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
July 8, 2019 Arts & Culture A Circus of Mallarméan Delights By Rachel Kushner Wayne Koestenbaum. Photo: Ebru Yildiz. Wayne Koestenbaum has written many books, and even recorded an album. I’ve seen him psychoanalyzed before a large, rapt audience. He does a lounge act, of spoken word and Scriabin. He paints. Among his glittering and varied oeuvre (and for Koestenbaum, oeuvre can be the only word used here), there is only one novel: Circus, or, as it was previously known, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes. The first time I met Wayne Koestenbaum was just after this novel initially appeared, almost fifteen years ago. He was reading from it at a bookstore. He wore, for his reading, a white pleather café racer’s jacket. It was raining that night. His jacket looked worthy to repel water but featured no hood, its semi-rain-worthiness a mere symptom of its primary function, which was to throw light. Koestenbaum and this book seemed like vessels containing an unusual combination of erudition, elegance, irreverence, and, in welcome measure, a touch of sleaze. Later, I recall people comparing Moira Orfei to Nabokov’s Pale Fire and the novels of Genet. I believe that means they approved. I approve, too, but I find those comparisons useless. Koestenbaum’s unique aesthetic orbit, his humor and thematic range, cannot really be understood by such refractions, although if I had to compare it I’d say his humor is like Bataille’s. “Don’t get your hopes up,” Theo Mangrove, the narrator of Circus, implores. “The object in your hands is not a novel.” But don’t believe Theo, either. The object in your hands really is a novel. But it retains the force of its language even when its words are pulled apart, left to sweat, in Mallarméan marmalade: the flawed the almost the …..not ……..quite …………..No one loves Baked Alaska …………..Heartlessness is a symbol ……………..Soiled time Pink sweater set …………………………………………………………………..Primary ruin ………………………………………………………Immortality clause ……………………………………………………Jerking off, I canceled reality a) Describe ….. b) Disappear Read More
July 8, 2019 Arts & Culture Trash Talk: On Translating Garbage By Lina Mounzer When we speak of translation in these end-of-days, it is often in the loftiest of tones, as though it were a sacred duty undertaken by devoted adepts prostrating themselves before the altar of language. The self is renounced, the greed for authorship forsworn in service of a greater calling, which is no less than bridging the gaps between the peoples and cultures of the world. This is certainly true if you’re translating, say, Don Quixote, or Heian-period Japanese poetry, or a new novel by Senegal’s latest rising star. But only a small minority of translators have the skill, opportunity, and financial security required to take on such labors of love. The rest of us, to earn a living wage, will have to make do with whatever garbage we can get. By garbage I mean any or all of the following: corporate-speak, brand manifestos, NGO reports, think tank reports, letters from government agencies replying to American oil companies, letters from government agencies replying to human rights organizations, prose written by self-professed wunderkinds whose trust funds and unearned self-confidence are paying for the translation, and that vilest genre of all, the art text. Read More
July 8, 2019 The Big Picture What’s the Use of Beauty? By Cody Delistraty Édouard Manet. Woman Reading, 1880 or 1881. The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection. The halo effect is a type of cognitive bias in which your initial superficial assessment of a person influences your perception of their other, more ambiguous traits. In the name of cultural journalism, I conducted an informal experiment to test this. I posted five different photographs of myself to a website called Photofeeler, which people mostly use for their acting headshots, company photographs, and online dating profiles. Strangers vote on your attractiveness, trustworthiness, and intelligence, and, using a weighted algorithm, the website tells you the percentile you’re in compared with the rest of the people on the website so you can choose the best photograph. The photo of mine that was voted the most attractive—my fingers awkwardly crinkled around a wineglass on a terrasse—was the one in which I was voted smartest and most trustworthy. The photograph in which I was deemed ugliest—sitting in a cab—was the one in which I was voted dumbest and least trustworthy. In every photograph, my perceived attractiveness determined my perceived trustworthiness and intelligence, traits that, of course, are impossible for anyone to actually know from a picture. The notion of the halo effect and the idea that “beauty is good”—meaning that we assume people who are prettier must also be cleverer, kinder, more moral than uglier people—were first tested in 1972 by the psychologists Karen Dion, Ellen Berscheid, and Elaine Walster. They found that people almost uniformly believed that those who they found more attractive on the basis of three small photographs were also more generous and more stable and had better marriages, better jobs, and better families than less attractive people. A similar study from just a few years ago found that people trust those they consider more attractive significantly more quickly than those they consider less attractive. Is beauty, therefore, the most useful trait one might have? Read More
