January 25, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Forensic Files, Fireflies, and Frigid Nights By The Paris Review Halle Butler. Photo: Jerzy Rose. Three pages into Halle Butler’s forthcoming novel The New Me, misanthropic Millie jokes about wishing she had a home intruder for company. Reading this, I immediately canceled dinner plans so I could finish the book in one sitting. Millie spends her days temping at a trendy design firm and imagining an improved version of herself waiting under layers of ill-fitting outfits and outward disdain. She oscillates between denigrating those around her and pitying their transparent desires with detached boredom. The New Me examines working womanhood, with all its privilege, ambition, objectification, and hierarchies, while confronting a nearly universal desire to build beautiful lives that society deems worth living. Every day holds a glittering future self, but reality diverges into nights of isolation, Forensic Files binges, and guilt-driven cleaning. To frame The New Me as the result of capitalism would unfairly simplify Butler’s depiction of contemporary workplace dynamics, but the implication stews as Millie considers her life’s purpose to “slowly collect money that I can use to pay the rent on my apartment and on food so that I can continue to live and continue to come to this room and sit at this desk and slowly collect money.” Regardless, in just under two hundred pages, Halle Butler made me laugh and cry enough times to feel completely reborn. —Nikki Shaner-Bradford Read More
January 25, 2019 On Sports A Loss Like a Knife: The 2019 Australian Open By Rowan Ricardo Phillips Our resident poet/tennis expert is back with some thoughts on the 2019 Australian Open. Stefanos Tsitsipas (left) and Danielle Collins (right) The two most in-form players at the 2019 Australian open, Stefanos Tsitsipas and Danielle Collins, met their ends in the semifinals. That their final sets both ended with scorelines of 6-0 is remarkable. That these rising young stars were defeated is surprising. But here we are. Stefanos Tsitsipas, the twenty-year-old phenom from Athens, was turned away by Rafael Nadal, 2-6, 4-6, 0-6. And Danielle Collins, the twenty-five-year old former college champion from the University of Virginia, met the end of the road in the form of a 6-7(2), 0-6 defeat at the hands of Petra Kvitová. Read More
January 25, 2019 One Word One Word: Boy By Bryan Washington In our new column One Word, writers expound on a single word. William Lindsay Windus, The Black Boy, 1844 I’ve worked a lot of jobs where I’ve dealt with boys. Lately, I’ve been teaching conjugation and sentence structure to junior high kids, swaths of whom are just flexing the boundaries of their boyhood. They ask a lot of questions. One little dude, from Puerto Rico, wonders how many light bulbs there are in the building. One boy, another brown kid, asks me whether Houston will survive the inevitable floods brought about by global warming. And another boy, a little older, during an SAT excerpt featuring Anna Karenina, asks about the legality of queer marriage in Russia, before also asking whether I think he can hack into the building’s Wi-Fi, did I know that he can floss, do I listen to Gucci Mane, can I loan him some money for Fortnite. They’re just boys. And that word—boy—is pretty interesting in itself: it embodies a phase of life and a physical state and a way of being. Boy is garçon. Boy is chico y niño. The distance between boy and man is elastic, and the word itself is just as flexible. Nearly every culture has some sort of ritual transition out of boyhood: bar mitzvahs for Jewish folks, cow jumping among the Hamar in Ethiopia, Seijin-no-Hi in Japan. A first gig. A first kiss. A first beer. And the word’s weight adopts fluidity as it drifts from mouth to mouth: when my aunt calls me boy, in a sprawling patois, it’s not the same boy I’ve heard on fuck knows how many crowded street corners, at whatever ungodly hour. That boy comes after I’ve said something dumb or needlessly contentious or unspeakably obvious. Boy like, Really nigga? Boy like, Slow your roll. Boy like, Bruh; like, Fuck outta here; like, Your assertion is wildly improbable, but my acquiescence to your instigations are an integral part of our friendship’s contract. Read More
