July 11, 2018 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Dorothy West By Emma Garman Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. The career of the Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West featured one of the most remarkable second acts in literary history. Almost half a century after her trailblazing debut novel, The Living Is Easy (1948), West published her second novel, The Wedding (1995), at the age of eighty-seven. It received an ecstatic reaction. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, at the time an editor for Doubleday and a fellow resident of Martha’s Vineyard, had encouraged West to complete the long-gestated work, which West dedicates to the late Onassis. “Though there was never such a mismatched pair in appearance,” West writes, “we were perfect partners.” Set on the Vineyard on a single summer weekend, The Wedding is narrated by an irresistibly droll omniscient voice that veers across centuries to trace the knotty, reverberating heritage of an affluent African American family. An instant best seller, it was adapted for television by Oprah Winfrey. The ABC miniseries, starring Halle Berry, aired not long before West’s death at ninety-one. When asked what she wanted her legacy to be, she said: “That I hung in there. That I didn’t say, I can’t.” In the decades between her two novels, West published short stories—she was one of the first black fiction writers to be published in the New York Daily News—and for many years, she wrote columns for the Vineyard Gazette. Yet her enormous early promise seemed destined to go unfulfilled. Her name was but a footnote to the Harlem Renaissance, of whose luminaries she was the longest living but, then and still, the least famous. One reason West gave for her long spell out of the limelight was that she felt alienated by the black militancy of the sixties. When watching television in that era, she said, “almost all of the black people I saw, I didn’t like what they were saying.” Though she was already working on The Wedding, she worried that its backdrop of privilege and its message of communality (“Color was a false distinction; love was not,” one central character muses) would go down poorly in an atmosphere abuzz with Malcolm X’s revolutionary separatist rhetoric. Read More
July 11, 2018 On Photography Ode to the Motel Pool By Hunter Braithwaite 1966 “Teenagers dancing at the pool of the Admiral Motel in Wildwood, New Jersey” “America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy,” John Updike wrote. Forty-six years later, the first half of the sentence holds. The line is from his 1972 story “How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time,” which begins with a vacationing family choosing a motel. At the top of the list for the kids is “a pool (essential).” In the new book The Swimming Pool in Photography, published by Hatje Cantz, Francis Hodgson includes iconic and obscure images of sanitarium-style public baths, backyard basins, fascist Olympians, face-lifted starlets, and the odd waterslide. Yet it wasn’t the kidney curves of Beverly Hills that brought back the burn of chlorine to my eyes, nor the steam off an Alpine sauna. It was a handful of photographs showing vacationers at motel pools. Shot on color-drenched Kodachrome and semistaged, these mostly anonymous photographs advertise a seasonal, obtainable version of the good life. The pools, many of which exist within the same space as the parking lot and the row of numbered doors, speak to a moment in America when average people had the resources to travel and relax—and to the temporary communities set up around these roadside oases. Those who know the tedium of the summer road trip—the nausea, the sweat behind the knees—also know the specific joy of a motel marquee, backlit by the evening sun, bearing those four closely kerned letters. Some say the journey is the destination. I’d trade both journey and destination for the motel pool—not too chilly, not too crowded, within walking distance of a Golden Corral. Hodgson’s book is a demonstration of how swimming pools are genetically photogenic. Perhaps it’s that a pool somewhat resembles a photograph: a field of glittering action, bordered by white. Or that before digital cameras, to develop a photograph meant to submerge it in a series of three pools—developer, stop bath, fixer. Or that both center around the joys of seeing—light dancing on water, bodies glowing in the sun. Photography might as well have been invented for swimming pools. Read More
