July 10, 2019 On Music The Woman of a Thousand Faces By Zachary Fine Aldous Harding performing at the Oxford Art Factory on November 21, 2015. Photo: Bruce Baker (CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)). Via Wikimedia Commons. Aldous Harding is a young singer-songwriter, the kind usually labeled a folk musician, but she’s been more fittingly described as “New Zealand’s woman of a thousand voices.” She grew up in Lyttelton, a town near Christchurch, and was discovered while busking in the streets. On her self-titled 2014 debut, she has a high, tremulous voice that’s subtly lisped and bent into an accent, and the tone across songs is uniform—subdued, eerie, a vague mood of the medieval. But on her second album, Party, and again on Designer, released at the end of April, her voice splays. Tonally, it might sound as if she’s blowing into a glass bottle at first—every note shored up on warm bass—then she’ll pull some invisible ripcord in the prechorus, and a sustained wail will spring out, cutting through everything like blades on ice. I first encountered Harding while I was living in England a few years ago. The weather was gray, the political situation was dire, and my bike kept doing this thing where the pedals would lurch and my ribs would get crushed on the handlebars. I bought a helmet and a heavy rain jacket, indoctrinated myself in the pleasures of lukewarm ale, and eventually began looking online for new music—something dark that would hopefully confirm and condense the British situation. Harding’s songs are not just sad and morose; they’re funereal. Every note climbed out of my speakers like a black vine, curving its way around my flat until the walls breathed a kind of death chill. I felt I should be lighting rows of candles or wearing a suit. Her lyrics and track titles alone relay that skulls are swelling, stones are being cuddled, birds are not singing but screaming, and someone has broken their neck while “dancing to the edge of the world.” There’s also her face. When she sings, her eyes wheel around ballistically in their sockets, her teeth grit into a grimace, and her lips purse in this muscular way, as if clenching around gravel. The unspoken coordination of features somehow seems orchestral, complex. It’s totally mesmerizing. Even the promotional literature that circulates with her live show explains that she “does more than sing”—her body and face are a “weapon of theatre.” Read More
July 10, 2019 First Person On the Eve of My Eternal Marking By Jenny Boully Photo courtesy of the author. My son wants to know why flies are even a thing; he wants to know why bugs are even a thing. They bother him. I get it. I, too, have his sensitivities. On the other side of the world, where our real lives reside, Chicago winters coerce living things to slumber or die—not so here, in Thailand, where life announces itself in its full verdancy and fecundity, unending, its tight and insistent tendrils ever unfurling. Tomorrow, I will receive the sacred blessing of a Sak Yant, a talismanic, ancient, protective, and mystical stick-and-poke tattoo from one of the most revered spiritual masters in Thailand. This, however, was not a decision I made for myself: my mother said she had a premonition; it was overwhelming. She told me I needed this tattoo for protection. Such tattoos are simply part of Thai culture, especially as it is lived by the peasant class, a class that, without power or money or resources, depends on luck and superstition to bank their hopes and dreams and visions of someday. Superstition or no, my mother says I need the protection. And soon. So here I find myself, in the country of my birth, on the eve of an eternal marking. It is more than a mere mark; like baptism or confirmation, getting a Sak Yant is ceremony, a pronouncement that one has made a significant life choice. With this mark, I am making the choice to be mindful of the spiritual dimension. In other words, I will have to believe that there is something to believe in. Read More
July 10, 2019 Happily I Am the Mother of This Eggshell By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. When my grandfather was dying, he pointed into the gray hospital air and said, “Buildings.” “Drawn in light pencil,” he said. “All around me.” “Are they yours?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “They’re mine.” Now he is dead and his children are fighting over these buildings. I tell my mother I am writing about inheritance and fairy tales. “Well,” she says, “soon there will be no inheritance.” I imagine an eraser rubbing all the pencil drawings out at the exact moment my grandfather takes his last breath. An inheritance of rubber dust, as soft as the sawdust lining the twelve coffins in the Brothers Grimm’s “The Twelve Brothers.” That fairy tale begins with a king and a queen and their twelve sons. They are happy until a daughter is born with a gold star on her forehead. The king wants her to inherit the kingdom and so he orders twelve coffins made. A coffin for each son, filled with wood shavings and each fitted with a small pillow. He orders all his sons dead, but the queen orders them to flee into the woods. What is inheritance? In fairy tales it’s where loneliness resides. It divides and isolates. It leaves the girl with the star on her forehead looking up at twelve empty shirts on a clothesline that once contained her brothers. “These shirts are far too small for Father. Whose are they?” The queen replies with a heavy heart: “They belong to your twelve brothers.” Read More
