April 8, 2019 Arts & Culture Dressing for Others: Lawrence of Arabia’s Sartorial Statements By Isabella Hammad Left: T. E. Lawrence; Right: Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) In the southwest Jordanian desert, among the sandstone mountains of Wadi Rum, there is a face carved into a rock. The broad cheeks and wide chin are framed by a Bedouin kaffiyeh headdress and ‘iqal, and beneath the carving, in Arabic, are the words: LAWRENCE THE ARAB 1917. If you are visiting Wadi Rum with a tour guide, you can expect to be brought to this carving. You may also be shown a spring where Lawrence allegedly bathed, as well as a mountain named after his autobiography, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, whose rock face has been weathered into a shape that does, from some angles, look a little like a series of pillars. I am familiar with the legend of T.E. Lawrence—fluent Arabist, British hero of the Arab Revolt of 1916, troubled lover of the Arab peoples—as well as with the ways the Jordanian tourism industry has capitalized on this legend. Nevertheless, I am still surprised when I hear someone mention him with admiration. The image of Lawrence as AN adventuring Orientalist, galloping through the desert in flowing robes at the head of a Bedouin army, has endured in the imaginations of the British and American publics at the expense, arguably, of an accurate understanding of Lawrence’s role in the events of the First World War and its aftermath. Despite the fact that, to date, Lawrence has been the subject of nearly fifty biographies and scores of critical works, it is the image of Lawrence in the film Lawrence of Arabia, starring Peter O’Toole and a heavily made-up Alec Guinness as the Arab Prince Faisal, that has stuck. Lawrence was blond and blue-eyed, and yet, by his own account, successfully “passed” as an Arab—to which he attributed his expertise in both the Arabic language and Arab customs. Not to mention that kaffiyeh he wore. Read More
April 5, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bangs, Barbie, and Bodies By The Paris Review Charif Shanahan. Photo: Rachel Eliza Griffiths. I worry that I never quite say what I mean. I think about this especially when talking (and writing) about books. Using language to describe other language is a strange task—the overlay of text on text makes it difficult to distinguish between what is true, what is deeply felt, and what only appears to fit. In moments of particular disorientation, I find myself returning to the poem “Song” by Charif Shanahan, and these particular lines: “I need to learn / not how to speak, but from where.” Here, I remember that my language has not appeared out of thin air. My parents’ voices, the landscape of my hometown, the local pronunciations, the topics and issues that were revealed and concealed by my neighborhood, my class—an abridged list of the many things that inflect my ideas and word choice. Remembering these tethers makes me imagine what tethers I might cast forward. I love “Song” and the collection it belongs to, Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, for how they remember and remind us of the bodies and voices that reach us at every turn. There’s the loneliness of walking at night and passing the sounds and lights of a gay bar; there’s more immediate physical touch, a man “slipping the tongue / through the body’s shutters”; there is violent homophobia and racism, everywhere. Shanahan never makes anything mundane or belittled by comparison. He allows space for much to be consequential. People and things, violent or kind, arrive and inflect, whether by inches or miles. When I read Into Each Room, I feel so precisely situated in a constellation. Whether the individual strands are clear or obfuscated, I am sure there is a web around me. I am beginning to understand, too, that it’s possible to cast out from here with intention. I look around and see if my words are beginning to build a where that I want to be a part of, and continue speaking into. —Spencer Quong Read More
April 5, 2019 Comics There’s No Dying in Baseball By Jason Novak In his new book Baseball Epic, Jason Novak brings to life the stars of early-twentieth-century baseball. A selection of his portraits and biographies in miniature appears below. Read More
April 5, 2019 Revisited Revisited: Guernica By Nathan Englander Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Nathan Englander revisits Picasso’s Guernica. Picasso, HEAD OF A HORSE, SKETCH FOR GUERNICA, 1937 When I was eleven years old, my mother took me into the city from our suburban Long Island enclave. It was 1981, and we were on our way to MoMA. We were going to say goodbye to Guernica, Picasso’s giant antiwar mural from 1937. At the end of the Spanish Civil War, Picasso lent the painting to MoMA, stipulating that it not be sent to Spain until liberty was restored. More than forty years after its creation, it was headed off to its Spanish home. It was an impressive thing to see. I can remember how that painting loomed. But it was the horse in the center—set under that giant, all-seeing eye—that drew my attention. Because that image and I, we already went back a long way. Out in suburbia, I’d stared endlessly at the version of it that Picasso had painted as a study for the mural. In the study, we see only the screaming gray horse’s head. The horse’s eyes, as in the larger painting, are tiny. But the head is set at a sharper angle, aimed up toward the heavens, as if seeking help that’s never going to come. The horse’s mouth is wide open, its nostrils flared. And between seven ground-down teeth, a horrible spear of a tongue sticks out. You can see the hair on the edges of the horse’s muzzle, which feels almost doglike, giving the face a domesticated warmth that makes the expression of fear all the worse. Read More
April 4, 2019 Comics The Corner of MacDoodle St. and Memory Ln. By Mark Alan Stamaty Mark Alan Stamaty’s Village Voice comic MacDoodle St. is unlike anything else in print. Each installment of the weekly strip, which ran from 1978 to 1979, is packed with sight gags and digressions, the panels near to bursting with recurring characters and critters. Through this chaos, though, zings an arrow of a plot. From week to week, Stamaty somehow finds a way to thread non sequiturs into a cohesive whole. Tossed-off jokes calcify into story beats, and Malcolm Frazzle, a doofy poet, bumbles his way into somehow saving the world. The final strip shows Malcolm and friends sailing out of the city on MacDoodle Airlines, promising to “be back after a while.” However, the strip never returned. This week, New York Review Comics has reissued the complete MacDoodle St. in book form. A new addendum, written forty years after the strip’s finale, reveals why Stamaty said goodbye to MacDoodle St. and how, in the process, he rediscovered the joy of being an artist. A portion of this addendum appears below. Read More
April 4, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: For My Lover, Returning to His Wife By Kaveh Akbar 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, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. © ELLIS ROSEN Dear Poets, It’s 1 AM where I live now, and it’s yet another sleepless night for me. For the past four years, I lived in another country across the world, but I recently had to move back home due to some paperwork-related issues. My expat life was exciting and it transformed me. It pushed me outside of my comfort zone, and gave me my best friend and new hobbies and interests. But I’m now stuck back in my hometown, unable to make any future plans until the issue is resolved. I have no close friends here, there are no interesting events, and a good time for most people my age is to get wasted. My days are spent going to the gym and to the same two cafés (it’s a pretty small city) to study or read. I’ve been trying to stay positive, but the thought of wasting my life like this has been keeping me awake for quite a while now. Do you have a poem for people who feel left out of life? Sincerely, Stuck In Limbo Read More