February 11, 2019 Arts & Culture Loitering Is Delightful By Ross Gay Ross Gay. Photo: Natasha Komoda. I’m sitting at a café in Detroit where in the door window is the sign with the commands NO SOLICITING NO LOITERING stacked like an anvil. I have a fiscal relationship with this establishment, which I developed by buying a coffee and which makes me a patron. And so even though I subtly dozed in the late afternoon sun pouring in under the awning, the two bucks spent protects me, at least temporarily, from the designation of loiterer, though the dozing, if done long enough, or ostentatiously enough, or with enough delight, might transgress me over. Loitering, as you know, means fucking off, or doing jack shit, or jacking off, and given that two of those three terms have sexual connotations, it’s no great imaginative leap to know that it is a repressed and repressive (sexual and otherwise) culture, at least, that invented and criminalized the concept. Someone reading this might very well keel over considering loitering a concept and not a fact. Such are the gales of delight. The Webster’s definition of loiter reads thus: “to stand or wait around idly without apparent purpose,” and “to travel indolently with frequent pauses.” Among the synonyms for this behavior are linger, loaf, laze, lounge, lollygag, dawdle, amble, saunter, meander, putter, dillydally, and mosey. Any one of these words, in the wrong frame of mind, might be considered a critique or, when nouned, an epithet (“Lollygagger!” or “Loafer!”). Indeed, lollygag was one of the words my mom would use to cajole us while jingling her keys when she was waiting on us, which, judging from the visceral response I had while writing that memory, must’ve been not quite infrequent. All of these words to me imply having a nice day. They imply having the best day. They also imply being unproductive. Which leads to being, even if only temporarily, nonconsumptive, and this is a crime in America, and more explicitly criminal depending upon any number of quickly apprehended visual cues. Read More
February 11, 2019 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Isabelle Eberhardt By Emma Garman Eberhardt in 1895, photographed by Louis David When the Swiss-Russian writer and explorer Isabelle Eberhardt died in the Algerian Sahara in 1904, she was physically ravaged. She was only twenty-seven, but heavy smoking, drinking, and drug use had taken their toll, as had poor nourishment. On her travels she’d carried a gun, but not a toothbrush, and so she had lost her teeth. She suffered from malaria and possibly syphilis, and just before her death had spent weeks hospitalized with fever. An assassination attempt a few years earlier, when a religious enemy attacked Eberhardt with a sword, had nearly severed her arm and left her in constant pain. Despite her youth, her body could no longer carry on. Her strange and brilliant mind, though, was immortalized by the travelogues, journalism, and fiction she left behind. “No one ever lived more from day to day than I, or was more dependent upon chance,” Eberhardt wrote shortly before her death. “It is the inescapable chain of events that has brought me to this point, rather than I who have caused things to happen.” Read More
February 8, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Death, Dávila, and Darkness By The Paris Review Amparo Dávila. Last Friday, when temperatures dropped into the bone-chilling teens, a crowd of about thirty people dipped out of the cold into Aeon Bookstore on East Broadway and Essex, where they sipped tequila with lime and listened to Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson read from their translation of Amparo Dávila’s The Houseguest, the first collection of her short fiction to appear in English. The lead story, “Moses and Gaspar,” was first published in The Paris Review in 2016, and readers of the magazine will remember it for its strangeness: a man inherits what at first glance appear to be his dead brother’s two pets, but slowly they reveal that they are not pets at all but beings otherworldly and sinister. Harris and Gleeson read “Oscar,” which is about a family being slowly destroyed, both figuratively and literally, by whoever (or whatever) lives in their basement. The eleven additional stories in the collection are just as tense and creepy, bristling with uncanny subtlety. Dávila’s psychological realism is spare in style and, despite all the demonic creatures, grounded in deeply human paranoia and fear. —Lauren Kane Read More
February 8, 2019 Arts & Culture Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction By Mairead Small Staid Johan Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, Laesende lille pige, 1900 “I read books to read myself,” Sven Birkerts wrote in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Birkerts’s book, which turns twenty-five this year, is composed of fifteen essays on reading, the self, the convergence of the two, and the ways both are threatened by the encroachment of modern technology. As the culture around him underwent the sea change of the internet’s arrival, Birkerts feared that qualities long safeguarded and elevated by print were in danger of erosion: among them privacy, the valuation of individual consciousness, and an awareness of history—not merely the facts of it, but a sense of its continuity, of our place among the centuries and cosmos. “Literature holds meaning not as a content that can be abstracted and summarized, but as experience,” he wrote. “It is a participatory arena. Through the process of reading