July 9, 2019 Redux Redux: A Creator of Inwardness By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Elizabeth Hardwick. The Paris Review meets The New York Review of Books: our summer subscription deal is here! To celebrate, we’re taking a dive into both our archives for this week’s Redux. Read on for Elizabeth Hardwick’s Art of Fiction interview, paired with her 1969 essay “Reflections on Fiction”; Susan Sontag’s Art of Fiction interview, paired with her essay on Simone Weil; and James Baldwin’s Art of Fiction interview, paired with his 1970 letter to Angela Davis. If you enjoy these free interviews and essays, why not subscribe to both magazines? From now through the end of August, you’ll pay just $99—that’s 35% off—to receive a yearlong subscription to both The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books, as well as complete access to their respective archives. And if you’re already a Paris Review subscriber, never fear—this deal will extend your current subscription, and your new subscription to The New York Review will begin immediately. Read More
July 9, 2019 Arts & Culture Virginia Woolf’s Pivotal Sophomore Novel By Lauren Groff Illustration by Kristen Radtke. Beware, sweet Night and Day reader, of being seduced by the name of Virginia Woolf on the spine of this novel into believing you are about to read a work of high Modernism, a sister to the author’s towering To the Lighthouse and Orlando and The Waves. Along that path lies only bewilderment. This is not to say that you won’t find the Virginia Woolf you know and love in this book, because you certainly will, if mostly after the first half, and in an endearingly tender, nascent form. What I mean is that the conversation Virginia Woolf is conducting in her second novel is not the conversation of her later books, the one with avant-garde authors of the early twentieth century like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, but rather a shrewd and ultimately subversive discussion with the male writers of the Edwardian age, like Henry James, John Galsworthy, and her friend E. M. Forster. This is a book that gazes backward in time with skepticism and a virago’s impulse to shred into tatters all that it sees. No book is written in a vacuum, and an author’s sophomore novel is in many respects a product of the trauma caused by writing and publishing her debut. In Virginia Woolf’s case, that trauma was severe. Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915, when the writer was thirty-three years old, after more than seven years of composition, massive revisions to temper the sharper and angrier of her political commentary, a dropped engagement to her friend Lytton Strachey, a marriage to Leonard Woolf, and at least one nervous breakdown and suicide attempt. Woolf’s mental state had never been secure since the sudden death of her mother when she was thirteen, after which, in the severity of her grief, she tried to throw herself out a window. Two years after her mother died, her stepsister, Stella—the de facto mother figure to the four bereaved Stephen siblings, a soft and good-hearted young woman who was able to control the egomaniacal rages of their father—married, moved out, and within two months died of a sudden illness, and the life that Virginia and her siblings had been able to piece together after their mother’s death was totally obliterated. Read More
July 9, 2019 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Ingeborg Bachmann By Emma Garman Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Ingeborg Bachmann. Photo: Heinz Bachmann. In early 1973, the year she died, the celebrated Austrian poet and novelist Ingeborg Bachmann visited Auschwitz and Birkenau during a reading tour of Poland. She remarked: “I don’t understand how one can live with them nearby … There is nothing to say. They are simply there, and it leaves you speechless.” Bachmann had spent her career grappling with the inadequacy of language, in pursuit of the inexpressible. “If we had the word,” she argued in a 1959 speech, “if we had language, we would not need the weapons.” She believed in the potential of poetic language to expand the limitations of communication, but had become disillusioned with poetry as a medium. “Believe me,” says the writer-narrator of Bachmann’s cult-classic 1971 novel, Malina, “expression is insanity, it arises out of our insanity.” Bachmann was twelve when Germany invaded Austria in 1938, but her schoolteacher father already belonged to the Austrian branch of the National Socialist Party. She later described the marching of Hitler’s troops into her southernmost border state, Carinthia, as the “specific moment which destroyed my childhood … It was something so terrible, that my memory begins with that day: with that early sorrow.” When World War II ended she was nineteen, and a fervent leftist. Her diary entries from the summer of 1945 were published posthumously alongside letters from Jack Hamesh, the object of her innocent yet deeply formative first love. Hamesh was an Austrian Jew who, having fled Vienna for the British Protectorate of Palestine as an eighteen-year-old orphan in 1938, returned to Austria with the liberating British army. Though Bachmann and the young soldier were from such different worlds, they recognized each other’s loneliness and alienation. They bonded over conversations about literature, “Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig and Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal … he told me he never thought he’d find a young girl in Austria who’d read all that despite her Nazi upbringing.” (Mann, Zweig, and Arthur Schnitzler were all banned under the Third Reich.) It was “the loveliest summer of my life,” the teenage Bachmann recorded in her diary, “and even if I live to be a hundred it will still be the loveliest spring and summer.” In a 1946 letter from Tel Aviv, where he had settled, Hamesh wondered: “Was our life together just a chance episode? I felt it was something much deeper … for me it was proof that despite everything that has overtaken our two peoples there is still a way—the way of love and understanding.” Read More