March 26, 2019 Arts & Culture On Cussing By Katherine Dunn So. We cuss. Some of us cuss by saying mercy me or suffering succotash. I like to say shooty-pooty, which I learned from a nice Baltimore boy back in 1963. It’s a Cub Scout version of shitty-pity, which is a cutesy diminutive for just plain shit. This kind of substitution for a cuss word is what linguists call an amelioration. It softens the blow while still addressing the topic. This is not the same as a euphemism, by the way, which tries to evade or screen the subject. Americans are big on substitute amelioration. We invent thousands of them daily, it seems. Darn for damn, gosh for God. They often sound as though we started to say the taboo word but caught ourselves. Almost all of us have darker vocabularies if we’re pushed. We all have strong vocal reactions to pain and surprise, to anger or fear. We often use the same language in response to the strong positive stimulus of pleasure or awe or humor. Cuss words and phrases, whatever they may be in our individual vocabularies, are the most potent words we have for expressing emotion. However, as writers, we now face a loss of power in the classic obscenities—the draining of shock value, the depletion of such terms’ ability to offend. Our challenge is to revive the language with vivid reinvention. Case in point: I was out on my balcony a while ago as two young men walked by on the sidewalk and one of them was telling a story in which every other word was fucking. It went along the lines of, “So I fucking told the fucking guy that it wasn’t my fucking beer, I’m just fucking here for fucking apples… ” And so on. Now this made me sad. Here is this potent word being drained of all its juice and snap by overuse. We often call such cuss words expletives. Technically an expletive is any word or phrase that adds nothing to the meaning of the sentence. A few years ago, for instance, TV reporters took to sticking in the phrase “if you will” in the most inane way. That was a smarmy, Uriah Heep–style expletive. For the guy under the balcony, the word fuck was an expletive. It had no more weight or meaning than like for the proverbial Valley Girl or um for the tongue-tied. It’s superfluous filler. It isn’t shocking. It isn’t vivid or engaging. It’s simply monotonous. He was boring and his story was unintelligible. Read More
March 25, 2019 In Memoriam Letters From W. S. Merwin By Grace Schulman Grace Schulman shares snippets from a lifetime of correspondence and friendship with the poet W. S. Merwin, who died on March 15, 2019. A young W. S. Merwin. (Credit: Estate of W. S. Merwin) “We must not vanish all at once; it’s too hard on the survivors,” W. S. Merwin wrote in a letter to me late in his life, referring obliquely to the passing of his contemporaries, John Ashbery and Galway Kinnell. In the dark hours following Merwin’s own vanishing on March 15, I thought of how he first appeared in my life. Our friendship began in 1972, during my first week as poetry editor of The Nation. Inside a box of submissions was his packet of poems with the usual stamped self-addressed envelope. Besides my predilection for his poetry, I’d known that he’d held my job at The Nation in 1962, and that he’d written for them an eloquent plea for the containment of nuclear power. His poetry came on October 14, 1972, a date I remember because exactly two years before, during the Vietnam War, he had famously refused to sign a loyalty oath before a reading at the State University of Buffalo (SUNY), and went home refusing his badly needed check. Still, knowing what I did, I was unprepared for the lines I read: I have to trust what was given to me if I am to trust anything it led the stars over the shadowless mountain what does it not remember in its night and silence what does it not hope knowing itself no child of time Over the din of office typewriters, I heard the music and silence of those lines, the surprise of faith in one who is accustomed to doubt, the rhetorical questions suggesting all memory, all hope. He’d sent that poem, “The Gift,” along with others from his forthcoming book, Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment, hoping that The Nation might feature them before the book appeared in 1973. It had been The Nation’s practice to print one poem at a time, often as filler. I asked the publisher, James Storrow, Jr., for space to print not just one but the cluster Merwin sent, and when he looked askance, I read him the closing lines of “The Gift,” Read More
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