April 12, 2019 Eat Your Words Cooking with Anzia Yezierska By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. At one of my first jobs in New York, I worked with an elegant, slim, freakishly tall young woman who occupied a cubicle by a window. She said things like, “I want to work for a couple of years before I get married and have children.” Men sent her flowers at work, and she had several handbags, rumored to be gifts, that were worth our month’s salaries. To me, this was an unimaginable alternate world, horribly antifeminist but also seductive. Where did one find men who sent flowers? Was there really a magic trick by which one could stop working? I knew better than to want such things. So why did it seem like this girl—her name, I’ve just recalled, was Suzanne—knew something I didn’t? Suzanne and I weren’t friends, but I occasionally lurked by her cubicle, looking at the graceful lines of her shoulders and the back of her head, wondering about her. I thought of her recently while reading Anzia Yezierska (1880–1970), a Polish Russian Jewish immigrant to New York in the 1890s, whose best-known work is the novel Bread Givers (1925). As the Columbia University professor Alice Kessler-Harris puts it in the foreword to that book, Yezierska writes about being an immigrant and a young woman “in a world where ambition was the path to Americanization and ambition seemed designed for men.” In a distinctive and vibrant vernacular, Yezierska’s books capture the life of a now-vanished Jewish Lower East Side. She experienced brief acclaim in her lifetime, died in obscurity, and since 1975 (in part thanks to Kessler-Harris’s tenacity) has been back in print, slowly becoming a part of the new feminist canon. Read More
April 11, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Ordinary Sex 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, I am in the happiest, healthiest relationship of my life, which is still going strong despite a period of long distance. My boyfriend is currently searching for a job, his first “adult” job since graduating, but seems to be falling at the last hurdles each time. He is usually a very upbeat and optimistic person, but rejection and his current job in the hospitality industry are having an effect on him that is hard to watch for someone who loves him. I am doing my best to reassure him that “the right opportunity will come along” and “you’re doing all the right things,” but this feels very easy to say without knowing what he’s going through. I have so much faith in him; he’s intelligent and passionate. I’m struggling to know how to help. Everything I say sounds clichéd or false, so until I can work out how to put my feelings into pragmatic advice, I’m hoping there’s a poem that might give him some hope for the future, and make him see himself the way I do. Best, An Optimist for Two Read More
April 11, 2019 Notes on Pop On Believing By Hanif Abdurraqib Hanif Abdurraqib’s new monthly column, Notes on Pop, muses on the relationship between songs and memory. To begin with a fact that is entirely beside the point (unless you are the owner of a Michigan area code and a very particular type of pride): South Detroit is, in fact, not a real place, at least not within the flimsy geographical construct of the United States. Anyone beginning in Detroit and traveling south will, because of how the borders are drawn, end up in Canada. From a geographical standpoint, South Detroit is Windsor, Ontario. The restaurant South Detroit, which is in Windsor, Ontario, was opened by someone with a slick sense of humor and a sharp eye for nostalgia and aesthetics. Since we are burdened with borders, it must be said that there are a lot of good reasons to travel to a border and then cross it. From Columbus, Ohio, where I grew up, the drive to Windsor, Ontario, is about four hours. Three and a half if you disregard the speed-limit signs posted along Route 23, where there are no blue-and-whites hiding along the high grass, and even if there were, they wouldn’t dare flick on their sirens and interrupt their downtime, reclining along the road. My friends and I would make the trip to go to the South Detroit diner in Windsor—passports and all. We’d wait in the long line clogging up the bridge to another country. The food at the diner wasn’t at all spectacular, and my pal Kyryn claimed they didn’t know how to mix a good cocktail—I don’t know much about drinks, so I took her at her word. What South Detroit did have was a good jukebox. I like a jukebox that requires labor. I’m not aging into one of those fist-shaking olds who sits on a porch and bemoans the fact that kids these days don’t play outdoors or that people stare at their phones or whatever else gets said about the younger generations. But there is the fact that I prefer a jukebox, one that cannot be controlled by a phone. I believe in accountability everywhere, even as it so eagerly escapes much of our day-to-day lives. And so, I must ask for accountability at the jukebox, where people know what songs I’ve played, because they’ve watched me approach the machine and fumble for my coins and scroll through the options. They’ve watched me sit back down and glance eagerly at the machine as each song ends, if they’re watching closely. If they keep watching, they might see a half-smile leap from the edges of my mouth when the first notes of my tune arrives. The jukebox alone is just a vehicle for sound, same as any other. But when a person enters, they can attach themselves and whatever hopes they have for the night, to that vehicle, and it becomes something greater. Read More
April 11, 2019 Look Chantal Joffe’s Many Faces By Olivia Laing Chantal Joffe, Self-Portrait, 1st January, 2018, oil on board, 24 1/8″ x 18″. © Chantal Joffe. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London/Venice. Here’s the setup: palette, chair, mirror. The mirror is bandaged together with red-and-white tape that says FRAGILE, but let’s not make too much of that. The original plan was written on a scrap of paper: “small heads—meditations—buy lots of small boards.” The first was painted on January 1, 2018, “the worst day of the year,” not that the rest of the year was that much brighter. Joffe’s marriage was breaking up. She painted herself nearly every day, sometimes at night, always in fairly pitiless light. Speaking broadly for a minute, she looks in this extraordinary series of self-portraits like someone almost warping under a heavy weight. Bowed down, weighted by feeling, she peers back at herself, artist prowling after sitter, avid to catch pouches, moles, sags, bags, and quirks of flesh. Maybe at first it looks like someone giving herself a hard time, the visual equivalent of how (women) rail against their face, their thighs. Something funny happens when a woman looks at herself, as if she can’t ever not be narcissistic, flaunting the way she either measures up or doesn’t to the flawless face we all carry around inside the handbag of our heads. That’s inevitable, you can’t unthink political realities, but it isn’t exactly what’s happening here. The clue, I think, is what it’s like to look at these faces communally, as a chorus. They are so wildly specific, peering at you sideways, each one differently unhappy, each one concrete, present, original as in not a copy of the last. Read More
