sicilian. In Theocritus are layers of rocks, and under the rocks is fire, ever ready to break out volcanic, infernal one might say, were there for the Greek any inferno but that of suppression and inhibition and actual bodily death. This is the world of Theocritus, as different from that of Euripides as black earth from limpid water, water surface that reflects images of Olympians, pure spirits, as if the sun threw color and fire, different yet the same, passing through that Athenian intellect. For at Athens there is light and one has never seen such light, not in dream, not in vision, not light reflected from rock-pools, nor light from the ridges of mountains. There is gold in Egypt, there is air doubtless, warmed and colored and steeped in gold in Assyria, in Phoenicia, in Libya, gold beneath and above, there is heat in Assyria; there is color everywhere, there is light in one city. Read More
December 5, 2019 Arts & Culture The False Innocence of Black Pete By Philip Huff Writing a weekly column for a Dutch newspaper is a good way to lose heart. Not because whatever topic you choose, you’re bound to receive slews of emails from readers who disagree with you, or because of the amount of hatred people tend to offload in those letters. What gets you down is that some people seem to think that when you contradict them, you lose your right not only to freedom of speech but to your nationality. “That’s not the Dutch way of doing things.” When I hear this, I often find myself coming back to the James Baldwin passage from the Autobiographical Notes that begin Notes of a Native Son: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Although I have lived here for almost five years now, the country that I love most is not the United States of America. I was born in the Netherlands, and most of my family and friends live there. Still, the notion stays the same: precisely because I love the Netherlands so much, I insist on my right to continuously criticize her. The aim of that criticism is to better the principles by which that country functions, and because I know no single person—and certainly not me—can be the moral center of a country, my hope is that other Dutch people will do the same. I suggest we start by taking a closer look at our family holidays. Read More