November 30, 2018 Arts & Culture On Edmond Baudoin, an Ink-Stained Proust By Matt Madden Edmond Baudoin is a force of nature who holds a singular position in the French comics scene. An ink-stained Proust, his drawings and his memory keep bringing him back to the small, Southern French village of his youth as well as the nearby city of Nice, on the Mediterranean coast. In many of his books, you see the same woodland paths, the same barren views of Nice harbor, the same faces: his own adolescent self, his parents, his brother. He came to cartooning relatively late in life—his first album (as the French call their bound comic books) wasn’t published until he was forty years old, in the early eighties. From his earliest works, Baudoin focused on autobiography, making him one of the first French cartoonists to explore this genre, which has gone on to become one of the most prominent features of European literary comics. At the same time, his art—already confident, with an inky expressionist manner reminiscent of his contemporaries Jacques Tardi and José Antonio Muñoz—evolved quickly into a daringly loose, calligraphic brush style that has made him one of the most respected and recognizable cartoonists in Europe. After Baudoin’s first few albums, Étienne Robial—the legendary graphic designer and cofounder, along with Florence Cestac, of Futuropolis, one of France’s most influential independent publishers—prodded Baudoin to break with traditional narrative structure. Shortly thereafter, an epiphanic Miles Davis concert gave the cartoonist the courage to start improvising in his work by introducing digressions, elements of collage, and postmodern authorial interruptions. Books like Un flip Coca! and Un rubis sur les lèvres are full of jarring juxtapositions and shifts in style. A few years later, Couma acò harnesses this jazzy, improvised style to the form of a more classical family memoir, a template Baudoin has returned to numerous times, notably in Piero, published in English this month by New York Review Comics. Couma acò was also his first big critical breakthrough, winning him the prize for best album of the year at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 1992. He would go on to win two scriptwriting awards: for Le voyage in 1997 and for Les quatres fleuves (in collaboration with the mystery writer Fred Vargas) in 2002. Read More
November 30, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Octavia Butler By Valerie Stivers My copy of Lilith’s Brood, with a breadfruit, soon to be made into an edible bowl. I’ve read the book six times, as the damage to my copy shows. The most perfect alien abduction scene in all of literature occurs in Dawn, the first volume of Octavia Butler’s Imago trilogy. Butler (1947–2006) was a rarity, a black woman publishing science fiction in the eighties, and the Imago trilogy is her masterpiece. On the first page, the protagonist, Lilith Iyapo, comes to consciousness with the words “Alive! Still alive. Alive … again.” She finds herself in a familiar room with “light-colored—white or gray, perhaps” walls and anonymous touches like a bed that’s “a solid platform that gave slightly to the touch and that seemed to grow from the floor.” Lilith has been here before, has undergone weeks or maybe years of questioning by disembodied voices that come from the ceiling, has lost her mind and fallen asleep or lost consciousness only to reawaken and be put through it all again. This time, there’s food—“the usual lumpy cereal or stew, of no recognizable flavor, contained in an edible bowl that would disintegrate if she emptied it and did not eat it”—and something new: clothing. She dresses and eats. She is finally ready to cooperate with her unknown captors. Lilith’s last memories from before the locked room are of an all-annihilating nuclear war, of which she recalls, “a handful of people tried to commit humanicide.” Despite the strange circumstances of her captivity, she doesn’t realize she’s on a spaceship in the hands of aliens until the first one comes through her door. She then discovers a race of humanoids called Oankali, who are covered with shaggy, grotesque, tiny “sensory organ” tentacles. The Oankali long ago scooped up all survivors of the war and have been keeping them in suspended animation while restoring the earth to a primordial, habitable state. Now they’re ready to repatriate the survivors—but only under certain conditions. Lilith has been chosen to help the Oankali manage her fellow humans. That Lilith doesn’t want to be a collaborator is the first problem. The second is that the aliens cause a visceral, bone-deep, skin-crawling horror in human beings—a sensation akin to being confronted with giant hairy bugs. And the third is that the Oankali want to have sex. More than that, they are gene traders, and they offer humanity a future only if the survivors are willing to give up human children and breed a new third race, to be left behind on earth when the spaceship moves on. Read More
