July 27, 2018 This Week’s Reading What Our Contributors Are Reading This Summer By The Paris Review Christine and the Queens. When I watch Christine and the Queens, I feel joy in its purest form. Her best songs are perfect pop constructions laced with a delicious, defiant queerness, and unlike most pop songs, they don’t wear out after repeated listenings. They’re songs to dance to, to feel at home inside, to feel sexy in, songs you don’t mind getting stuck in your head. The pleasure of the music is deepened by her music videos—that is to say her body’s movements, loose, earthy, MJ-inflected, charged with the casual charisma of a true star. I’ve spent the year pregnant, my body becoming bigger, stranger, slower, and unwieldy—after giving birth two weeks ago, my body remains a slow moving creature, still unfamiliar to myself. Watching Christine move with such boundlessness, as she does on her latest single, has a new kind of power over me. I feel it, the freedom she has in her body, in my limited one. It holds a place for my body to return to. She’s on tour this fall to promote her new album, and you should not miss the chance to see her live. —Shruti Swamy TMI, maybe, but I’ve had a rough summer so far. Well, so has the world (it’s not summer everywhere, but you know what I mean). I’m reading all sorts of Marxian stuff for a book I’m working on—I don’t recommend this as therapy—and a line from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus keeps coming back to me: “What cogito lacks its evil genius, the traitor it will never be rid of?” But “at least there’s pretty lights,” as the band Men at Work put it. At least there’s the National Park Service’s Bear Cam, a live feed from Brooks Falls in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. Right now there’s a lone brown bear in the frame, scratching himself and romping in the river. Sometimes there are five or six, scanning for the salmon that surge upstream. Yesterday, I watched a huge fellow catch a fish, tear it open, then jump, startled, when a seagull alighted briefly on his back, causing him to drop his prize after one bite. The gulls just wade around, or float like ducks, waiting to gulp down what the bears let fall. I’m a bit obsessed with bears. I’ve met a few black bears in the wild, including one last summer in the Catskills who refuses to stay put in a poem. These Alaskan brown bears are bigger, lanky and lumbering but fleet af when they need to be. Now there are no bears in the frame, just the river. I like the river too. —Michael Robbins Read More
July 27, 2018 Arts & Culture The Saddest Songs Are the Ones About Flowers By Drew Bratcher My buddy Nick swears that “Chiseled in Stone” by Vern Gosdin is the saddest country song ever written. “You ran crying to the bedroom,” it begins: I ran off to the bar Another piece of Heaven gone to Hell The words we spoke in anger just tore my world apart And I sat there feeling sorry for myself It’s a hell of start. Seldom has romantic strife been evoked so concisely. What words did they speak in anger? None, we suspect, that lovers haven’t always said. The point, I think, is that these lovers never dreamed they’d be the ones saying them. Nobody sets out to be miserable in love. After a modest run as a singer and guitar player in California folk-country bands, Gosdin retired in the early seventies only to rally as a solo act later in the decade. Beginning in his mid-forties, he sent one song after another—“I’m Still Crazy,” “Is It Raining at Your House?,” “This Ain’t My First Rodeo”—into the top 10. “Chiseled in Stone,” which won the’89 CMA award for best song, helped him mount one of the greatest comebacks in country music. He was Music City’s patron saint of late bloomers. Gosdin looked like a Burt. He had Bacharach eyes, Reynolds sideburns and mustache, Lancaster air. His pliant, world-worn voice took cues from George Jones, whose vocal performances of sentimental lyrics dredged out of wretchedness a pitiful joy. Read More
