March 25, 2019 Arts & Culture A Tortoise Stakeout with Patricia Lockwood By Richard Cooke Patricia Lockwood. Photo: Grep Hoax. © Grep Hoax. I have a mildly confessional face, which means that strangers often feel compelled to tell me things. My natural mode of small talk is inquisitive, like the good cop in an interrogation, and I attract oddballs (although not as many as I used to). These factors together mean the occasional reception of terrible secrets. Once, a man I asked for directions confessed to an unprosecuted murder (in fact, a double murder); in a bar, a woman blurted out a cancer diagnosis nobody else knew about. A confessional face can be useful for a writer, although its consequences are sometimes unwelcome. I mention this only because it means I can recognize a related quality, a much rarer one, which is the ability not just to encounter this strangeness and revelation, but to manifest it. It’s the difference between being a weirdo magnet and being Weirdo Magneto. So it is not blurb-speak to call Patricia Lockwood a writer of “rare power”: she has a confessional face, and also a self-confessional face, and emanates a humorous and apparently limitless energy that blends and blurs the reality around her. She attracts eccentrics the way hunting deities are depicted attracting beasts, and her chosen habitat of Savannah, Georgia, is teeming with them. She moved to Savannah almost on sight, because it is so beautiful and so strange, and a reader encountering her work for the first time could trip over this influence, mistaking her poetry as Southern gothic played for laughs, everything made supernaturally lush and fervent by marsh air. But she was born in the Midwest—living in “all the worst cities of the Midwest,” places such as Cincinnati, Ohio, and Fort Wayne, Indiana—and they honed her style like whetstones. She is also part of that first generation of writers to be shaped by the internet, from a time when it was still called the “information superhighway.” I suppose it’s odd, to think about Weird Twitter and Something Awful being influential the way that Encounter or The Criterion once were. But without that lineage—first coders, then jokers, then journalists who picked up what she calls the “crisp new style,” recognizable immediately—the elements in her work that might be termed “insanely online” will be missed. Read More
March 25, 2019 Arts & Culture White People Must Save Themselves from Whiteness By Venita Blackburn Toni Morrison, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Baldwin There is a neurological condition that causes brief paralysis after sleep. In my family we call it the witch’s wake, a lovely, macabre title for a terrifying predicament. This happened to me a few times as a teenager: I rose to consciousness out of a dream, out of normal sleep, only to be locked in an unresponsive body. This was as close to death as I could fathom then, as close to being buried alive, which may not be in the top five on my list of worst fears, but it’s on there. The whole body becomes a tomb and the mind is a ghost, skimming the space between the living and everything else. I remember screaming when it happened, hard, loud, in tears, and yet I was silent. I say this because it is the nearest analogy for explaining not just the black experience in America, but the white experience as well. There is a seam between consciousness and sleep, between the wreckage of the body and being able to see the forces that attack it. The black American is born on that seam, that fragile space of knowing your physical self is in peril and being unable to act. We watch our bodies wrecked for the economic and sadistic benefit of whiteness and our screams are silenced through disbelief. Remember that whiteness is not personal, a white person is not whiteness itself; whiteness is institutional, it is what James Baldwin identified as the price of the ticket, the entry into America. Baldwin noted that the racial caste system is an affront to humanity, saying, “I am a man and so are you. As long as you think I’m a problem you’re demeaning your own manhood.” As obvious as it is, even a generation later, little is being done to curb that artificial construct. Read More
March 22, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Moscow, Misunderstandings, and Money Mark By The Paris Review Fyodor Alekseyev, View of Lubyanka, ca. 1800. I’d encourage all to check out the Moscow-focused second issue of the new quarterly Stranger’s Guide. Under the leadership of the Lapham’s alum Kira Brunner Don, the magazine travels to a different city or region with each installment. Rather than gawking and gushing in the travel-section mode, it commissions new work by writers and photographers from that place alongside contributions from a few roving and travel-savvy authors. Although I’m partial to the compact trim size of The Paris Review, the oversize format of Stranger’s Guide is ideal for its luscious photo spreads (I’m a fan of Vladimir Markovich’s pictures of renovating Moscow and the creepy museums captured by Lily Idov), and its features go deep into subcultures that, until now, only the luckiest of strangers might discover. Plus, new place-based fiction—this time by Lara Vapnyar—contextualizes a community through another lens. —Emily Nemens Read More
