June 7, 2019 Summer Solstice In Summer We’re Reborn By Nina MacLaughlin In this series on the summer solstice, which will run every Friday through June 21, Nina MacLaughlin wonders what summer’s made of. Max Pechstein, Frische Brise, 1921 We start in the stars and move to the womb, which is to say water, which is to say swimming, which is the best part of summer. We’ll ease in. On the dawn of the summer solstice, rouse yourself from bed and head to the lawn or the field or the garden, kneel in the grass or the mulch, and with palms open, touch the grass or leaves or petals, get the damp on your hands, and put the wetness to your face. Power lives in the solstice dew—it gives youth, beauty, health, new glow. Especially true for maidens, it’s said, but all can take part. Take a dew bath in the solstice dawn. It makes sense somehow with the residual self-evidence of childhood—oh, of course the solstice dew holds magic—like a belief in fairies or demons. There’s a lot in this world we can’t see. Dew is the damp left behind as day is born out of night, “a child of moon and air,” according to the lyric poet Alkman, writing in the seventh century B.C. Air and moon mingle and the result is a bead on the grass blade. Haikuist Kobayashi Issa writes: The world of dew is the world of dew. And yet, and yet— Here, the dash is the haiku’s Rorschach test—how does your brain fill in what’s next? This world is real, but it won’t last long. This world exists and yet—we can’t enter it, and yet—we live right in it. And yet the world of dew is not a world at all. And yet what is a world and what are we doing? On the solstice, a baptism with these beads brings renewal, purification, a whole new life. We’re made fresh and ready. When Christianity took sway over paganism, there came a midsummer day, the midpoint between planting and harvest, known as Saint John’s Eve. It marks the feast day of Saint John the Baptist, he who dipped people in the river and washed them of their sin, he who rebirthed people in the water. Read More
June 7, 2019 Eat Your Words Cooking with Ntozake Shange By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. Ntozake Shange (1948–2018) is one of those writers who just don’t want to stay on the page. The book that made her famous was not a book, really, but a “choreopoem”: the now legendary For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, which was first performed at a women’s bar outside Berkeley, California, in 1974, before it traveled to New York City and eventually ran at the Public Theater and on Broadway. Shange wrote poetry, most of which was refined in the presence of a band, and novels, including Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo, which bursts with idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation, healing rituals, recipes, and gemstone lore. In its overall effect, her work feels less like something to be read than something to be experienced. This was a deliberate strategy of black American resistance, Shange tells us in her 2011 book of essays, Lost in Language and Sound. As a child of the seventies, Shange was, in her own words, an Afrocentrist, who adopted a Pan-African identity to the extent that she uses “we” in essays on places as disparate as Cuba, Haiti, and Brazil. “My house, my neighborhood, my soul,” she writes, “was immersed as far as I can recall in the accents of Togo, Liberia, Trinidad, Costa Rica, Chicago, Lagos, New Orleans, Bombay, and Cape Town, not to minimize in any way drawls of the Mississippi, clipped consonants from Arkansas, or soprano-like chisme (gossip) of Kansas City.” Due to the cross-cultural riches of the diaspora and because “most black people have some music and movement in our lives,” Shange posited an “independently created afro-American aesthetic” that was essentially multidisciplinary. She refused limitations, hated plays that were just dialogue without music and dance, and rejected English as the speech of the slavers and “the language I waz taught to hate myself in.” After all, For Colored Girls more than just a work of art, it was a spell or a ritual or a promise of aid to those on the brink of despair. Read More
June 6, 2019 The Big Picture Modernism’s Debt to Black Women By Cody Delistraty An exhibition at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay centers on a black model named Laure in Édouard Manet’s Olympia and reinterrogates the role of black people in art history. Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, 51″ x 75″. Presented at the 1865 Salon. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, RF 644. Photo © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. Around the time that Édouard Manet was painting Olympia, in 1863, a liberating politics was underway in France. Napoleon III had become so distracted with foreign affairs—handling the Second French Intervention in Mexico, breaking up a burgeoning Roman Republic in order to restore the Pope’s power, and making colonial conquests throughout Central Africa, Asia, and the South Seas—that he had little time to resist many of the political pressures back home. And so he was actually carrying out some of the promises he’d made in the run-up to his Second Empire coronation, such as reducing media censorship and allowing workers to strike. By 1870, Napoleon III, under the pressure of the Liberals, even assented to a parliamentary legislature in France, which would ultimately serve as the basis of the Third Republic. In the late nineteenth century, Paris began to seem like an integrated and relatively racially equitable city. After the 1848 Revolution, slavery had been abolished in France’s territorial colonies; Caribbean people moved en masse to the French capital. Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, and his father, Thomas-Alexandre—who was one of the most important black military men in European history—were viewed as unassailably prominent members of French society. Racism, of course, still existed, even at the highest levels of government: in 1884, Jules Ferry, who served as both prime minister and as president of the senate, was espousing his eugenics-based racism, saying things like, “The higher races have a right over the lower races … a duty to civilize the inferior races.” But for a moment, the scene seemed to be set for a fresh form of liberty and relative equality. Gustave Le Gray, Portrait d’Alexandre Dumas en costume russe, 1859, oval proof laminated on gray paper, itself laminated on cardboard, 10″ x 7 1/2″. