February 1, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Steepletop, Sandra Bullock, and Celeste By The Paris Review Prabda Yoon. I’ve wanted to read the work of the Thai writer and filmmaker Prabda Yoon for a while now, and with The Sad Part Was—his 2002 collection, translated into English by Mui Poopoksakul and released by Tilted Axis Press in 2017—I’ve finally delved in. The stories are marvelous: witty and at times irreverent looks at life in contemporary Bangkok that are unafraid to ask the big questions concerning the human capacity for good and evil. They’re formally innovative, too. The first story, “Pen in Parentheses,” uses the parenthetical to an almost Woolf-like effect, while “Miss Space” ends with a note that its final sentence isn’t a conclusion but rather “a waiting period that doesn’t yet have a thought to succeed it.” By the end, I wanted more—and luckily, it looks like Tilted Axis has recently published another collection of Yoon’s stories. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
February 1, 2019 Arts & Culture Three Writing Rules to Disregard By Benjamin Dreyer I have nothing against rules. They’re indispensable when playing Monopoly or gin rummy, and their observance can go a long way toward improving a ride on the subway. The rule of law? Big fan. The English language, though, is not so easily ruled and regulated. It developed without codification, sucking up new constructions and vocabulary every time some foreigner set foot on the British Isles—to say nothing of the mischief we Americans have wreaked on it these last few centuries—and continues to evolve anarchically. It has, to my great dismay, no enforceable laws, much less someone to enforce the laws it doesn’t have. Certain prose rules are essentially inarguable—that a sentence’s subject and its verb should agree in number, for instance. Or that in a “not only x but y” construction, the x and the y must be parallel elements. Why? I suppose because they’re firmly entrenched, because no one cares to argue with them, and because they aid us in using our words to their preeminent purpose: to communicate clearly with our readers. Let’s call these reasons the Four C’s, shall we? Convention. Consensus. Clarity. Comprehension. Also simply because, I swear to you, a well-constructed sentence sounds better. Literally sounds better. One of the best ways to determine whether your prose is well constructed is to read it aloud. A sentence that can’t be readily voiced is a sentence that likely needs to be rewritten. A good sentence, I find myself saying frequently, is one that the reader can follow from beginning to end, no matter how long it is, without having to double back in confusion because the writer misused or omitted a key piece of punctuation, chose a vague or misleading pronoun, or in some other way engaged in inadvertent misdirection. (If you want to puzzle your reader, that’s your own business.) As much as I like a good rule, I’m an enthusiastic subscriber to the notion of “rules are meant to be broken”—once you’ve learned them, I hasten to add. But let’s, right now, attend to a few of what I think of as the Great Nonrules of the English Language. You’ve encountered all of these; likely you were taught them in school. I’d like you to free yourself of them. They’re not helping you; all they’re doing is clogging your brain and inciting you to look self-consciously over your own shoulder as you write, which is as psychologically painful as it is physically impossible. And once you’ve done that, once you’ve gotten rid of them, hopefully you can put your attention on vastly more important things. Read More
February 1, 2019 Eat Your Words Cooking with Iris Murdoch By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. Some novels are so full of eccentric food and cooking instructions that it seems the best treatment of them would be to write a second book trying all the recipes. The Sea, the Sea, by the British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919–99), is one such novel. In its first pages, Charles Arrowby, a retired actor and theater director, veers from his description of the English coast, where he’s come to work on his memoirs, to discuss his lunch. I’m reproducing the following passage in full, since it’s exemplary of the book’s treatment of food. It is after lunch and I shall now describe the house. For lunch, I may say, I ate and greatly enjoyed the following: anchovy paste on hot buttered toast, then baked beans and kidney beans with chopped celery, tomatoes, lemon juice and olive oil. (Really good olive oil is essential, the kind with a taste, I have brought a supply from London.) Green peppers would have been a happy addition only the village shop (about two miles pleasant walk) could not provide them … Then bananas and cream with white sugar. (Bananas should be cut, never mashed, and the cream should be thin.) Then hard water-biscuits with New Zealand butter and Wensleydale cheese. Of course I never touch foreign cheeses. Our cheeses are the best in the world. With this feast I drank most of a bottle of Muscadet out of my modest ‘cellar’. I ate and drank slowly as one should (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heavens) conversation or reading. Indeed eating is so pleasant one should even try to suppress thought. Charles’s food descriptions are wonderful in their particularity and spur all kinds of culinary thoughts, such as, Can canned baked beans be redeemed by good olive oil?, and, Why hasn’t the old-fashioned dessert of fruit in heavy cream made a comeback? The preparation details are a boon for a person wishing to replicate the food. Another simple dessert of apricots with shortbread cookies specifies that the apricots, if not available fresh, should be obtained dried, and soaked for twenty-four hours. Each meal comes with a wine pairing. Read More
