July 9, 2018 Arts & Culture I’m Not Supposed to Talk About Dubus By Nina MacLaughlin On revisiting Dubus’s female characters. The man, who I will not name, had started his fifties but looked older, paunchy, with thinning curls. We overlapped for two weeks at a writing residency in another country. He was the head of the department of creative writing at a large university and was the type of cliché that was amusing at first—the defeated, world-weary writing professor, the sad, self-involved blowhard, mourning his youth and his lost early promise. He was a faded, aging never-quite-was who name-dropped the famous poets at his wedding, and he both did and did not want you to know about his unfolding divorce. (“Let’s just say there’s been a disturbance in the marriage.” “Let’s just say I’m not feeling particularly fond of Geminis these days.” “Let’s just say I don’t have a lot of sympathy for adulterous poets right now.”) The type of cliché who is amusing at first but, in short time, devolves into despicable. He was loathsome. He lectured about writers—not in a formal sense but in the sense that to engage in conversation with him was to feel oneself being lectured—and at one point landed on the work of Andre Dubus, the short-story writer who was born in Louisiana in 1936 and died in 1999, who spent much of his life writing and teaching in Massachusetts, had three wives, and was the father of the writer Andre Dubus III (as well as five other children). “I’m not supposed to talk about Dubus,” he said. “Why not?” I asked. “I’ve been told he’s not PC. That’s what my students have said. My female students. That the way he writes women … ” Here, he made a vague gesture with his hand and pursed his lips. “I can’t really comment,” he said. This was two months before the ignition of #MeToo. I wanted to tell him he was wrong or that the “female students” who told him were. I am better able than you to say how well he writes women, I thought. And at that point, I would’ve argued Dubus writes women very well. Read More
July 9, 2018 Arts & Culture The Legend of Joaquín Murieta: A History of Racialized Violence By Hsuan L. Hsu Like its elusive hero, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854) is difficult to pin down. It has the distinction of being the first novel published in California, the first novel published by a Native American, and the first American novel to feature a Mexican protagonist. Its story draws together transformational events in the history of three nations, connecting the California gold rush with the Cherokee Trail of Tears and the Mexican-American War. It blends elements of epic, folktale, revenge tragedy, and romance—yet historians have often treated it as a factual record. It has been repurposed, and sometimes plagiarized, throughout the U.S., Mexico, Europe, and Latin America; in publications ranging from the California Police Gazette to the popular Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta (Splendor and Death of Joaquín Murieta), a play by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda; and the 1998 Hollywood film The Mask of Zorro (in which Joaquín’s brother, played by Antonio Banderas, takes up the mask of Zorro). While few Americans today would recognize the name of Joaquín Murieta, most are familiar with figures such as Zorro and Batman, whose creators were inspired by this sensational account of vigilante justice and righteous violence. Paradoxically, John Rollin Ridge’s book (published under his Cherokee name, Yellow Bird) has become both one of the most influential and one of the most invisible novels in the history of American literature. Read More
July 6, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bandits, Revenge, and Decapitated Animals By The Paris Review Mona Chalabi is the data editor for the Guardian’s U.S. branch. Her beautiful Instagram account is a mixture of data, visual art, and, taken together, a kind of self-portrait in infographics, illustrating Chalabi’s preoccupations, curiosity, neuroses, politics, and sense of humor. You’ll find a chart on the “Probability of a White Christmas” (at least one inch of snow) from Michigan to South Carolina, and another of an outstretched leg, illustrating the downward slope in pantyhose sales in Japan. The caffeine content of various beverages is represented by stretched-open bloodshot eyeballs. Another chart, of penises, represents the “Average Time to Ejaculate During Vaginal Penetration”: “Median = 5.4 minutes”—though her caption notes, “This data comes from 500 heterosexual men in monogamous relationships for at least 6 months. So, not exactly representative. And it was collected by