February 28, 2019 Re-Covered Re-Covered: In the Ditch By Lucy Scholes In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print books that shouldn’t be. Photo © Lucy Scholes “Who will be interested in reading the life of an unfortunate black woman who seemed to be making a mess of her life?” This was the question Buchi Emecheta asked herself in the early seventies before she began writing what would become her first published novel: In the Ditch (1972). Closely based on Emecheta’s own life, it’s the story of Adah (the author’s fictional alter ego), a young Nigerian single mother living on a London council estate. Like the other “problem” families around her, Adah’s doing her very best, but life is a daily struggle. Unable to work because there’s no one else to look after her children, she’s entirely dependent on the welfare state. There’s never enough money to make ends meet, and the apartment block she lives in is a site of almost Dickensian squalor: the stairwells are “smelly with a thick lavatorial stink,” the trash chutes are blocked and overflowing, and the apartments themselves are damp and poorly heated, the cupboards all “carpeted” with mildew. It’s a world rarely brought to life on the page with the candor and intensity of firsthand experience. “She, an African woman with five children and no husband, no job, and no future, was just like most of her neighbours—shiftless, rootless, with no rightful claim to anything. Just cut off … none of them knew the beginning of their existence, the reason for their hand-to-mouth existence, or the result or future of that existence. All would stay in the ditch until somebody pulled them out or they sank under.” Upon learning that Emecheta had written up episodes from her life, a friend suggested she try sending them to Richard Crossman, then-editor of the New Statesman, Britain’s socialist paper. Emecheta typed up a few “Observations” and began sending one to Crossman every Tuesday (the day she visited the post office to collect her weekly family benefit payment). After a few weeks, she heard back, and he began printing her work as a regular column. This led to interest from publishers and agents, and soon Allison & Busby published In the Ditch—the collected columns turned into a novel. This was the beginning of Emecheta’s long and acclaimed writing career. By and large the reviews were excellent, but some critics wondered how a supposedly well-educated woman found herself in the ditch in the first place. These questions, Emecheta explains in her autobiography Head Above Water (1986), motivated her to write a prequel: Second-Class Citizen (1974). Read More
February 27, 2019 Arts & Culture The Strange Things I’ve Found inside Books By Jane Stern I read like a buzz saw cuts wood. A book a day is not unusual, and my discard pile is always bigger than the unread pile. Because new books are expensive, I buy my books online, at Goodwill, and at library sales. I seldom have to pay more than a few dollars. In the past few years I have discovered an added benefit, besides not bankrupting myself, to acquiring books secondhand. Many of the used books I buy have something left inside of them by their former owners. Here are some things I have found: a Seattle traffic ticket for jaywalking, the luggage slip for a first class flight to Paris, to-do lists with some very curious items like “pick up the whip” or “explain cremation.” Often I find ticket stubs (Hamilton!). Once I found a check fully made out for $375.15 that was never given away, and just today I found a yellow card from Pacific Photo Express that offered to transform my images into a “photo fun button.” I am not sure I want such a pin: the illustration shows a creepy little girl getting cozy with Frankenstein’s monster. I can’t quite imagine the right occasion on which to wear that. I no longer get excited when I find something as simple as a grocery store receipt, but I still try to match the book with what the person eats. Twelve boxes of red Kool-Aid in an Oliver Sacks book on migraines was simply confusing, but cage-free eggs seemed appropriate in a book about prison reform. Read More
February 27, 2019 Arts & Culture Who Was the “Female Byron”? By Lucasta Miller Artist, Henry William Pickersgill; Engraved by D. H. Robinson, L.E.L., 1852 Not many people know what happened to English literature between the end of the Romantics and the beginning of the Victorians. This troubling era in British cultural history has never been given a name; it’s been called a “strange pause” and an “indeterminate borderland,” and dismissed as a tedious “flat calm” during which nothing much happened. It was certainly strange, and its literary voices were indeed indeterminate—often calculatedly so, making their tone hard for the modern reader to pin down. But the one thing British publishing culture was decidedly not during the 1820s and 1830s was calm, as is demonstrated in the rise and fall of the prolific poet and novelist Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Known by her initials “L.E.L.” and called the “female Byron” in her day, she was born in London in 1802, and found dead in 1838, a bottle of prussic acid in her hand, a few weeks after arriving at Cape Coast Castle in West Africa. It was a fittingly dramatic end to a short but tumultuous life as one of London’s most talked about literary phenomenons. Her career coincided exactly with the strange pause. When she published her first poem as a teenager, the second generation of Romantics were still alive: Keats (died 1821), Shelley (1822), and Byron (1824). But by the end of her life, Dickens’s Oliver Twist was the new literary sensation, and the world of Regency rakes and Romantic rebels had been swept away by the new Victorian values. Symbolically enough, her last public appearance in London was on a balcony overlooking Queen Victoria’s coronation procession. It was as if she simply could not survive under the incoming regime. Read More