July 5, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Fathers, Fleabag, and the French Toast of Agony By The Paris Review Ingeborg Bachmann. Photo: Heinz Bachmann. I knew I was going to appreciate Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1971 cult classic Malina before I even picked it up—not only have I enjoyed reading her poetry in the past (some of which has been published in the pages of this very magazine), she’s also a major influence on one of my favorite writers, Elfriede Jelinek. And so I sat down this past weekend to finally read Malina, recently reissued by New Directions, with a great eagerness—but I didn’t realize just how profoundly it would affect me. The novel is almost impossible to describe—dense and experimental, it’s essentially a portrait of one woman’s psychological unraveling. The narrator, a nameless writer in Vienna, is torn between obsessive relationships with two different men: Ivan and the mysterious Malina, who may or may not be real. But the book is also about trauma and shame and the implicit violence that lurks in the relationships between women and men. Many pages are dedicated to a series of nightmarish visions the narrator has about her father, seemingly based on Bachmann’s hatred of her own Nazi father. Like Jelinek after her, Bachmann delineates the relationship between patriarchy and fascism to extraordinary effect, and though her vision may be bleak, it is one of profound, disquieting importance. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
July 5, 2019 Eat Your Words Eat This Book: A Food-Centric Interview with Amber Scorah By Valerie Stivers I met the Canadian writer Amber Scorah at a party last winter. She was introduced by a mutual friend as the author of an upcoming memoir, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life. I tried but failed to bite my tongue (a frequent failure), and asked, “What terrible thing happened to you?” Scorah, it turned out, was a former Jehovah’s Witness who’d escaped the church while working as a missionary in China. Fortunately, she had a sense of humor. The hard-knocks memoir is nothing new, but Scorah’s struck me as a story relevant to today’s cultural moment, and to my mission as the Eat Your Words columnist for The Paris Review, where I re-create meals from the pages of books, not just for fun (though it is fun) but because approaching a beloved book through its food is an estranging and fertile way to connect to the story. What field of human endeavor is more estranging than being a missionary? You go, bearing the ultimate truth (as you see it), to a place where you know nothing, to a people you know nothing about, where you are a stranger and everything is strange to you. You’re there to teach, not to learn; to talk, not to listen; to show, not to see. Many people in this position gird themselves with disdain for those they’ve come to convert—it helps to keep up the conviction that you are right and everyone else is wrong. But for those who approach their potential converts with respect, the way Scorah did despite her training, the missionary relationship can become inverted. Of learning Chinese, Scorah writes, “It was a different way of being in the world. I was in a mild state of disorientation for a number of years, and one of the unexpected effects was that I was slowly made a little less sure that the world was in fact as I had always seen it.” I’ve always been attracted to learning from experience. You sit down, you share food, if you’re paying attention, you’ll learn something. Being a missionary in a foreign country is all unfamiliar foods and new dining companions. And while the history of religious expansionism is littered with human tragedy, there are many inspiring individual stories. Shortly before meeting Scorah, I’d written a column on Pearl S. Buck, the author of a thirties U.S. best seller set in China, The Good Earth. Buck was a daughter of missionaries to China. Like Scorah, she renounced her church after gaining perspective from her contact with Chinese culture. And though her legacy is tarnished with accusations of racism (a 1937 movie version of The Good Earth in which the Chinese characters were portrayed by white actors is partially responsible), in her own time she was responsible for the first realistic depiction of the everyman Chinese farmer in either Chinese or American literature. Scorah and I talked about Leaving the Witness, the parallels between her life and Buck’s, and of course, Chinese food. INTERVIEWER Where did this story begin? How did you become a Jehovah’s Witness? SCORAH I was born on the prairies of Canada as a third-generation Jehovah’s Witness on both sides. From a young age, I heard what was preached from the platform at our meetings, and internalized its message of apocalypse and destruction in a deep way. When you’re a young girl from a family that has some problems, and you are offered clear guidelines about how to protect yourself from a violent end, you listen. Our children’s books from the organization couldn’t have helped—they depicted children in the paradise God had promised would come after Armageddon, but also had graphic illustrations of the world’s end, with fire raining down on children from the sky, destroying them. It was a strong motivator. Plus, the people in the congregation were so kind and nice to me, it felt like a safe place to be. I’ve since come to understand that this is one tactic that groups like this use to control people: creating unresolvable fear and balancing it out with generous doses of love. The love, however, is conditional on your staying in the group. When I was entering secondary school, my family moved to Vancouver. After I graduated from high school, I ended up becoming a “pioneer,” which is a Jehovah’s Witness who commits to at least seventy hours per month preaching, a missionary of sorts, except that we support ourselves in the work. It was in Vancouver that I first encountered Chinese people in my preaching work. INTERVIEWER You’ve told me that for a smart, ambitious person, being a Jehovah’s Witness was boring, and your solution to that was to go to China. Is that right? SCORAH Yes, especially as a woman. Women are not allowed to teach in the congregation, or to have positions of authority in the organization. Careers are forbidden, education is off limits, even getting too into any kind of hobby or sport is discouraged—because they are all a distraction. For a woman who liked to do things, there was only one acceptable place to focus her energies: preaching. Read More