September 9, 2019 Happily The Currency of Tears By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. One day in nursery school, when I was five I think, I cried. My teacher, in her floral apron with gigantic pockets, handed me a paper cup. She handed me a paper cup, and told me to collect my tears as they slid down my face and drink them. “And when you drink your tears,” she said, “think about your ancestors who were slaves in Egypt.” It must’ve been close to Passover. She didn’t intend to be cruel. Her face was covered with freckles the same rust color as the flowers on her apron. The other kids wanted to taste the tears, too. The teacher told me to pass the cup around. And I did. And from the little paper cup the children drank. I wish I could remember what I was crying over. In 2014, a story appeared about a Yemeni woman who cries stones. She produces as many as a hundred stones a day, and she cries most of the stones in the afternoon and evening. She is one of twenty children, and she does not cry stones while she is sleeping. None of her sisters or brothers cry stones. Her name is Sadia, which means “happy” in Arabic. The tears look like tiny pebbles, and they collect under her lower eyelids. It is not impossible that the girl’s tears are the same pebbles Hansel and Gretel use to make a path home. Local doctors cannot offer a scientific explanation, but some villagers agree she is under a magic spell. Read More
September 9, 2019 Arts & Culture A Very Short List of Very Short Novels with Very Short Commentary By Alice McDermott In her Art of Fiction interview in our new Fall issue, Alice McDermott reveals that she is currently at work on a very short novel. The format has long intrigued her, and she has taught a class on the subject to her M.F.A. students at Johns Hopkins University. “I divide the reading list into three loose categories: A Day in the Life, An Inciting Incident, and A Life. We read three novels in each category, and then the students begin their own short novels, using these somewhat fungible categories as structural guides,” she says. “The wonderful thing about teaching the short novel is that structure is everything, and often more apparent than in a long and winding five-hundred-pager.” We asked her to share a few of her favorite short novels below. A Day in the Life Seize the Day by Saul Bellow This is a novel that careens to a foregone conclusion (page 2: “Today he was afraid. He was aware that his routine was about to break up and he sensed that a huge trouble long presaged but til now formless was due”) without ever losing its protagonist’s—the slovenly, whiny, disappointed, exhausted, endearing Tommy Wilhelm’s—own desperate, caffeinated, ever-flickering sense of hope. It’s all in the language: hardly a sentence in this novel, hardly a detail, that does not, wryly, keenly, make your heart ache. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn A novel that proves plodding doesn’t have to be a pejorative. Ivan Denisovich Shukov’s icy plod through this long, cold, routine day in a Siberian labor camp magnifies an excruciating drama: the struggle to find food, to work, to stay out of trouble, to stay human in the most inhuman of circumstances. Less celebrated than it once was, this novel is more than a historical artifact or political tract, it’s a chilling (literally) work of art. Read More
September 9, 2019 First Person One Thousand and One Nights By Samantha Hunt Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781, oil on canvas, 40″ x 50″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. “I hate running.” My oldest daughter might quit soccer. I start to defend running, though running, to me, is always as in a dream, legs stuck in quicksand, lungs stiff with panic, the bad guy closing in. Why defend things I do not like? I tell my girl the truth. “I hate running, too.” * When do the men come to you? They come to me at night. In the quiet, they find a way in, as if they’d been waiting in the foyer all day. Samantha will see you now. Which is to say, I let the men in, reckoning with the past. I don’t sleep well and, through the long night, the men line up like planes for landing, a flight pattern of losers: the crotch-grabber on the night train; the frotteur on the Roman bus; the masturbator on the C local; the man in Grand Central; the man at the photo assistant interview; the guy in the Chevrolet; my older cousin’s older boyfriend who slipped into my bed when I was fourteen; and the stranger jerking off beside me on a dark Santa Monica beach as I sang a slow, sad version of “Shattered,” wearing my nutty song as a protective shroud of mental instability or at least a muffle to drown out the grunts and fleshy kneadings of him getting off on my fear. Read More
