March 29, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Spells, Cephalopods, and Smug Salads By The Paris Review Sarah Moss. Around Christmastime, which seems as far away as the late Iron Age by now, there were whisperings of a book that was as yet hardly known on our shores: Ghost Wall. The slim novel by Sarah Moss is about a small knot of students doing extracurricular research credits for their college archaeology course by living like Iron Age Britons for a few summer weeks. They are joined by an amateur enthusiast and his family, and I set the book down at first for being too pedantic. Even the fierce loyalty of our grade school narrator toward her father can’t hide her nascent skepticism—or is it the author’s?—regarding his monomaniac devotion to a pure British past. A large portion of contemporary writing is a critique of the bourgeois condition: comfortable linen tunics, smug salads, and sparkling résumés. Ghost Wall left me feeling fine about food co-op bulletin boards and Dan Barber books, but the real treat of the novel is the fucking desecration of all men. The men in the book are bad—all of them. They are bad because they are abusive or objectify women or are complicit in these crimes. They are undeniably bad, and it is women who plot and pilot their escape and the rescue of other women, and it is women who provide nourishment, comfort, and, in the distance, the sweet, warm light of sexual gratification—finally. —Julia Berick Read More
March 29, 2019 Re-Covered Re-Covered: Not So Quiet … Stepdaughters of War By Lucy Scholes In her new monthly column Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. When it was published in 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front, by the German World War I veteran Erich Maria Remarque, became an international best seller. The blackly brutal account of life in the trenches touched a nerve with readers who were still reeling from the aftershocks of the Great War. Hoping to cash in on some of Remarque’s success, the following year Albert E. Marriott, an enterprising London-based publisher who was new on the scene, approached the children’s writer and journalist Evadne Price and asked whether she’d be willing to write a spoof response about women at war. He had in mind a title—“All Quaint on the Western Front”—and a pen name for her, Erica Remarks. Price had a talent for pastiche—she was the author of a popular series of girls’ stories that mimicked Richmal Crompton’s hugely successful Just William books—but she had no intention of making light of such a serious subject. Instead, she offered to write a realistic account of a woman’s experience in Flanders. In a bid for verisimilitude, Price relied heavily on the diaries of a woman named Winifred Constance Young, an Englishwoman who had served as an ambulance driver behind the front line. Price, ever the consummate professional, wrote quickly, and the novel was finished in only six weeks. Not So Quiet … Stepdaughters of War (1930) is a shockingly visceral and realistic documentation of the cost of the conflict written as the firsthand account of a woman ambulance driver. It is a world of “wounds and foul smells and smutty stories and smoke and bombs and lice and filth and noise, noise, noise … of cold sick fear, a dirty world of darkness and despair,” and the book is a shattering denunciation of the jingoism that kept the war machine turning. Although last year marked the centenary of the end of World War I, Europe is teetering on the brink of a new era of incendiary nationalistic fervor. As such, a new generation of readers would do well to turn to Price’s novel. It’s as much a warning for our future as it is a reminder of our past. Read More
March 29, 2019 Arts & Culture To Believe or Not to Believe: That Is Not the Question By Peter Bebergal Photo by Dialog Center Images via Flickr (Creative Commons) Many years ago at a dinner party, I met a couple who had brought along their two-year-old son. The mother was Jewish, and the father was a practicing Buddhist from Tibet. Making small talk in the kitchen, the mother began to tell me about how she had been unable to get pregnant, so her husband had gone to their lama to ask him to bless them with a child. Some months later the couple successfully conceived, but before they broke the news to friends and family, they received a call from the lama, who told them that their unborn son was a bodhisattva—a being who has achieved enlightenment but chooses to reincarnate for the good of the world. As she told me this story, I felt dizzy and entranced. All I could see was her suddenly illuminated face; all I could hear was her voice. Now, I am not a Buddhist, but I experienced what she said about her child as true. He was beautiful and played quietly on the floor at our feet. For me, this was an encounter with the numinous, a realization of holiness and magic that didn’t require what religious people call faith. Moreover, when my trance broke and the other voices and sounds of the party returned to my awareness, I didn’t immediately begin to rationalize what I had been told or how I had felt about it. That spirits of the dead might move through the heavenly spheres and reemerge in new earthly forms seemed as real to me as the food that was being prepared for us. The language the family used to convey the story stirred all our imaginations. Read More
March 28, 2019 Devil in the Details A Bathroom of One’s Own By Larissa Pham Larissa Pham’s monthly column, Devil in the Details, takes a tight lens on single elements of a work, tracing them throughout art history. In this installment, she focuses on women in bathrooms. Edgar Degas, La Toilette, c. 1884–86 The door of my childhood bedroom didn’t have a lock on it, so I spent a lot of time in the bathroom. Every human wants privacy, but no one more than a teenage girl. Though I ostensibly shared the bathroom with my little brother, I claimed it as my domain. I spent hours reading on the tiled floor, my body bracketed between the sink and the door. In my memory, it’s a slightly steamy, always warm, watery place—but I never spent that much time in the bath. If I wasn’t reading or sulking after a fight with my parents, I was performing those charmless beauty rituals teenage girls are so fond of—shoving my A-cup breasts together trying to make cleavage magically appear in the mirror; waxing my legs with a kit I’d surreptitiously tipped into the family shopping cart; dyeing the tips of my hair hot pink. Manic Panic spotted half my towels; menstrual blood stained the rest. In the bathroom—my bathroom—I lounged, I cried, I sat on the edge of the empty tub, my two thumbs laboriously T9-texting my friends. Last summer, my