June 3, 2019 YA of Yore YA of Yore: Annie on My Mind By James Frankie Thomas In her monthly column, YA of Yore, Frankie Thomas takes a second look at the books that defined a generation. Here’s the mystery of Annie on My Mind, the 1982 young adult novel by Nancy Garden: I’ve never met a straight person who’s read it. As far as I can tell, only queer women have read it—and yet I’ve never met one who sought it out on purpose. It comes to us only by accident. I’m generalizing, I know. But test it out for yourself. Ask your favorite lesbian how she first encountered Annie on My Mind, and you may well hear something like this Amazon review from the year 2001: “Someone gave me this book when I was 17 and wondering who the heck I was. I read it in one sitting, flipped it over and read it again.” Or this one, from 2009: “I was walking down a [library] aisle and just had this funny feeling to pull out this book. Call it crazy, but it felt like the book that I’ve never seen before wanted me to read it.” As if by enchantment, the novel finds its way, often in disguise, to those who don’t know they need it. It found its way to me in the summer of 2000, when I was thirteen, via the Union Square branch of Barnes & Noble. Back then YA fiction took up just one small shelf, consisting mostly of Francesca Lia Block and the hoax diaries of Beatrice Sparks, so I was quick to notice a book I’d never seen before. The tagline intrigued me: “Liza never knew falling in love could be so wonderful … or so confusing.” Why did I assume that Liza was in love with a boy, when the book gave no such indication? Its front cover depicted two girls holding hands, their eyes closed, their foreheads tenderly touching. Its back cover, which was a soft-butch shade of salmon pink, featured a short excerpt in which Liza’s mother asked, “Have you and Annie done more than the usual experimenting?” But these things have a way of hiding in plain sight from anyone not actively looking for them. We see what we expect to see. Annie was Liza’s best friend, I thought; the two of them were experimenting with boys. What else could they be doing? The other possibility, of course, is that I did know. On some level, perhaps, I knew right away. Read More
May 31, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Odes, #Ads, and Amazing Grace By The Paris Review Kathryn Scanlan. Recently, a friend told me about a job she’d had clearing out an apartment in Chelsea. It belonged to a woman who’d recently died, a woman my friend had never met. The woman was a hoarder, and when her apartment became impassible, she’d bought the one next door. In her final days, just enough space was cleared in her first apartment for her bed and hospice nurses. Slowly, my friend pieced together the woman’s life—an antique Chinese tea case shoved full of highlighters, hundreds of self-help books, thousands of photographs. A photo of the woman and her husband, who’d left her in her youth, naked in the bath with their cat; photos from her solo travels to Mongolia, Israel, and China. The woman had died alone, estranged from her family, but in death, through her photographs, my friend fell in love with her. Who wouldn’t? There’s something about encountering only the most intimate remnants of a life that can make us feel it is our own. Something similar happened to the writer Kathryn Scanlan when she came across a stranger’s diary in a box at an estate sale. The diary chronicled the years 1968 through 1972 in a small town in Illinois. Its owner was eighty-six when she began to write in it. For a decade, Scanlan read, cut, reread, and rearranged the words in the diary until she could no longer tell what was her own. The result, an elegant and unpretentious volume published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux next week as Aug 9 — Fog, grants every reader that simultaneous pull between mystery and intimacy. Some pages contain only a single sentence: “Robin on nest today,” “Terrible windy everything loose is traveling.” And yet buried within this pragmatic poetry (“Fog out. I sure slept. Took a Nytol.”) is a life, a death. These barest clues—of new lights installed and tomatoes canned, tombstones bought and weeds tormented, a self-help book with a photograph from decades before tucked inside—are the ones that make us fall in love. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More
May 31, 2019 Look Walt Whitman’s Right Hand By The Paris Review The great Walt Whitman sang a song of himself, and that song has continued to resonate over the two centuries that have passed since his birth. As a poet, a queer icon, and a literary celebrity, his influence on the American consciousness was monumental. A new exhibition at The Morgan Library and Museum, “Walt Whitman: Bard of Democracy” (on view from June 7 to September 15), examines how thoroughly Whitman’s work is threaded into this country’s DNA and mythology. A selection of artifacts from the show—including a plaster cast of the poet’s right hand, a notebook containing early versions of lines from Leaves of Grass, and the cardboard butterfly he posed with in one of his infamous author portraits—appears below. Phillips & Taylor, Photograph of Walt Whitman, 1873. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Image provided courtesy of the Library of Congress. Walt Whitman’s cardboard butterfly, 1850. Manuscript Division, Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of Walt Whitman Papers, Library of Congress. Image provided courtesy of the Library of Congress. Read More