July 10, 2018 Redux Redux: A State of Hyperconsciousness 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. This week, we bring you Jane Smiley’s 2015 Writers at Work interview, where she describes writing in a fugue state; Raymond Pettibon’s portfolio “Real Dogs in Space”; and May Sarton’s poem “A Farewell.” Jane Smiley, The Art of Fiction No. 229 Issue no. 214 (Fall 2015) INTERVIEWER You’ve described writing as a source of relaxation. SMILEY Do you know the writer Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi? He’s a Hungarian psychologist who writes about the state of flow. If you’re in a creative state, then essentially things sort of coagulate and you enter a state of hyperconsciousness—you can write for an hour or so, but it only seems like a few minutes because you’re so concentrated on it. I’ve experienced that a lot, which doesn’t mean there’s no frustration, but I don’t really remember the frustration very well. I remember more when the writing comes together. And I’m willing to seek out that coming together. If I get frustrated, I’ll go eat something, I’ll go open another Diet Coke, I’ll go to the barn, I’ll distract myself, and then the parts in my brain that were working click and I get an idea. I read an article about how to learn to play a musical instrument. You practice, practice, practice on Friday, then you walk away. And then when you sit down on Saturday, you’re better. Not only because of all the practice, but also because of the walking away. I’m a firm believer in walking away. Read More
July 10, 2018 Arts & Culture When Your Muse Is Also a Demonic Dominatrix By Nina-Sophia Miralles On Salvador Dalí’s wife, Gala. When Salvador Dalí’s wife, Gala, died in 1982, the first person outside of his household to hear the news was Juan Carlos, the king of Spain. Dalí telephoned the reigning monarch himself, and for once, this was not an act of posturing or presumption on his behalf. By then, the once-destitute artist had become a surrealist superstar, a multimillionaire, a man whose supreme genius landed him the nickname el maestro, the title of marquess, endless fawning fans, and an equally endless litany of clingers-on, copycats, and sycophants. Dalí had met Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, when he was the tender age of twenty-four (and, the story goes, still a virgin). She was ten years his senior, and they lived together for the next fifty-three years, until her death. How would he fare without her? Not well. Following her funeral, Dalí locked himself away in his surrealist tower in Púbol, Spain, drew the curtains, and refused to eat or drink. He denied entry to his friends and aides and forbade anyone to speak Gala’s name. As he writes in The Unspeakable Confessions in 1973, the castle itself was a testament to his love: Everything celebrates the cult of Gala, even the round room, with its perfect echo that crowns the building as a whole and which is like a dome of this Galactic cathedral. When I walk around this house I look at myself and I see my concentricity. I like its moorish rigour. I needed to offer Gala a case more solemnly worthy of our love. That is why I gave her a mansion built on the remains of a 12th century castle: the old castle of Púbol in La Bisbal, where she would reign like an absolute sovereign, right up to the point that I could visit her only by hand-written invitation from her. I limited myself to the pleasure of decorating her ceilings so that when she raised her eyes, she would always find me in her sky. In 1984, two years after her death, a fire broke out in his bedroom under suspicious circumstances, and Dalí was horribly burned. In the hospital, they discovered he was suffering from severe malnutrition, and his staff was accused of negligence. But the truth, as Gala’s biographer Tim McGirk writes in Wicked Lady, is that “after Gala’s death, Dalí lost his will to paint or even live.” Read More
July 10, 2018 Writers’ Fridges Writers’ Fridges: Ottessa Moshfegh By Ottessa Moshfegh In our series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. Do you see that half-eaten can of tuna on the top shelf? That was a mistake. Most of the food in my fridge is inedible. It would be inedible even if the stink of tuna hadn’t penetrated through it all, because it’s old. I’m almost never at home in Los Angeles, where this fridge lives. I travel a lot, and when I’m in California, I go to Luke’s house, two hours away. Luke’s fridge is a lot like Luke: exploding with deliciousness. Who could be luckier than me? Luke opens his mouth and whole chocolate cakes fall out. He snaps his fingers and voilà—chicken cacciatore. One time he rolled over in bed and left in his wake an entire patch of strawberries. I don’t know how to explain it. He’s the most wonderful man in the world. I’m always well-fed when Luke is around. Then I come home, alone, to this—rotten lettuce. I just tried pouring that Soleil carbonated water over ice, and even the ice smelled like fish. Read More
July 9, 2018 On Film On Agnès Varda’s Vagabond By Andrea Kleine Still from Vagabond, by Agnès Varda. As a teenager, my view of the world was bleak. I was the only one of my small group of misfit friends to leave home and go away to college. Not long before I did, I saw Agnès Varda’s film Vagabond. I can’t remember if I saw it at the local art-house cinema (which went out of business the same year) or if I pulled it off the rack at the neighborhood video-rental store or if I happened upon it on Cinemax, which in the late eighties was known for showing the HBO leftovers: foreign films and soft porn. I’m fairly certain I saw Vagabond alone. There were few female heroines that made sense to me growing up in the eighties, an era whose filmic representations were overwhelmed by John Hughes and his bubblegum suburbia, where misunderstood girls were eventually sexualized and therefore welcomed to the ranks of fitting in. That kind of conformist resolution was unsettling to me. Agnès Varda finally gave me a female protagonist who didn’t compromise. Read More