September 6, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Men-Children, Motown, and Middle Age By The Paris Review Jennifer Croft. Of late, I’ve encountered a cluster of victorious, independent teens in my reading. In Tara Westover’s Educated, Tara splits from her Idaho family’s abuse to thrive in the British education system. In Lara Prior-Palmer’s Rough Magic, Lara decamps from a posh English upbringing to ride a pony across the Mongolian-Manchurian steppe. A similar narrative even springs up in the latest Sally Rooney novel, Normal People: Marianne quits her hometown to find some version of herself and success at Trinity. These stories detail train wrecks and triumph, following young women going it alone to overcome anything, everything. Jennifer Croft’s new memoir, Homesick, takes that same fabric of the young woman finding her way and makes an entirely different garment. Here is a young woman refusing to let go of her family: little sister Zoe gets sick, and Amy (Jennifer’s stand-in) frets and fumbles her way through treatment, waiting for news. Amy goes away to college early, but the broadened horizons are hardly a panacea to the troubles at home—instead it opens up a new level of longing and absence. And while the propulsive narrative of the aforementioned books is compelling (there’s even a race, that most rocket-fueled of story lines), in Homesick Croft teaches us to read another way: the story is told between long, potent subtitles and short vignettes, between the focus of Croft’s photos and what might be out of the frame. It’s a slower sort of storytelling, a family wound up together, heading not toward victory but acceptance. And in creating that intricate web, one built of ambitious form, unflinching recollection, and her own style of multifaceted lyricism, Croft has arrived at a triumph of another kind. —Emily Nemens Read More
September 6, 2019 Arts & Culture Does Poetry Have Street Cred? By Major Jackson Major Jackson photo: © Erin Patrice O’Brien. Does American poetry suffer from an abundance of artistic dignity and not enough street credibility? It’s possible. When I asked a friend, a terrific prose writer, why she seems to have a slight disdain for poetry, she replied, “It’s too elitist, like walking through a beautiful forest in which I know not where to look, much less know what I am searching for. If I don’t get it as a reader, then I feel like an idiot and somehow not worthy of the form.” In years past, I would have fretted and dismissed her remarks as garden-variety philistinism, but my friend is admirably sensitive, a brilliant scholar, Ivy educated, and not someone prone to make trivializing remarks without great consideration. Nor is she alone. For the better part of my life, at dinner parties, at neighborhood gatherings, or on the sidelines of my children’s sporting events, I have had to confront the incredulity of ordinarily thoughtful, even erudite people who professed a similar antagonism toward poetry. An English department chair, a Renaissance scholar relishing a moment of candor, with tapenade and a flute of Dom Ruinart in hand, admitted to me that he is “terrified” of poetry. The roots of such fears and anxieties have been the subject of many essays, and as a result there are as many defenses as there are quarrels with poetry, the most recent being Ben Lerner’s humorous and insolently titled The Hatred of Poetry. Read More
September 5, 2019 Arts & Culture The Clarity of Violence By Rosie Price On rereading Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and confronting the trauma of sexual assault. The morning after I was raped, nearly eight years ago, I got in my car and drove home. There, in my teenage bedroom, I took the pair of tights I’d been wearing the night before out of my bag, put them back on, and looked at myself in the mirror. The tights were torn across the crotch: not a ladder, but a gaping, deliberate tear that went across both thighs and between my legs. At the tops of my legs, on the skin exposed by the tear, were bruises. I took the tights off and threw them away, along with the underwear I had been wearing that night. I was due to start my first year of college in a week, and my mind was pushing down the memories of what had happened the night before. Even then, I was already rationalizing the tears and the bruises as something consensual, something I had either invited or agreed to. The mind has ways of burying what has happened to the body, during and after trauma. If this has not happened to you, it can be difficult to comprehend. Dissociative amnesia is a survival mechanism which represses memories and experiences of trauma so deeply that the conscious mind has no access to it. Throughout my time at university, I dissociated myself from the memory of what had happened just before I moved away from home. I experienced anxiety and depression, developed disordered eating habits and addictive behavior. I had nightmares, dreams of a man standing over me, from which I would wake up screaming so loudly that I would wake my neighbors, but all of this I somehow managed to put down to exam stress, work stress—anything that would allow me to continue denying the fact that I had been raped. It was not until a year after graduating, more than four years after the assault, that I first acknowledged what had happened to me. Whether it was emotional stability, maturity, or forcible reminders, my mind was ready to present me with those buried memories. And when they came, they came with force. I was suffering daily panic attacks, flashbacks, intense anxiety, and depression. I began treatment, medication courses, therapy, and the soul-destroying work of telling the people I loved most what I had spent all these years hiding. Of the various coping mechanisms I developed, functional and dysfunctional, the one I held on to, the one that gave me the most hope, was writing. It gave me the possibility of a future that wasn’t shaped by trauma, but that I might shape. When I first started showing symptoms of post-traumatic stress, it was November 2015. By the end of the year, I had written the short story—a rape, its consequences—on which my first novel would be based. Read More