May 23, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Then the Letting Go By Claire Schwartz In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This column has run weekly for over a year, and now, our dear and busy poets must slow it down to once a month. Never fear — they’ll still be here, just a bit less often. This month, Claire Schwartz is on the line. ©ELLIS ROSEN Dear Poets, Two years ago, I came out of the closet to my family by introducing them to my girlfriend. They responded fairly negatively, expressing their disbelief (“we would have known if you were gay”) and disapproval (“it’s not something we believe in or support”). I have pushed back in many ways—bringing my girlfriend to family functions, being hypervisible online, and proclaiming the steadfastness and validity of my relationship in frequent and intense fights. In the wake of this, my relationship, which did not have a strong foundation to begin with and shouldered the normal fears and anxieties that accompany any romantic partnership, suffered greatly. The more unstable my relationship became, the more strongly I held on to it—I fought for her so hard in the public arena that I didn’t know how not to in the private one. At times, it was volatile and abrasive, yet I fought for it still. After two years of what felt like pushing the boulder of “us” up a mountain, we decided to call it quits. Now I am both heartbroken over losing her and losing myself. In her absence, I am struggling to find mooring. How do you mourn a relationship whose primary purpose was to validate your queerness, both to yourself and others? How do you maintain an identity in the absence of the person it was formed around? Perhaps most of all, can I keep her in my life without making her my compass? Sincerely, Broken Heart, Broken Self Read More
May 23, 2019 First Person Winter By Marin Sardy Photo: Paxson Woelber, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)). Still sometimes late at night it slides in—what it felt like to think of my brother Tom outside. In the coldest seasons of his years of homelessness, it would rise up late in the day if I was alone in the hour in which darkness descended. Each year as the seasons shifted, as leaves fell and the frosts came to Santa Fe or New York, I would grow tired and short-tempered, my body aching. The small muscles along my spine would seize up and I would get tight headaches. A knot would form at the base of my skull as my shoulders lifted and pinched, causing a tingling pain to come on along the backs of my arms. I would have to distract myself, get my mind off Tom—have a beer, talk about movies, pop a Valium left over from a prescription for back spasms. I came to rely on certain facts about his relationship to winter. That he had been a skier, a camper, a mountain climber. That Alaska was, aside from a few years in Boulder, the only home he had ever known. He knew how to survive outside. He had the skills to stay warm, to make a camp in the woods. As long as he could keep track of his gear. Find enough food. That was my biggest worry at first—that he was always hungry. Nights, I tried not to imagine the worst possibilities of where he might be. Instead I placed him in the safest, warmest camp I could conjure. I led him into the thickets beside the Coastal Trail, built him a snow cave, stuffed him into a fat sleeping bag on a thick foam pad, filled his pack with dry gloves and long underwear, placed new socks on his feet. What else was there to do. If it gets really bad, I thought, he can always go trespass somewhere and get arrested. I knew he knew that. I knew he wouldn’t forget that. Read More
May 23, 2019 At Work Taking on Edward Abbey: An Interview with Amy Irvine By Leslie Jamison Amy Irvine (Courtesy Torrey House Press) Amy Irvine is a writer and a mother, a competitive rock climber, an activist, a caregiver, and a truth teller. (She is also a friend.) Her latest book, Desert Cabal, is a fiercely tender and provocative response to Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire—his classic and now canonical account of the desert West—on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. Desert Cabal is about Irvine’s own life in the West—raising a family, falling in love with the land and working to protect it—and it explores the myths of Western masculinity, the sublimity of endangered territory, and the kinds of intimacy enabled by spaciousness and proximity. Near the beginning of Desert Cabal, Irvine evokes Abbey’s seductive evocation of solitude as “loveliness and a quiet exaltation.” But her book challenges his understanding of solitude in nuanced and surprising ways. “Now that I have been a working mother wrangling a special-needs child in a complicated and congested world,” she writes, “my definition of solitude has changed.” As soon as I read that line, I thought, Yes! Solitude means something different for women. It has to do with the intense expectations we face around caregiving—the assumption that we’ll take care of places, people, objects, schedules. Before I became a mother, I remember thinking, How does parenting work for introverts? These days—as someone who loves my ten-month-old daughter so intensely I can hardly stand it, but still loves to be alone—I’ve spent much of the past year thinking about the vexed relationship between care and solitude. I’m not an expert in wilderness literature, but Irvine’s book is written for all of us: those of us who know the literature of the wilderness, and those of us who don’t. Because the wilderness matters to us all. We are all beholden, and we are all culpable. In proposing a new way of thinking about the wilderness—not in terms of solitude but in terms of relation—Irvine is posing even broader questions about how we understand ourselves in relation to one another. This is a book written for anyone who has ever wanted to be alone, and for anyone who has ever realized solitude is a delusion. Read More