July 26, 2018 Arts & Culture Reopening the Case Files of Leopold and Loeb By Jeremy Lybarger Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. It wasn’t America’s worst murder, even at the time. The June 1912 massacre of six members of the Moore family and their two houseguests, all of them bludgeoned to death as they slept in Villisca, Iowa, was arguably worse. That case was never solved, though a recent book, The Man from the Train (2017), names a plausible suspect. And worse than that was in 1893, when the physician and amateur hotelier H. H. Holmes built a jerry-rigged murder castle in Chicago in which he killed and cremated potentially dozens of women—a case that inspired that staple of used-book sales, The Devil in the White City (2003). Or maybe the worst was in 1892, when Lizzie Borden, from Falls River, Massachusetts, was tried and acquitted of killing her father and stepmother with an axe. In 1924, the murder of the fourteen-year-old Robert “Bobby” Franks should have seemed mild by comparison. What was most shocking about Franks’s murder, of course, was who killed him: two young University of Chicago students named Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Both came from wealthy families. Leopold’s father was a prominent businessman; Loeb’s was an attorney and vice president of Sears, Roebuck. The families’ combined fortunes would now total more than a hundred fifty million dollars, adjusted for inflation. From today’s vantage, the boys seem like prototypes for a figure that has since become cliché: the intellectual, nihilistic, remorseless killer who has a hailstone where his heart should be—sociopaths, in other words, real-world precursors of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho or Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs. When asked to identify the “original nucleus” of the idea to kill Bobby Franks, Leopold mentioned the “pure love of excitement, or the imaginary love of thrills, doing something different.” Read More
July 26, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: There Is a Line That Could Make You Love Me Really 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, My little sister is in the throes of an eating disorder. She is quite literally wasting away in front of me, and she has always looked to me for advice. I feel like I should be able to be supportive and strong for her, especially since I have been dealing with an eating disorder for more than five years now, but I find myself obsessing even more over my own issues and am a little afraid to spend time with her. Is there any poetic advice that might give me courage to help my sister fight back the same demons that threaten me? Sincerely, Skinny and Scared Dear S & S, I want to begin by saying that if you or anyone is struggling with an eating disorder, you should be talking to a professional, not a poet. The National Eating Disorders Association help line is 1-800-931-2237, and I encourage you to use it—it’s available 24-7. I don’t think I can give you a poem that will offer practical advice about how to move forward—or through or around your or your sister’s illness. What I can give you is one that might offer a flicker of recognition, a moment of “there we are.” Lo Kwa Mei-en’s “Pinnochia On Fire” is a fugue of searing language, a speaker’s meditation on compulsion, embodiment, and hunger. One section reads: Read More
July 25, 2018 Look Sadism Illustrated By Marquis de Sade Everyone knows what sadism is, but few have actually read Marquis de Sade. Now you don’t have to. At the end of the eighteenth century, de Sade commissioned an anonymous artist to illustrate his collected writings. The resulting edition, originally published in 1797, contained 101 copper engravings of sex scenes, mostly set in dungeons. A compilation of these images was reprinted and published by Goliath Books this week. A selection is presented below. Read More
July 25, 2018 Arts & Culture Where the Voice of Alejandra Pizarnik Was Queen By Patricio Ferrari Hay, madre, un sitio en el mundo, que se llama París. Un sitio muy grande y lejano y otra vez grande. (There is, mother, a place in the world called Paris. A very big place and far and very big again.) – César Vallejo In a diary entry of May 1959, while still living with her parents in Buenos Aires, shortly after the publication of her third poetry collection, the twenty-three-year-old Alejandra Pizarnik wrote: Je voudrais vivre pour écrire. Non penser à autre chose qu’à écrire. Je ne prétend [sic] pas l’amour ni l’argent. Je ne veux pas penser, ni construire décemment ma vie. Je veux de la paix: lire, étudier, gagner un peu d’argent pour m’independiser [sic] de ma famille, et écrire. (I would like to live in order to write. Not to think of anything else other than to write. I am not after love nor money. I don’t want to think nor decently build my life. I want peace: to read, to study, to earn some money so that I become independent from my family, and to write.) Bold and assertive in tone, these words are less of a confession than a daring conviction, a resolution, a literary plan. Circumstantial? Purposely stylized? Perhaps the more essential question here is: Why did the Argentinian-born poet turn to a foreign language that, until then, she’d almost exclusively employed just to read French literature? Read More