March 22, 2019 Arts & Culture The Artist-Activists Decolonizing the Whitney Museum By Daniel Penny Posters designed by Kyle Goen On December 9, 2018, at twelve thirty in the afternoon, a group of about a hundred friends, acquaintances, and strangers began arriving at the corner of Washington and Gansevoort Streets on the far west side of Manhattan, right in front of the Whitney Museum. Many carried signs and banners painted with slogans, which they spread across the sidewalk and weighed down with socks full of spare change: I DIDN’T CROSS THE BORDER, THE BORDER CROSSED ME in green and white, NO DAPL in red block letters against a black background, and FUCK ICE written in a script made of what looked like snakes being torn apart by eagles. “I want to thank everybody for coming out on this cold-ass day,” said Shellyne Rodriguez, a member of the group Take Back the Bronx. She wore a beanie over her bundle of gray dreadlocks and rubbed her hands together. “Warren B. Kanders is on the board of this museum,” she added, pointing to the shimmering glass and concrete structure behind her. Warren B. Kanders, the vice chairman of the Whitney’s board, is also the CEO of the “less lethal” arms manufacturer Safariland. Along with making body armor, billy clubs, and the NYPD’s holsters, Kanders’s company is among the largest manufacturers of tear gas in the world, and it was his canisters you likely saw in photographs from 2018 demonstrations at the Mexico–United States border. “We can trace the tear gas canisters launched at the caravan of asylum seekers at the border of the U.S. and Mexico to the Whitney Museum. The time is now to put a stop to that shit. Because what will they do next?” Read More
March 22, 2019 Arts & Culture Blood, Shit, and Sex By Andrew Hodgson While he is best known in his native France as an artist, and perhaps for his turn as Renfield in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu (1979), Roland Topor’s written works are still generally unacknowledged. In the scant body of critical writing surrounding his books, they are classed as “post-surrealist horror” that demonstrate “the same half-sane magnifications that strike home in Kafka.” And yet to read his novels, short stories, and plays is to enter a world far from the sleek poeticisms of Breton’s Nadja (1928) or indeed the safety of a barricaded room in which Gregor Samsa hides his transformation in The Metamorphosis (1915). Topor’s writing, much like his illustrations, plunges the reader again and again into predicaments in which grotesque metamorphoses are encountered already in advanced states of development and resultant crisis. In this way, the narratives lead us in a sense to the ground where Breton and Kafka leave off. Read More
March 21, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Your Absence Has Gone through Me 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 week, Claire Schwartz is on the line. ©ELLIS ROSEN Dear Poets, I am a poet myself; I write about the strength and love my family provides for me, and about my identity as a daughter. A few months ago, I found out that my father has a second family and has been hiding years worth of lies. Since confronting him, he has become offensive, threatening, and hurtful. He refuses to acknowledge what’s happened and insults me instead. Even more than feeling betrayed and rejected, I feel like my sense of self and of reality is crumbling. I keep second-guessing my father and our family’s life together. I would love to read a poem that provides some comfort or affirmation as everything familiar falls apart. With Love, Former Child Dear Former Child, We are accustomed to thinking of the future as unknown. The past, on the other hand, often feels like a stable coordinate from which any number of futures might be charted. Your father’s betrayals have complicated that clean narrative line from where you’ve been to where you’re going—a line that often constitutes a central pillar of identity. But you are a poet. You have practiced something other than narrative. I want to offer you a poem I turn to when the coordinates of my life feel unmoored, not because it directs me to feel more grounded, but because it nourishes the possibility of being exactly where I am, wherever that is: Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript”: And some time make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, In September or October, when the wind And the light are working off each other Read More