May 22, 2019 Look The Art of Doodling By The Paris Review “Everyone is a collector in one way or another,” the English-teacher-turned-art-dealer David Schulson would tell his children. “Everyone has the impulse to collect.” What Schulson didn’t say is that the impulse to collect often contains within it another: the drive to keep, to hoard, to hold on. Schulson spent his weekends trolling New York’s flea markets for oddities, searching for the stories behind strange objects, and though he often sold what he found, he couldn’t bring himself to part with some of his most treasured discoveries. Over the course of his career, he amassed arguably the most impressive private collection of drawings, scribbles, and autographs in the world. The book Scrawl: An A to Z of Famous Doodles showcases this trove of miscellany for the first time. A selection from Schulson’s collection—including Queen Victoria’s donkey doodles, Stephen King’s spookily jubilant stick figure, and an erotic painting by Tennessee Williams—appears below. Tennessee Williams Courtesy of Schulson Autographs. Tennessee Williams, one of the twentieth century’s most important American playwrights, also painted with oils and pastels. On the back of an eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white photograph, he painted two male figures with thick brushstrokes. Near his initials, he writes, “Frankenste[in] Monster,” and between the two figures, framed in orange, he titles the drawing World of Morrissey. This is likely a reference to the director Paul Morrissey’s 1973 horror film Flesh for Frankenstein, also known as Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein. The figure labeled “Joe D.” must therefore be Joe Dallesandro, who played a starring role in the film. Williams’s paintings tended to express his homosexuality, which was largely absent from his plays. Read More
May 22, 2019 Archive of Longing Daša Drndić’s ‘EEG’ and the Joys of Pessimism By Dustin Illingworth Daša Drndić The most convincing literary pessimists are superior stylists. They smooth their nihilistic impulses into pleasing shapes. Despair is largely inimical to art, while melancholy—its pensive, perfumed cousin—makes of the void something paradoxically seductive. I think of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I with its horizon of bats and comets, its alchemical implements and carpenter’s tools laid in disarray. This extends, perhaps extends especially, to literary art. If the negative radiance of Giacomo Leopardi or Fernando Pessoa arises from a certain nihilism—that existence is evil, say, or without meaning—that message is nonetheless palliated by the intrinsic beauty of their craft. This is a kind of strategic enticement. If we are to follow the pessimistic artist into his annihilating vision, a little poetry goes a long way. The Croatian novelist Daša Drndić, who died of lung cancer last June, gives her readers no such poetry. She would have us take our medicine straight. “Les belles lettres is a heavily outdated term,” Drndić told me in a 2017 Paris Review interview, “therefore today a concept with hardly any weight. Art should shock, hurt, offend, intrigue, be a merciless critic of the merciless times we are not only witnessing but whose victims we have become.” Her novels, several of which have been translated into English by Celia Hawkesworth, orbit the criminal violence of European authoritarianism. An archival impulse animates much of the work. Trieste—the best-known of her books—features a forty-four-page list of some nine thousand Jews who were killed in Italy between 1943 and 1945. (The names, stacked four-wide across each page, are tragic in how little they ask of us.) Whatever she rescues from obscurity—photographs, courtroom testimony, case files, maps, scraps of song—achieves an uncanny wavering quality, as if already at home in the immaterial. Like those of W. G. Sebald, to whom she has been favorably compared, Drndić’s fictions creak beneath the weight of their own reclamation. They are load-bearing structures whose formal wonder is how such a painfully burdened edifice could remain standing upright in the first place. Read More
May 22, 2019 Arts & Culture A Trip to Bohemia By Adam Ehrlich Sachs Prague Karlovy Vary—Plzeň—Český Krumlov—Prague In August 2017 my family and I traveled to the Czech region of Bohemia, my mother’s homeland and the setting of my new novel, The Organs of Sense. At the airport in Prague we rented a car and drove directly to Karlovy Vary, the birthplace of my grandfather, who had died the year before; then we swung southeast through Plzeň and Český Krumlov before returning north toward Prague. It was meant to be a tour of our heritage, but it would also, I hoped—though the melding of my familial obligations with my artistic ambitions gave me a twinge of guilt—provide material for the novel of which I was then in the middle. Karlovy Vary In the spa town where, a century earlier, my grandfather was born, a local genealogist I’d found online and to whom I’d sent a pdf of my grandfather’s death certificate took us first to the spot where once stood the dress shop of Felix and Elsa, names he uttered in a tone of such hushed revelation, as though he had taken us to a site that would obviously mean a great deal to us, that my mother did not dare ask him in what way the people who bore them were related to us. From the dress shop of Felix and Elsa we walked to the apartment building in which Helene and Max lived shortly before the First World War, and from there we climbed a steep staircase to the villa on the hill where the twin sisters Frieda and Clara (both murdered by the Nazis) grew up. Then we drove to the abandoned porcelain factory once run by Frieda’s husband, Julius. At each stop my mother’s mood grew bleaker; she reproached herself for her estrangement from this world; these names meant nothing to her, and the fact that it was now too late (but only just) to ask her father who they were and what they were like caused her—this was clear—exquisite pain, which, however, she kept to herself. Only upon returning to our hotel and locating some online reviews he’d managed to suppress did I learn that the genealogist, driven presumably by compulsions of his own, was notorious for taking foreign tourists to the former residences and workplaces of his own dead relatives, every day the same sites. My mother, whom I had never known to give online feedback, later left him a three-star review. Read More