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, PHO 1986 11. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d’Orsay) / image RMN-GP. Art, naturally, was both driver and recipient. The poet Charles Baudelaire was dating Jeanne Duval, a French Haitian actress so beautiful she was often called the Black Venus and was painted by Manet. Manet, meanwhile, was fashioning himself as a recorder of the contemporary social scene. A number of his paintings depicted the black people who had immigrated to the northern neighborhoods of Paris. In his studio notebook, he described the black maid whom he painted standing next to the lounging white prostitute in Olympia and the black caregiver in his Children in the Tuileries Garden (1862) as “Laure, très belle négresse, rue Vintimille, 11, 3éme étage.” Manet’s depiction of Laure wasn’t exoticized—not the kind of nude caricature that had been standard of European depictions of black women. Instead, with her voguish neckline and bouquet of flowers, Laure modeled a typically “white role,” as a clerk in a department store or a server at a café. Also: whereas in Titian’s Venus of Urbino (ca. 1532), a clear forerunner of Olympia, the maid, who is white, is turned away from the nude, lounging women in the foreground; in Olympia, Laure is just as much a part of the scene, in both the amount of the canvas she takes up and her foregrounded placement. Read More
June 6, 2019 Look Beach Life By The Paris Review No one captures the colorful, blissful chaos of the beach like the British photographer Martin Parr. Some of his seaside shots swim with the verve of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Others are spare, dotted with tiny figures who are nearly swallowed up in the sprawl of the dunes. Everywhere there are stories: a seagull going about its day; surfers cresting and crashing; a couple, still wet from a dip, canoodling across their towels. Martin Parr: Beach Therapy collects and reproduces the latest in Parr’s long-running series of sandy photographs. A selection of images from the book appears below. Martin Parr, Mar Del Plata, Argentina, 2014. From the series Beach Therapy. © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos. Read More
June 6, 2019 Arts & Culture On Effort and Letting Go By Salvatore Scibona Creative Commons License: alexanderward12 Every writer has a carburetor, unique to herself, that measures out a mist of fuel for the volume of flowing air in the cylinder of her imagination. A plug provides the spark, the fuel ignites, and off she goes. The spark is an idea; the fuel is effort; the air is grace. She needs them all, and all in balance. If the cylinder contains too much fuel, it won’t ignite. She sits in an old car on a winter morning and twists the key while she pumps the pedal: the engine makes a cranking wheeze, not the whoosh of ignition. She pumps the pedal again, adding still more fuel, to no avail. She has flooded the cylinder. She has tried too hard. For three years, I sat at my desk, about six mornings a week, and nothing happened. A strenuous nothing. With great force, I looked at the wall. Or I wrote a few paragraphs, revised, typed, extended, retyped, over a number of months, then threw it all away. Advice from Kafka hung from a thumbtack in the bulletin board over my desk: Wait. Vehemently, I waited. I was trying to write a second novel. The first had taken ten years, but I had spent most of that time writing my way into mistakes and cutting my way back out of them. Experience should have counted for something. Next to Kafka on the bulletin board hung instructions from Nina Simone to her band during a recording session: “Y’all pushing … Just relax, relax. You’re pushing it. It’ll go up by itself.” Read More
June 5, 2019 Arts & Culture The Tale of Genji: What Is It? By Anthony Madrid A woodblock print from 1852 featuring a scene from The Tale of Genji The Tale of Genji—what is it? It is a super-long, super-detailed proto-novel, written in Japan in the early years of the eleventh century. It was written by a woman whose personal name is lost but who acquired the nickname “Murasaki” on account of its being the name of the most important female character in the book. Murasaki means lavender. There’s a Japanese ink, purple of course, named after Nippon’s #1 purple girl —$20 a bottle on Amazon, if you’re into purple ink. (Probably a lot of purple things in Japan are named after Lady Murasaki.) Now, what do I mean by “super-long.” I mean 1,135 pages in the handy one-volume version of the Arthur Waley translation (originally published in six volumes, 1925–1933), 1,090 pages in Edward Seidensticker’s translation (two volumes, 1976), and I don’t know how many pages in Royall Tyler (2001) and in Dennis Washburn (2016). At any rate, it’s like with Proust: one narrative, a half-dozen novel-sized books. What’s it about? It’s about the life (especially the erotic life) of a very glamorous, heart-crushing, multi-talented dude: Genji. That’s about two thirds of it. Later, it’s about the next generation: Genji’s son, and these other ones, including a guy whom everyone thinks is his son… Doesn’t sound all that interesting, right? Oh, but it is! Because of the way the material is handled. The narrator, in fact a court lady who all her life dealt with Genjis and sub-Genjis and all their women and all their children, tells the story with a very modern-seeming strategic restraint. Her characters are selfish and generous, foolish and wise, from one minute to the next, and she simply tells you what they said, thought, and did, without overtly judging them. Now, this approach doesn’t amount to squat, when a narrator is describing beings whose moral status is perfectly clear, but the effect becomes exciting and engrossing for readers the second they find themselves longing to be told what to think. Read More