April 10, 2019 Arts & Culture Balzac and the Reassembly of France By Jérôme David Louis Boulanger, Balzac, 1836. In the 1820s, when Honoré de Balzac decided to become a writer, the novel was a minor literary genre in France. Like Voltaire, educated French people preferred poetry and grand tragedy, wherein virtue, truth, enthusiasm, and hope marched solemnly across the page. As a result, contemporary French novelists were almost ashamed of their prose. Many published under pseudonyms—the men because their tone tended to be light, schoolboyish, and edgily anticlerical; the women because they knew to expect prim, frowning disapproval if they openly wrote for publication. Then the sentimental novel began to win popularity. Writers such as Adelaïde de Souza, Sophie Cottin, Germaine de Staël, Madame de Genlis, and Madame von Krüdener gravitated toward Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1761 Julie, or the New Heloise, enriching its approach to prose with fresh narrative procedures that realist novelists would later adopt. With remarkable precision, these authors analyzed contemporary dilemmas regarding, for instance, the postrevolutionary longing for individual freedom and the enduring weight of social conformity. In foreign countries, they came to represent a sparkling inventiveness that was entirely French; the English, in particular, appreciated this inventiveness, comparing it to their own Samuel Richardson and Ann Radcliffe. Meanwhile, the Germans applied it in their attempts to explain the dichotomy between Moralität and Sittlichkeit (individual morality and the collective ethic, respectively). The contemporary French sentimental novel exported well to the rest of Europe, though most modern literary histories would have us forget it ever existed. The fact was that between Paris, London, and Weimar, a Romantic genre was circulating: the French variant, largely produced by women, offered non-French people a keener understanding of the literary specificity of France than the idiosyncratic prose of the Romantic François-René de Chateaubriand or Benjamin Constant. Indeed, these sentimental novels alerted sensitive observers all over Europe to the painful destinies of fictional characters who lived as outcasts from their own existences, and also to the French approach to a human predicament that was as noble as it was vulnerable. Literature, in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, was much concerned with human passions at odds with social norms, and it tailored itself directly to readers—especially women—who now sought to define themselves through their characters rather than their conditions. Natural sensibility became the equivalent of a literary passport. Read More
April 10, 2019 Arts & Culture Soon By Jill Talbot I’m six, speeding my Bicentennial Huffy up and down the sidewalk, or wandering the edges of a playground as the PE teacher blows the whistle through his mustache to end recess, or grinning—blonde ponytails and yarn bows—beside my mother’s maroon Monte Carlo to archive the first day of school. I’m seventeen, smoking Swisher Sweets on the lip of Johnny Roan’s truck bed, or facing off with my father’s clenched jaw after missing curfew, or touching myself to the scruff of that boy in algebra while Air Supply aches through my clock radio. I’ve been writing all of these moments as essays. As a way to reconcile the girl I used to be, the woman I am now—the longings they share. I’m in my twenties, skinny-dipping with a guitar player, or riding a teal-tired rowboat across the Rio Grande, or gripping the black receiver of a pay phone after taking the first exit to Lubbock, Texas. Or I’m older, ducking into a liquor store in Chicago, or mistaking a bearded man on a campus in New York for the one who left me years ago (calling his name, such impossibility), or driving through the yellow fields of Idaho for the first time. Or it’s a few weeks ago, and I’m standing in a cemetery telling my parents the house sold only a year after they both left me suddenly. I’m staring at the tree across the pathway and pressing my hands, hard, into the back pockets of my jeans. All of these moments feel like something I did yesterday or might do tomorrow. I remember a man who played a Dylan record in his living room. I remember climbing the rickety steps to a wooded bar in Stillwater, Oklahoma. I remember that road toward a bleached-out desert and a ghost town named Terlingua. My father and I racing popsicle sticks in the gutter after a storm. The sound of my mother’s sighs, as if she were always staring out a window. The time two friends and I got stranded on our way to a lake and spread our towels in the parking lot of a gas station so the lines of our bikinis wouldn’t miss the sun. Let me explain—in these essays, I am not a mother. It’s freeing to write a self beyond or even before I became a mother. To be ridiculous and reckless, to ride and to roam. My daughter turned seventeen last month. Give me a minute, will you? I have raised her by myself, and she’ll be leaving home in a year, so I’ve been trying to teach myself how to get back to who I was and who I am—beyond a mother—because I will be that woman soon, a woman back on her own. I need to remember how to pedal fast and wander edges and lose my clothes and cross borders and listen to records with men who still play them and listen to music by myself in the dark and take photographs of pay phones and push the gas down on roads away from ghosts until my tires kick up the gravel of a gas station. Watch her fill up, watch her pull away. Watch her answer a call from her daughter and say, “I’m fine.” Watch her mean it. Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction. Her writing has been recognized by Best American Essays and appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Longreads, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and Slice Magazine.