roommate brought home a framed print of a woman standing at her toilette. She found it for five dollars at a yard sale in the Hamptons and purchased it for the Dutch blue frame, but I liked the elegance of the print—a replica of a Mary Cassatt drypoint and aquatint, Woman Bathing, from 1891. In the composition, a woman bends over a basin, one hand submerged in water, the other at her brow. She is nude from the waist up; her dress is rendered in appealing, nearly abstract stripes, and the shape of her skirt blocked out in solid, pastel colors—sage green, snow white, sunrise pink. On the floor is a flowered water pitcher, and the ground is similarly patterned with ferns and flowers in warm gray and thinned-out royal blue. The image is modest—we see only her smooth back, the faint shape of her breasts—and the mood is one of quiet intimacy, a peek into one woman’s private world. Though Cassatt’s subject stands opposite a mirror, her face is hidden from us. Her expression is caught in the private, unreadable space between her body and the mirror. I love this most—that her image is doubled and therefore doubly hidden from us. The rectangle between her face and her reflection becomes a chamber of endless possibility: What thoughts run through her mind? The flowered ground rises up to meet her. Read More
March 28, 2019 Arts & Culture The Benefits of Chronic Illness By Tom Lee Félix Vallotton, The Sick Girl, 1892. In my early twenties, along with an obsessive but largely un-acted-upon desire to become a writer, I was afflicted by an enduring physical malaise. It is hard now for me to separate these two dominant features of my life at that time, perhaps with good reason. I was always exhausted. I had a constant sore throat. I had headaches that went on for days. My mind was often foggy, dulled. I was checked for everything and I saw everyone—doctors, specialists, homeopaths, nutritionists, hypnotists, Reiki healers. When my acupuncturist felt she was making no progress she referred me to her mentor and he interviewed me about my symptoms in front of a lecture theater of trainees, who discussed the enigma of my case and took turns drawing my tongue. Eventually I was diagnosed with ME/chronic fatigue syndrome by a consultant, but this brought no hope of treatment except for a handful of sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy. I was struggling at work and when my temporary contract came to an end I left London and went to South America for six months, during which I felt no better. On my return home, anxious about the future and unsure how I would cope with the demands of a more orthodox job or career, I began a graduate course in creative writing. I hoped—but didn’t really believe—that writing would save me. The sickly writer is a staple, a cliché, of literary history, enduring and strangely compelling. Thomas De Quincey and the neuralgia, digestive issues, and visual problems he numbed with opium. Charlotte Brontë with her headaches, bodily pains, and hypochondria. Guy de Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet and syphilis. James Joyce and his failing eyes. Flannery O’Connor and lupus. And perhaps most notoriously, the consumptive writer—John Keats, Robert Walser, Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell, and many, many others. In some cases, illness, particularly mental illness, has become a key part of the writer’s literary iconography, near impossible to disentangle from the work: Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Robert Lowell, David Foster Wallace. In many of these cases their sickness seems to have added to their authenticity as writers, that they were too cerebral or too sensitive for the demands of the world, that their suffering brought to their work depth and insight that were unavailable to others, the humdrum well. Read More
March 27, 2019 Arts & Culture Beyond the Narrative Arc By Jane Alison Photo: Just chaos (CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)) In 1926, an Irish designer named Eileen Gray built a shiplike villa on the south coast of France that drove the famed architect Le Corbusier wild. Corbu had declared that a house was “a machine to live in,” but Gray thought, No: a house is a person’s shell, a skin, and should respond to how she lives. To start designing, she studied how she and her housekeeper moved through the day and made diagrams of their motions and those of the sun to reveal natural patterns—loops in the kitchen, deep lines by the windows, meanders through the living room. The house she then built on rocks by the sea expressed this organic choreography. A mouthlike entry pulled you in; screens and mirrors unfolded from walls; windows and shutters opened in all directions for the right air, light, or view. On plans she drew lines showing how you could move, look, and live in this house: natural pathways transformed to design. I love how Gray made this house, and really love how much it maddened bombastic Corbu. Gray’s way of working from life to art could also describe writing: writers go about their observing, imagining lives, moving onward day by day but always alert to patterns—ways in which experiences shape themselves, ways we can replicate these shapes with words. We then create passages for a reader to move through, seeing and sensing what we devise on the way. And when a reader’s done—levitation! She looks down and sees how she’s traveled, the pattern of the whole. I’m saying see because we often think of narrative as a temporal art, experienced in time like music, but it’s visual, too; a story’s as much garden as song. Northrop Frye puts it this way: “We hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer’s total pattern we ‘see’ what he means.” John Berger atomizes further: “Seeing comes before words.” We first apprehend text as texture—blurry or dense, black on white—and perceive each word as a picture (the part of our brain that recognizes words has a twin that recognizes faces). Then we pass through the words’ looks and into their meanings, absorbing a stream of visual images conjured by the language. Next we might develop another layer of “vision,” sensing elements that give the story structure: a late scene mirrors an earlier one, or a subtle use of color tints the whole. And as we read, we travel not just through places portrayed in the story but through the narrative itself. It might feel like gliding in a bayou, pacing a labyrinth, hopping from block to block: neuroscientists have recorded the inner sensations of reading as “a felt motionless movement through space.” Once you’ve finished reading, that motionless movement leaves in your mind a numinous shape of the path you traveled. Read More