February 1, 2019 Devil in the Details The Art of the Bruise By Larissa Pham Larissa Pham’s monthly column, Devil in the Details, takes a tight lens on single elements of a work, tracing them throughout art history. In this installment, she focuses on bruises. The bruise in Nan Goldin’s “Heart-Shaped Bruise” could be anyone’s. A woman reclines on floral sheets, her face out of frame. She lies on her side like an odalisque. Her black-and-white striped dress is pulled up above the knee, her sheer black tights are yanked down. Framed in the middle, as if between curtains parted to reveal a stage, is the titular bruise, high on the woman’s right thigh. It is defined by its outline, like the imprint left on a table by an overfull coffee cup. One edge is beginning—just barely—to purple; the bruise is at most a day old. The photograph can’t show how the bruise will turn purple, as bruises do, then deepen into blacks and blues. We won’t see how the burst capillaries, like lace under the skin, will sour into greenish yellow and mauve. But we know. The bruise will move through a rainbow of colors, mottled like the translucent surface of a plum, until finally—weeks later, and no longer heart-shaped—it will fade back to the pink of healthy skin. We know that as we look, the bruise has already healed: Nan Goldin took the photograph in 1980. It is an old wound. It exists now only as a memory—a mark destined to fade, captured before it did. Every time I have a nosebleed—which is often lately, in the bone-aching dryness of a New York winter—I absolutely must take a photograph. I wish I didn’t have this terrible, maudlin impulse, but as soon as I feel the jet of warm blood I’m in the bathroom with my iPhone, doing my best Francesca Woodman impersonation until the little runnel of red hits the bottom of my chin. Bruises, too, have found their way onto my camera roll, captured from the moment I first notice their purpling presence and tracked as they blossom into violet, ultramarine, and lemon-yellow hues. Read More
January 31, 2019 Arts & Culture She Was Sort of Crazy: On Women Artists By Lynn Steger Strong Hilma af Klint exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum I went to the Hilma af Klint show at the Guggenheim alone. It was my birthday. I had other obligations, but I snuck out of them. I don’t like birthdays, and I wanted to be alone with art made by a woman. I found parts of the show stunning and parts of it strange and underwhelming. I admired her ambition; I liked the idea of her. I liked the idea of her having finally been discovered, anointed, and I admired her faith that a more spiritually transcendent future class of people would appreciate the work that she knew would be misunderstood in her own time. I admired the scale at which she worked and its specificity: it almost seemed to exist outside of time. She painted landscapes and portraits to make money. On the side, she created ecstatic, massive works, taking her instructions from the “High Masters,” spirits from whom she received messages at the regular seances she held with four of her friends who referred to themselves as “The Five.” At one point, about halfway up the path of the museum, reading a panel that described the seances, a middle-age man standing next to me and, I think, assuming I was whomever he had come to the museum with, whispered, conspiratorially to me, “She was sort of crazy, huh?” Then he saw me and blanched, as he realized I wasn’t who he thought he’d whispered to. I laughed and left him there. I was annoyed; he was a man, calling a female artist crazy. I hoped he felt at least a small amount of shame at having a stranger hear him say this thing out loud. Klint did, though, seem a little crazy. She was insane enough to think her paintings had a sort of spiritual transcendence, to think that her work was capital-A Art. I sort of think anyone who believes this, myself included, especially if they’re a woman, must be at least a little bit insane. Read More
January 31, 2019 Arts & Culture What Che Guevara and Fidel Castro Read By Tony Perrottet Che Guevara reading the newspaper La nación. Photo: Diario La Nación. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Even Che Guevara, the poster boy for the Cuban Revolution, was forced to admit that endlessly trudging the Sierra Maestra mountains had its downsides. “There are periods of boredom in the life of the guerrilla fighter,” he warns future revolutionaries in his classic handbook, Guerrilla Warfare. The best way to combat the dangers of ennui, he helpfully suggests, is reading. Many of the rebels were college educated—Che was a doctor, Fidel a lawyer, others fine art majors—and visitors to the rebels’ jungle camps were often struck by their literary leanings. Even the most macho fighters, it seems, would be seen hunched over books. Che recommends that guerrillas carry edifying works of nonfiction despite their annoying weight—“good biographies of past heroes, histories, or economic geographies” will distract them from vices such as gambling and drinking. An early favorite in camp, improbably, was a Spanish-language Reader’s Digest book on great men in U.S. history, which the visiting CBS-TV journalist Robert Taber noticed in 1957 was passed around from man to man, possibly for his benefit. But literary fiction had its place, especially if it fit vaguely into the revolutionary framework. One big hit was Curzio Malaparte’s The Skin, a novel recounting the brutality of the occupation of Naples after World War II. (Ever convinced of victory, Fidel thought reading the book would help ensure that the men would behave well when they captured Havana.) More improbably, a dog-eared copy of Émile Zola’s psychological thriller The Beast Within was also pored over with an intensity that could only impress modern bibliophiles. Raúl Castro, Fidel’s younger brother and usually an inspired platoon leader, recalled in his diary that he was lost in “the first dialogue of Séverine with the Secretary General of Justice” while waiting in ambush one morning when he was startled by the first shots of battle at 8:05 A.M. Che himself was nearly killed in an air raid because he was engrossed in Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Read More