we slip out of our customary time orientation, marked by distractedness and surficiality, into the realm of duration.” Writing in 1994, Birkerts worried that distractedness and surficiality would win out. The “duration state” we enter through a turned page would be lost in a world of increasing speed and relentless connectivity, and with it our ability to make meaning out of narratives, both fictional and lived. The diminishment of literature—of sustained reading, of writing as the product of a single focused mind—would diminish the self in turn, rendering us less and less able to grasp both the breadth of our world and the depth of our own consciousness. For Birkerts, as for many a reader, the thought of such a loss devastates. So while he could imagine this bleak near-future, he (mostly) resisted the masochistic urge to envision it too concretely, focusing instead on the present, in which—for a little while longer, at least—he reads, and he writes. His collection, despite its title, resembles less an elegy for literature than an attempt to stave off its death: by writing eloquently about his own reading life and electronic resistance, Birkerts reminds us that such a life is worthwhile, desirable, and, most importantly, still possible. In the face of what we stand to lose, he privileges what we might yet gain. Read More
February 8, 2019 Arts & Culture Notes from Kathleen Collins’s Diary By Kathleen Collins When the writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins died in 1988 at age forty-six, her level of fame was disproportionate to the heights of her talent. With a singing, singular voice, she wrote stories of black women in and out of love. The release in 2016 of Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? introduced her pioneering work to twenty-first-century readers. Now, Ecco has released Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary, a delightful grab bag of Collins’s letters, plays, film scripts, journal entries, stories, and chapters of an unfinished novel. Below, Collins revisits her diary and reflects on the nature of writing, loving, and living. Kathleen Collins. Photo: Douglas Collins. November 19 It rained hard today. After lunch I sat in the kitchen sipping a can of beer. The beer made me very sleepy, so I came in to take a nap. It was one of those deep naps, where the wind and the rain conspire to take you into a deep, secure slumber. Every muscle goes limp. You awaken, as you awaken sometimes after really good lovemaking: spent, but incredibly rested and content. February 8 Riding in the car, the day was suddenly dreary, bleak. And life seemed monotonous and sad. I wanted to cry. It seems that I have watched enough winters come in, turned the clocks back enough times, watched the rain turn the world black too many days. Only my children really hold me to life. They give me the patience to wait it out for a new day. January 13 On my desk sits a photograph taken in the ’30s of several young women gathered for some festive occasion. They are all in their twenties, all the daughters of prominent black families. They are smiling, some holding hands. One of them is to become my mother. Another is to become the mother of my first lover … January 23 The extremism, the tenacity in me. I will hold on. I will to hold on. Until all the cards have been played February 24 On the phone with B–— over an hour, about men and women. In the end I am close to tears, recognizing that all the things we take so personally, all the things we suffer over so dreadfully, have so little to do with us. I try to describe to him the terror I feel in the face of a man’s freedom, the boundless arbitrariness of it. How ruthless it can be in pursuit of itself. Men become themselves out of a refusal of certain kinds of limitations, women out of an acceptance of them. Women are bound. They must come to terms with a whole centrifugal force of taboos that they cannot violate without doing severe violence to themselves. We are in bondage to life. A woman’s life is a terrible thing. Make no mistake about it. And I believe in liberation, but I don’t believe it is at all the thing we think it is. March 18 We can’t fight time. We can’t get over anything faster than we’re supposed to. Whatever we have to live through we have to live through until its time is up. I’m saying all this to say that I think my present sense of clarity is not my victory, but time’s. And so it goes. As if the words could weight down the fleetingness and force it to exist in some more physical, more irrevocable way. Read More
February 7, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: I Woke to Myself By Claire Schwartz 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, Claire Schwartz is on the line. ©Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I’ve been betrayed by my best friend, my mentor, and my first (and only) lover. He was a narcissist, a cheater, and a liar—but I didn’t recognize it quickly enough. I left him and am doing all I can to heal, but my half-closed wounds rip open at the slightest irritations. I crumble when a mention of him is floated between mutual friends, or when I discover another of his countless mistresses populating my “Suggested Friends” list on Facebook. He’s a successful man, and for him, life has gone on. I, on the other hand, feel ashamed and insignificant. Worse than the pain is my anger: I keep rewriting our breakup script, inserting scenes where I finally get to make him feel my pain. Do you have a poem to help me surrender my rage? Kindest, Eaten By Grief Read More