February 26, 2019 Redux Redux: Eerie Fictions of the Afternoon By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, and their daughter, Quintana Roo. The Oscars were on Sunday, and we’ve got movies on the brain. This week, we’re reading John Gregory Dunne on the Art of Screenwriting, Susan Minot’s short story “The Man Who Would Not Go Away,” and Chase Twichell’s poem “Bad Movie, Bad Audience.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. John Gregory Dunne, The Art of Screenwriting No. 2 Issue no. 138 (Spring 1996) What the screenwriter is ceding to the director is pace, mood, style, point of view, which in a book are the function of the writer. The director controls the writing room, and it’s in the editing room where a picture is made. Read More
February 26, 2019 On Sports They Think They Know You, Lionel Messi By Rowan Ricardo Phillips Our favorite poet/sports correspondent is back, this time with a meditation on Lionel Messi. Lionel Messi/ Photo: David Ramos On a sunny Saturday afternoon in Seville. On an overcast morning in New York. Sometime past midnight in Tokyo. A Saturday in Abidjan. This is how you live now. This is how you have lived for nearly half of your life. You’re in one place, playing a game, which is to say doing your job, which is playing a game. You’re in one place and you’re in all possible places; at times encircled, at times cursored, at times turned into a digital shroud of statistics that mark how fast you’ve run at your fastest. The shorn-smooth grass you walk on—you mostly walk, like a painter let loose on a meadow, while everyone else runs as though late for a meeting—is black ice for the rest of us. We see you there, infected with data. We watch you in the simulacrum. We love you because the simulacrum tells us to love you. We hate you because the simulacrum tells us to hate you. The pontificators and the screamers have their say. Some of us have no interest in you, but the simulacrum makes sure we know who you are. We parse from all of this what we consider pleasure: love, hate, indifference. You’re standing in one place, one patch of grass on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Seville, playing a game, which is to say doing your job, which is playing a game. A ball floats in the air toward you. You’re in one place and you’re in all possible places. Your name is stamped between your shoulder blades. You turn your back away from the ball. We all know who you are. You balance yourself and focus. What you’re about to do has no name. Read More
February 26, 2019 On Music A Tribe Called Quest Is Gone, but Hip-Hop Isn’t By Hanif Abdurraqib Lil Uzi Vert. Photo: Spike Jordan. Photo courtesy of Atlantic Records. I spent a lot of 2017 in schools, and I imagine that I will spend a lot of future years in schools. Because of this, I spend a lot of time talking to people younger than I am, and I spend a lot of time talking to them about music. This creates an interesting discussion point for me—I spent 2017 remembering that when I was young and wanted to talk to someone older about music, I mostly wanted validation that the thing I liked was not, in fact, awful. This had mixed results in my teenage years. My love of the so-called “shiny suit era” had its detractors, many of them older than me, many of them longing for the days of what they imagined to be “real hip-hop.” The question I spent most of my time answering in 2017 was how I felt about what is now called “mumble rap” in the popular discourse—rappers who eschew lyrical prowess in the name of drum-heavy trap beats and melodic choruses. If there’s one thing that’s for sure, changing trends in music will forever have their scapegoats, and because the trends in rap music shift so rapidly, scapegoats appear and then are replaced by new scapegoats nearly every two or three years. Shiny-suit rap was a scapegoat once, back after Biggie was murdered, and Tupac murdered before that, and conservative media outlets were delighting in what surely was soon to be the death of the genre they hated most. But then songs about money and partying and living like no death would ever arrive for you ended up on the radio. Auto-Tune was a scapegoat for a while, until Kanye West made 808s & Heartbreak in 2008 and people decided Auto-Tune was a worthwhile artistic endeavor—until Jay-Z released the song “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)” in the summer of 2009, and then it was done for good. “Mumble rap” is the most active and vigorous scapegoat rap has had in years, in part because the internet—particularly social media—has created a landscape for it to thrive and be a hotly debated topic, engaging with ideas of language and whether or not rappers should have to adhere to them, and whether or not this so-called mumble rap is actually pushing the genre forward, past some of its bowing to establishments. The real truth is that the rappers don’t actually mumble. Rappers like Lil Yachty, Lil Uzi Vert, and Young Thug aren’t really aesthetically or sonically similar, and all of them rap fairly clearly. What people are really angling at is the drug-drenched persona of young rappers who seem to, as they put it, have no substance. What people are really pointing at is what they believe to be a lack of lyricism. I don’t necessarily rebuke this in its entirety, but I rebuke the idea that my pals and I weren’t young once and didn’t listen to shit that moved us to dance or get reckless no matter what the rapper was saying. I rebuke the idea that every lyric written when I was a young hip-hop lover was sent down from the heavens and written with a golden pen. I rebuke the idea that the “turn up” is new or something that anyone in need of it should be ashamed of. Or the idea that the turn up isn’t flexible. That it doesn’t happen in the middle of a gospel song on Sunday, or in a trap house on any day when people in the hood get paid, or in a nightclub in New York when the horn player catches a good solo and the band lets him air it out until he’s gotten all he can out of his instrument. Read More