October 4, 2018 Arts & Culture Five Hundred Faces of Mass Incarceration By Maurice Chammah Before he went to prison, Mark Loughney used watercolors and acrylics to create bright, playful portraits of his favorite musicians. His early work features Trey Anastasio and Grace Potter and Snoop Dogg, all smiling and content, deep into their guitars and joints. But then Loughney committed a crime that even now, years later, he can barely explain. In 2012, when he was thirty-five and struggling to make it as an artist, Loughney got into a fight with residents of an apartment building. According to the police, he returned with a gasoline container and set the building on fire, sending multiple people to the hospital. It was big news in Dunmore, Pennsylvania, where Loughney was raised and where his father was serving a term as mayor. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a minimum of ten years in prison. At sentencing, his lawyer brought up the role of alcohol. But Loughney still has difficulty comprehending his own actions. “It wasn’t as if I was in the midst of an addiction or dealing with clinical anger … It was a fight gone bad,” he wrote in a recent message from the State Correctional Institution at Dallas, thirty miles southwest of his hometown. “The main point I hope you can make for me is that I am very remorseful and contrite for what I did. I don’t often get the opportunity to express my remorse or apologies and I would really like to be able to do that in a public forum.” After Loughney entered prison, his partner left him, and at times he felt catatonic. But listening to an interview with the Australian painter Johnny Romeo on the radio inspired him to return to his passion. “By the end of his interview, I was on my feet, in my cell, working,” he wrote. “I’m able now to actually understand how fragile and fleeting life is.” To make sense of his new surroundings, he began to draw what was around him, but instead of depicting the bars and razor wire, he focused on the people. Read More
October 4, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Pain Will Become Interesting By Sarah Kay 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 week, Sarah Kay is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, This year, I have seen so much death. Losing the people I love used to be my biggest fear, but now I have lost so many so quickly that I find myself with a new one. I jump into problem-solving zombie mode every time it happens. There’s so much to do and so many people to take care of. Last week, a poet I knew killed himself. I spent the night comforting every friend he had and, in the middle of comforting, I realized how used to this I had become. I know just the right thing to say or not say, just how long to hold the silence before it had to break. I am an expert at helping others deal with the grief death brings. Now, my biggest fear is that I will get too accustomed to tragedy, to suicides, to death. I am scared of getting used to losing. I am scared of losing all this pain. I don’t ever want to stop feeling. I don’t ever want to get used to it. Is there a poem for it, any words that will stop this from happening? Too Used to Death Read More
October 4, 2018 Arts & Culture The Silence of Sexual Assault in Literature By Idra Novey Detail from the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony last week opened a desperately needed national conversation about the nature of silence in the aftermath of trauma. Why didn’t Blasey Ford tell her “loving parents,” Donald Trump discharged on Twitter. The hashtag #WhyIDidntReport generated thousands of testimonies about the societal forces that push victims into silence in the aftermath of assault. That silence, unheard by anyone else but shatteringly loud inside one’s head, is an open secret in American life. It is also an open secret in American literature, especially in the works of women writers. Brett Kavanaugh’s description of his daughter’s prayers at dinner brought to mind the theatrical piety of the Bible salesman in Flannery O’Connor’s story “Good Country People.” That Bible salesman comes off as earnest—at first—as he scopes out a family’s front parlor and decries the absence of the Bible that “good Chrustians” would certainly display there. Once he gets beyond the front parlor and has Hulga, the adult daughter of the household, to himself, he doesn’t bring up anything more about “Chrustian service.” Watching Kavanaugh lose control of his “good country folk” performance and become increasingly overcome with rage, I thought of O’Connor’s salesman absurdly repeating the word “Chrustian,” of the terrible theatrics of our politics. Read More
October 3, 2018 Hue's Hue Hooker’s Green: The Color of Apple Trees and Envy By Katy Kelleher “William Wilson” was published in 1839. It is not one of Edgar Allan Poe’s more popular tales. It is not as fun as “Hop-Frog” or as dread inducing as “The Tell-Tale Heart.” But it is my favorite of his stories, because it taps into a narcissistic fear, that of the doppelgänger or “double-goer.” The story is about two men named William Wilson. The nominally linked males talk alike, walk alike, and dress alike. The two Williams grow up in close proximity to each other on the misty outskirts of London, much to William the narrator’s dismay, who hates the sound of his own name (it’s too common, too pedestrian) and resents this upstart William for forcing him to hear those four syllables twice as often. It is dizzying to find someone with your name. I know; I search for them regularly. I befriend fellow Kathryn Kellehers on Facebook, sending out little electronic pings of acknowledgement. For the most part, they refuse my requests and resist my efforts to spy on their social-media accounts. But there is a Katy Kelleher in Wisconsin who allows me to see her images. On late nights, when I feel particularly alienated from myself, I peer into her life, imagining that we share some destiny, linked by consonants and vowels and perhaps a drop or two of Irish-American blood. William Hooker did not have to look far to find another man with his name. It was a common enough appellation. But the tale of two Hookers is a strange one, for both men were not only contemporaries, they were also both wedded to gardens and bewitched by greenery. They lived in tandem, and they are often confused and conflated. But there were two William Hookers, and only one of them was responsible for the most enviable of inventions: Hooker’s green. Read More
October 3, 2018 Arts & Culture Obligatory Readings By Alejandro Zambra I still remember the day when the teacher turned to the chalkboard and wrote the words test, next, Friday, Madame, Bovary, Gustave, Flaubert, French. With each word, the silence grew, and by the end, the only sound was the sad squeaking of the chalk. By that point, we had already read long novels, almost as long as Madame Bovary, but this time, the deadline was impossible: barely a week to get through a four-hundred-page book. We were starting to get used to those surprises, though: we had just entered the National Institute, we were twelve or thirteen years old, and we knew that from then on, all the books would be long. That’s how they taught us to read: by beating it into us. I feel sure that those teachers didn’t want to inspire enthusiasm for books but rather to deter us from them, to put us off books forever. They didn’t waste their spit extolling the joys of reading, perhaps because they had lost that joy or had never really felt it. Supposedly they were good teachers, but back then, being good meant little more than knowing the textbook. As Nicanor Parra might say, “Our teachers drove us nuts / with their pointless questions.” But we soon learned their tricks or developed ones of our own. On all the tests, for example, there was a section of character identification, and it included nothing but secondary characters: the more secondary the character, the more likely we would be asked about them. We resigned ourselves to memorizing the names, though with the pleasure of guaranteed points. Read More
October 2, 2018 Redux Redux: The Whims of Men 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. This week, we bring you Toni Morrison’s 1993 Writers at Work interview, Grace Paley’s short story “The Little Girl,” and Sally W. Bliumis’s poem “In the Women’s Locker Room.” Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134 Issue no. 128 (Fall 1993) I only know that I will never again trust my life, my future, to the whims of men, in companies or out. Never again will their judgment have anything to do with what I think I can do. That was the wonderful liberation of being divorced and having children. I did not mind failure, ever, but I minded thinking that someone male knew better. Read More