January 24, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: You Are a Threat Loving Yourself By Sarah Kay 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, Sarah Kay is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I am a young woman living in New York. I am the daughter of an alcoholic. When I was twelve, my mom stopped drinking, and we began a long conversation about the nature of addiction. We spoke about our genes and the importance of drinking cautiously (if at all). Two years ago, I went through my first breakup (we were together for five years), and I have since surrounded myself with new friends (many who drink heavily). I feel as though I am starting to depend on alcohol to bring me the comfort that my partner once provided. There is a large part of me that would love to be sober, but it seems there is a larger part of me that enjoys the instant gratification and social ease that alcohol brings. I am searching for a poem that will encourage me toward sobriety and/or capture this dual nature within myself. With gratitude, Afraid of My Own Addiction Read More
January 24, 2019 Arts & Culture When Diderot Met Voltaire By Andrew S. Curran François-Marie Arouet, a.k.a Voltaire, and Denis Diderot. In mid-December 1776, the eighty-three-year-old Voltaire pulled out a piece of paper and dashed off a note to Diderot. Having been exiled from Paris for more than twenty-five years, the now wizened and virtually toothless philosophe lamented the fact that the two men had never laid eyes on each other: “I am heartbroken to die without having met you … I would gladly come and spend my last fifteen minutes in Paris in order to have the solace of hearing your voice.” Fifteen months later, Voltaire rolled into the capital in his blue, star-spangled coach. Quite ill with prostate cancer, the famous humanitarian, essayist, and playwright nonetheless organized a feverish schedule for himself. In addition to finishing work on a five-act tragedy—he lived long enough to attend the premiere—Voltaire spent most of his days holding court in a friend’s hôtel particulier on the corner of the rue de Beaune and the quai des Théatins. Here, for hours at a time, Voltaire received visits from a long list of adoring friends and dignitaries, among them Benjamin Franklin and his son. Sometime during Voltaire’s three-month stay, Diderot also came to pay his respects. Journalists who wrote about the meeting hinted that some relationships are best conducted solely by correspondence. Diderot and Voltaire had first exchanged letters in 1749 when the “prince of the philosophes” had invited the then up-and-coming Diderot to dinner. In addition to hoping to get to know the clever author of the Letter on the Blind, Voltaire had presumably hoped to help the newly appointed editor of the Encyclopédie rethink his atheism. Diderot decided to dodge both the invitation and the sermon. One might wonder what kind of young writer turns down lunch with the most famous public intellectual ever to live. The answer, in 1749, was pretty clear: a proud and unremorseful unbeliever who had no interest in having his philosophy questioned by an unbending deist. Read More
January 23, 2019 Look Nature Redescribed: The Work of Vija Celmins By The Paris Review Although she’s been friendly with artists from both coasts of the United States throughout her five-decade career, Vija Celmins has remained agnostic regarding trends and movements; like nature itself, her discipline operates on its own terms. “When I’m working,” she says in a 1992 interview with Chuck Close, “my instinct is to try to build and to fill. To fill something until it is really full.” She has referred to her meticulous, overflowing portraits of the natural world as “redescriptions,” a word that implies paraphrasing rather than pure invention. But this perhaps minimizes her genius—nearly as expansive and awe inspiring as the night skies and desert floors they depict, Celmins’s works demand to be experienced firsthand. In that setting, they close the distance, enveloping the viewer in gloriously rendered detail. The first major North American exhibition of her work in more than twenty-five years is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through March 31, after which the show will travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario (May 4–August 4) and the Met Breuer (September 23, 2019–January 12, 2020). Below, we present a selection of images from the book Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory, which accompanies the show. Vija Celmins, Untitled (Big Sea #2), 1969, graphite and acrylic ground on paper. Private collection. © Vija Celmins. Photo courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery. Vija Celmins, Clouds, 1968, graphite on paper. Private collection. © Vija Celmins. Photo courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery. Read More