November 29, 2018 Arts & Culture We Tell Ourselves Stories: Didion’s “White Album” Takes to the Stage By Daniel Penny Photo: Lars Jan I was told to wait outside a dinged-up stage door on Ashland Place, in Brooklyn. When I rang the bell, the door opened, and I was ushered through a series of winding passages and deposited by the front row of the theater. A monologue emerged from what sounded like a tape recorder. The voice was warbling about an unnamed patient experiencing a mental break: It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal. In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure. The patient to whom this psychiatric report refers is me. The lines would be instantly recognizable to any fan of Joan Didion’s now iconic essay “The White Album.” It’s the first moment when the reader begins to understand just how unwell and perhaps unreliable the narrator really is, when the kaleidoscope turns and the essay rearranges itself into something darker than expected. “The White Album,” first published in 1979, is perhaps the single work most closely associated with Didion, and 2018 marks the fiftieth anniversary of many of the events she describes: the Manson murders, the rise of the Black Panthers and Huey Newton’s arrest, the student takeover of San Francisco State College, and the writer’s own breakdown. Read More
November 29, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: When You Weep, Sorrow Comes Clean Out By Kaveh Akbar 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, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. ©Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, This year has been full of so many new experiences, in the best possible ways. It’s disorienting. How did I get to this place? How is everything so strange? Am I allowed to feel happy, to accept good things for myself? Even if it’s all so fleeting? I’m unfamiliar with the geography of joy. How might I learn to navigate this space? Sincerely, Bewildered in the Best Way Dear Bewildered, The geography of joy! What a wonderful place to find yourself. When my life slowly started to improve after getting sober, I was mystified. I had familiar psychological algorithms for pain and desperation and loneliness and despair, but I didn’t know what to do with gratitude or contentment. Some of the labor of recovery, for me, has been working to allow new, good things into my life, even when my brain wants me to reject them in favor of the joyless desolation it knows so well. For you, I offer Naomi Shihab Nye’s “So Much Happiness.” The bewilderment you speak of is the same bewilderment I have known, and it is the bewilderment Nye points to when she writes: It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness. With sadness there is something to rub against, a wound to tend with lotion and cloth. Yet, as she says: But happiness floats. It doesn’t need you to hold it down. It doesn’t need anything. Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing, and disappears when it wants to. You are happy either way. I hope that you discover a path into and through your new joy, one that will allow you to feel it fully, to be immersed in it, to “hold it, and share it, and in that way, be known.” –KA Read More
November 28, 2018 Look Something We All Can Agree On: The Moon By The Paris Review Love fades, everything dies, but the moon looms forever in our imaginations. Organized to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing, a new show at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, in Denmark, examines how the earth’s satellite has served as a point of fascination and inspiration for artists, thinkers, writers, and scientists across human civilization. Below, we present a selection of images from the exhibition, which runs through January 20, 2019. The first known photograph of the moon was taken by John W. Draper ca. 1839. The spots in this photo are caused by mold and water damage on the original daguerreotype, which apparently no longer exists. Photography. New York University Archives. Max Ernst, Naissance d’une galaxie (The Birth of a Galaxy), 1969, oil on canvas. Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel Beyeler Collection. Read More
November 28, 2018 First Person Yellow City By Ellena Savage Photo: Deensel [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.February 1, 2017 Sitting in the back seat of the taxi into Lisbon with Dom, I notice that I am wearing, more or less, the same clothes I wore when I traveled here alone eleven years ago: a worn-out black turtleneck, skintight black jeans. Though now I am one and a half dress sizes larger. Though now my jeans are tailored, and my sweater has a designer label. Though now I don’t wear whimsical fur-collared coats or charming hats from the twenties to imply that I might be interesting. The last time I came to this city, I could talk to any person in the world. I had fast learned how to sleep in any number of positions: between the farts and fucks and snores of adolescent adults in hostels; on a row of couch cushions laid out by earnest Belgian students on their Erasmus year; with my head resting on the shoulder of a fleshy Brazilian on an overnight bus. I saw no problem in taking time from others, or accepting their hospitality, because I was paying it out in full. I had everything to give, because I was a general, all-purpose, adaptable person. All my unrealized potential suggested that I might become exactly like any one of the people I encountered. —In becoming specific, narrower, more difficult, you, you don’t have much left to give. —But it’s true. We dress the same, she and I. And we didn’t get much better. Read More