May 31, 2019 Summer Solstice The Start of Summer 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, Summer in Nidden. 1919-1920 It was early June, Saturday, midmorning on the Red Line. I was moving through tunnels beneath Cambridge when a teenager approached and asked if I wanted to take part in a memory project. Take an index card and a pen and write down a memory, any memory at all, and get one from a stranger in return. I took a card, a pen, and wrote. I handed it to her, and before we reached the next stop she returned and handed me a memory that belonged to another person on the subway car. It was written on an index card folded in half: On the last night of summer camp, my best friends and I snuck out of our cabins and slept on the tennis courts so we could stargaze and spoon with each other all night. I saw 6 shooting stars that night. Such is summer. Unroofed, under stars, away from parents, away from rules, pressing against friends, laughing, urgent whispers—did you hear that?—quiet, quiet, earth as bed and sky as blanket. The stars sweep across the sky in silence, heaven’s hemispheric map-makers, time-tellers, their positions revealing where in the year we are. Where in the year are we? We don’t need to track the stars to know. Here in the northern hemisphere, each evening’s longer light alerts us. Right now the year is skipping toward the opening of the heated season. Which, for some, begins tomorrow, June 1. Where you define the start of the summer depends on whether you align yourself with the meteorological calendar, which is used by climatologists and meteorologists, or the astronomical calendar. If you stand with the scientists, June 1 starts summer (and September 1 starts fall, December 1, winter, and March 1, spring). If you base your seasonal switches on the earth’s tilt and changing relationship to the sun, the solstice opens the season, this year on June 21, when, in the northern hemisphere, the sun reaches its highest point in the sky, and light lasts longer than any day of the year. Read More
May 31, 2019 Arts & Culture What Really Killed Walt Whitman? By Caleb Johnson “Sit a while dear son, Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink, But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence.” – “Section 46” of Song of Myself, Walt Whitman At the start of every semester I ask my creative writings students what food they would choose to eat for their last meal. What they say reveals elements of their pasts, values, hopes, regrets. Students have answered crème brûlée, Papa John’s pizza, Ritz Crackers washed down with grape juice. My go-to is whole fried chicken, served cold, alongside champagne. Beginning in a roundup of notable ailing figures titled “The Sick Among Us,” the New York Times chronicled the decline of Walt Whitman, whose two-hundredth birthday would have been today. In the article published December 18, 1891, he was said to have been “taken with a chill” and “quite feeble to-night, though not considered dangerously ill.” The poet was seventy-two years old, a celebrity the country over—his health warranted front-page news. Over the next few months, the Times continued with minute coverage of what turned out to be Whitman’s final days and diet. Among the liquids and solids mentioned, one in particular caught my eye—milk punch. Milk punch dates back to the seventeenth century. The cocktail writer David Wondrich credits the drink to Aphra Behn, an English actress and writer noted for being one of the first women to make a living by publishing her work. Typically milk punch contains milk, sugar, a sprinkle of nutmeg, and bourbon, brandy, or rum—sometimes more than one. There are two main varieties: the creamy kind served in a glass right after mixing, and the clarified kind, bottled in advance. For the latter, milk gets curdled then strained, which creates a smoother flavor. Whitman’s health problems had begun decades prior. In the summer of 1858, he experienced a small cerebral hemorrhage. While he continued to brag about his rosy complexion, his thick beard, and how he tipped the scales at more than two hundred pounds, the hemorrhage was the first of several strokes that would partially paralyze the poet on one side of his body. According to Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography by David S. Reynolds, Whitman received a number of confusing diagnoses throughout his life, which seeded a mistrust of doctors and medicine. In September 1869, one medical professional told Whitman the dizziness and sweating he was experiencing resulted from “hospital malaria, hospital poison absorbed in the system.” Vague diagnoses like this were common before germ theory. Read More
May 30, 2019 Pinakothek Masked and Anonymous By Lucy Sante In her biweekly column, Pinakothek, Lucy Sante excavates and examines miscellaneous visual strata of the past. The press photographer’s task is to obtain a likeness of the person who is at the center of the news. This proves difficult when the subject, who is either accused of crimes or tied, however flimsily, to someone who is, wants to avoid being photographed at all costs. Hounded at every step, unable to escape, even in shackles, the subject resorts to makeshift concealments—hat, sleeve, lapel, handkerchief, newspaper—in order to prevent facial capture. The photographer can only pursue, shadow, perhaps verbally goad the subject, waiting for a slip or a stumble that will cause the mask to drop. When that fails to happen, the photographer’s sole option is to photograph the mask. The public, inflamed by press coverage of the case, wants a face it can charge with blame (and, often enough, spread the blame to faces that bear it a superficial resemblance), but is instead offered a metonym: hat, handkerchief, newspaper. The photographer, in quest of a portrait, has delivered in its place an event: the defeat of portraiture by the subject. Read More