December 11, 2018 Arts & Culture Imagining a Free Palestine By George Abraham An ekphrasis on a fragmented nationalism. Installation view, Mona Hatoum, Hot Spot, 2006, stainless steel and neon glass tube. Photo: KhaoulaSharjah [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons. Somewhere in Tel Aviv, Israeli citizens are walking through an art exhibition called “Stolen Arab Art.” The title is not a metaphor—the show features four unattributed video art installations created by Arab artists, without the consent of those Arab artists. Here, the word Arab is a placeholder for Palestinian, but I suppose that goes without saying. In every interview, the curator (an Israeli who is not Palestinian) defends the installation as a comment against the cultural boycott of the Zionist state, claiming the exhibition is a “performative action,” hence all visitors are performers, and everyone—curators, attendees, and artists—is implicated in the theft. In a way, the curator is correct. At the center of all settler colonial projects is theft. All interactions with the settler colonial project, be they cultural or economic, normalize the existence of the aforementioned settler colonial project, which, again, is contingent upon theft by construction. The premise of the installation is a contradiction, much like the Zionist state: the curator, intending to criticize boycotts of the Zionist state, perpetuates the precise colonial theft being criticized. “Stolen Arab Art” is not an isolated phenomenon; earlier this year, an Israeli publisher released a translated collection of essays by Arab women without their consent to translate, print, or distribute the text. The publisher, Resling Books, titled the collection Huriya, which translates to “freedom” in Arabic. The contradictory metaphor is self-evident, and the trend is unsurprising in a historical sense. Within the walls of an exhibition and the pages of a book, Israelis dare to imagine works of Palestinian imagination as their own. Isn’t that how this all began? Read More
December 11, 2018 Arts & Culture But I Don’t Ever Lie: On Lucia Berlin By Rebecca Bengal LUCIA BERLIN IN ALBUQUERQUE, 1961. PHOTO: BUDDY BERLIN/LITERARY ESTATE OF LUCIA BERLIN There are masters of the paragraph and masters of the sentence; Lucia Berlin is the master of the fragment. Her deliberate abbreviations slipstream off one another. Less drag, high velocity; the story propels forward. Take this succession from the story “Strays,” set in a desolate rehab facility outside Albuquerque: “Fallen-down barracks. Torn and rusted venetian blinds rattling in the wind. Pinups peeled off the walls. Three- or four-foot sand dunes in every room. Dunes, with waves and patterns like in postcards from the Painted Desert.” Rather than create pauses, her descriptions ignite the story, keep it in motion. Like this from “The Musical Vanity Boxes,” as Raúl, a father from Juarez, leads young “Lucha” and her Syrian best friend Hope back over the border to El Paso: “Gentle, like the pull of a dowser’s branch, drawing our bony bodies into the pachuco beat of his walk, so light, slow, swinging.” Berlin’s first posthumous collected stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women (2015), showcased her extraordinary and underappreciated talent and her fantastic range; the second, Evening in Paradise, recently published alongside a companion volume of her memoir and letters, presumes to show us this and more: her life. Read More
December 10, 2018 Arts & Culture The Faces of Ferrante By Miranda Popkey Still from the HBO adaptation of My Brilliant Friend In most respects, HBO’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend is merely serviceable. It’s a re-creation, competent and faithful, of the events described in the first novel of Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. The performances are convincing, the movement from scene to scene is pleasurable, the music is complementary but unobtrusive, and the set decoration is impeccable. One expects, from a production branded with the HBO logo, nothing less. And yet, in one respect, the series is in fact brilliant. Take it from this terrone: they got the faces right. My Brilliant Friend is an account, painstaking and digressive and emotionally devastating, of the friendship between Elena (Lenù) Greco and Raffaella (Lila) Cerullo between the ages of six and sixteen. (The adult Lenù, now a successful writer in late middle age, narrates all four novels.) But it is also a portrait, universalizing precisely because of its attention to particulars, of small-town Southern Italy in the years after World War II, years during which economic privation and casual violence were the rule, years during which (very recently ex-) Fascists retained local power, their authority, like their comparative wealth, unquestioned. I say comparative wealth because even those who had money had little, and what they could buy with it was meager: a small convertible, a single television. My Brilliant Friend ends in the year 1960, midway through the Italian “economic miracle”—il boom—that helped modernize the then-rural South. But the effects of Northern industrialization seem to have barely trickled down to Ferrante’s Neapolitan suburb; the poverty, the miseria, is still everywhere. Sara Casani and Laura Muccino, the Italian casting directors, understand what that miseria looks like, how the body wears struggle. They know that what we call beauty is often just another marker of class. They know that if you don’t feel like you belong, you’ll never look like you do, either. And so they have populated Lenù’s neighborhood with, my god, such faces: sloppier and saggier, more wrinkled and more weathered and more crooked than many American readers will have imagined for these characters. Read More