asking them to use a stopwatch which you’d think would kill the mood at least a bit. But still, interesting, no?” Yes. Also interesting: the spike in people googling “Will I Die Alone” around Valentine’s Day; the number of decapitated animals found in New York parks (with chickens and pigeons in the lead, ahead of goats and cats); the degree to which Trump campaign contributors profit from his policy of detaining immigrants; and the current disparity in earnings between black and white Americans. Some aren’t charts at all, just facts and drawings, like the one of two hands being pulled apart—one big, one small—posted alongside the fact that 1,995 children were separated from 1,940 adults at the United States–Mexico border between April 19 and May 31 of this year. Some artists are perfectly suited to the visual medium of Instagram. Others provide you with information that may broaden your perspective or at least redeem your procrastination. If these two types are in a Venn diagram, with varying amounts of overlap, then Mona Chalabi is a total eclipse. —Brent Katz Read More
July 6, 2018 Bulletin A Send-Off to Nicole Rudick By The Paris Review After eight years as managing editor, and editing the last two issues as interim editor, Nicole Rudick has decided to leave The Paris Review. Our staff is small, and Nicole’s role, like so many of ours, extended far beyond that which is simply captured by job titles: she promoted new writers and artists, curated portfolios and conducted interviews for the magazine, edited and wrote pieces for the Daily, produced special projects—like our reinvigorated Paris Review Editions imprint and the Big, Bent Ears series—and so much more. We’ll miss her dry humor, strongly held opinions, hard-earned praise, and surprisingly colorful dress shoes. She has been equal parts tough and nurturing, a mentor to many who have passed through these doors. The day after the 2016 election, when many of us were crying quietly at our desks, Nicole gathered everyone around the pool table for a meeting. Then she turned on the music and encouraged us to dance. Read More
July 6, 2018 Arts & Culture First Woman Wins the Strega Prize in Fifteen Years By Francesco Pacifico Helena Janeczek won the Strega Prize, Italy’s biggest literary prize, on Thursday night. The last time a woman won was in 2003, fifteen years ago. Janeczek, who was born and raised in Germany by a Polish family, writes passionately about history and how hard it is to pin down the truth. The book that won the prize, La ragazza con la Leica, is a work of nonfiction about Gerda Taro, the young woman photographer who died in the Spanish Civil War just before her twenty-seventh birthday. Women were well represented on this year’s long list and short list, and excitement brewed that a woman might win. Before the award ceremony, the feminist intellectual and author Loredana Lipperini wrote that voters shouldn’t treat this as a token #MeToo win. The day before the ceremony, I got on the phone with Janeczek, who was my favorite in the short list, and asked her if she felt that this year was going to be different. Read More
July 6, 2018 The Big Picture When Female Artists Stop Being Seen as Muses By Cody Delistraty On the work of Gabriele Münter. Gabriele Münter, Fräulein Ellen im Gras, 1934. The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, some twenty-five miles north of Copenhagen on the shore of the Øresund, has a sense of porousness—glass and light everywhere, so many doors between the museum and the sculpture park that inside and outside lose their distinction. There are exhibitions on the Los Angeles–based artist Ed Ruscha and on Pablo Picasso’s surprisingly prolific work with ceramics, but the reason I’ve come is to see a two-floor exhibition on the life and career of Gabriele Münter. The exhibition, devoted wholly to the sixty-year career of the underknown Berlin-born German Expressionist, includes around a hundred thirty of her works. But before you’re able to focus on her aesthetic breakthroughs—on the way in which she positioned and profiled and photographed women, on her František Kupka–level jumps in artistic style—social conditioning dictates that you look first at the shadow of her long-term lover, the better-known Wassily Kandinsky. History, of course, tends to take for granted that women have been influenced by the men in their lives while the very same men aren’t seen as having been influenced by these women. Viewing art has tended toward the same effect: lonely men are “lone geniuses” while lonely women, those who devote themselves to their art at the expense of love or family, are “art monsters.” Read More