December 10, 2018 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Anna Kavan By Emma Garman Anna Kavan Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. The reputation of Anna Kavan, who wrote some of the twentieth century’s most haunting and original fiction, exists in a shadowy realm not unlike those inhabited by her alienated characters. Since her death fifty years ago, Kavan has built a cult following, with all that phrase implies. Her fans, who have included Anaïs Nin, Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, J.G. Ballard, Jonathan Lethem, and Patti Smith, are scarce yet passionate. “Few novelists,” declared Ballard, “match the intensity of her vision.” Kavan’s stranger-than-fiction life, meanwhile, has become mythologized, murky, the truth overlaid by details from short stories and novels that were taken for straight autobiography. An enduring piece of Kavan apocrypha, for example, is that she intentionally shrouded herself in mystery. “What a thrilling enigma for posterity I should be,” muses one of her fictional alter egos. Whether deliberately or otherwise, Kavan did little to assist future biographers. Elusive and capricious, with the restless, questing nature of the malcontent, she drifted from country to country and man to man, formed friendships and dropped them, concealed her real age, and destroyed diaries and letters. “She cast doubts, she lied, she fabricated, she spoke the truth, she was most honest,” wrote the drama critic Raymond Marriott, a friend and coexecutor of her estate. “But where did it begin and where did it end?” Read More
December 10, 2018 YA of Yore Harry Potter and the Secret Gay Love Story By James Frankie Thomas In our new monthly column, YA of Yore, Frankie Thomas takes a second look at the books that defined a generation. Joseph Christian Leyendecker, Man Reading Book, 1914 My micro-generation—that is, the subset of millennials who were born in the second term of the Reagan administration and graduated face first into the Great Recession, and of which the most famous member is probably Mark Zuckerberg—has very little to brag about, so you can hardly blame us for our possessive attachment to Harry Potter. Harry Potter is to us what the Beatles were to our baby boomer parents. To say that we “grew up along with Harry” is far too corny to convey the actual experience of being the world’s first children ever to read those books. I remember attending a classmate’s twelfth birthday party in 1998, thrusting into her hands a gift-wrapped copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (at the time the only Harry Potter book available in the United States), and informing her with something like personal pride, “This book has been on the New York Times best-seller list for five weeks!” It would probably still be there today if the Times hadn’t, shortly thereafter, created a separate best-seller list for children’s books on the grounds that J. K. Rowling’s success was unfair to the other novelists. It was a classic everybody-gets-a-trophy policy, a fitting legacy for the foundational text of millennial childhood. The fifth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, was published in the summer of 2003, by which point Harry was fifteen and those of us growing up along with him had discovered sex. The Harry Potter years also happened to coincide with the Wild West era of the internet and the rise of abstinence-only sex education; as a result, for better or for worse, erotic Harry Potter fan fiction played a major and under-discussed role in millennial sexual development. This was especially true if you were queer—or, not to put too fine a point on it, if you were me—and had picked up on the secret gay love story that existed between the lines of Rowling’s text. I refer, of course, to Sirius and Lupin. Read More
December 7, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Whisky Priests, World’s End, and Brilliant Friends By The Paris Review Still from Episode 1 (debut 11/18/18) of HBO’s My Brilliant Friend, “Le Bambole (The Dolls).” Photo: Eduardo Castaldo/HBO. I tend to be suspicious of film and television adaptations of my favorite books. This might stem from a kind of jealousy—the slow unraveling of a narrative or the exact right word used for the exact right idea are part of the pleasures of literature, but sometimes, as a writer, I wish I could borrow from film the immediacy of a jump cut or image. So it was with some apprehension that I began to watch My Brilliant Friend, HBO’s new adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Would this first season—eight episodes in total, dedicated entirely to portraying the first novel in the series—water down the source material, with its unflinching portrayal of the violence and poverty of postwar Naples and the simultaneous terror and joy of girlhood and female friendship? After devouring the first few episodes this past weekend, I can assure you that, so far, it does not. Rather, this is the rare adaptation that both hews closely to its source material and yet manages to escape any stiltedness. And while Ferrante’s novels remain first in my heart, there are moments in the television series—the visual shock of a red menstrual stain amid the otherwise muted color palette—that might work even better on film. —Rhian Sasseen Read More