November 19, 2018 Arts & Culture The Pugilist at School By Mark Jude Poirier Thom Jones’s first collection of stories, The Pugilist at Rest, was published in 1993, when he was in his late forties. He died in October 2016, at the age of seventy-one. This October, Little, Brown and Company published Night Train: New and Selected Stories, a definitive posthumous collection of his work. Thom Jones (Via Little, Brown and Company) On the first manuscript I submitted for critique at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop back in the fall of ’95, Thom Jones, my professor, crossed out the word breasts and replaced it with sexy milk jugs. He didn’t offer much more advice, written or verbal; he let my classmates do all the work. A few days later, as I sat in his office, watching the eyes of his shiny black Kit-Cat clock roll back and forth, listening to him talk about his psychiatric meds, his father’s suicide, and how Sally Field’s publicist kept hounding him to meet with Sally, I was mildly entertained, but wondered whether we’d ever get around to discussing my story. We didn’t. I was cynical and miserable that first month of graduate school in Iowa City. I lived in one of two apartments above a drywall company, behind a soon-to-be-defunct Godfather’s Pizza, next to a vast lot of brand-new mobile homes. Beyond the mobile homes were a litter-filled swamp and the biggest Walmart I’d ever seen. My next-door neighbors were bikers, one of whom vomited in the washing machine we shared. They had very loud and very frequent sex that they narrated with porn clichés. I was grateful that I never heard them scream or moan the words sexy milk jugs. Most people in the workshop lived within walking distance of one another, and within stumbling distance of the Fox Head and George’s, two of our favorite watering holes. I lived three carless miles away on Highway 1 West, in what felt like the epicenter of everything that was wrong with America. Read More
November 19, 2018 Arts & Culture Starvation and Suffering Also Get You High By Eileen Myles Can Xue. “Have you always treated the whole world as your home, Fourth Uncle?” “Not the whole world—I’m always wandering nearby.” Books have lighting, I think. And I speak as a dedicated and conflicted reader lured hopelessly away from the page by television and the entire history of film available now on various sites—yet some books drop me nicely in the middle, right in between the modes of reading and watching, to live alongside me in the dilemma. Can Xue’s Love in the New Millennium is lit a lot like Tarkovsky’s Solaris. The astronaut wanders through the weeds and trees of his dacha before he heads off on his voyage. Yet he is already gone. We are leaving the earth but that is the earth. It’s got this crazy nostalgic light. I mean, it’s not exactly that. Maybe it’s the light of uncanniness that follows our departure from a movie theater during the day, maybe that’s the version of lighting or reality that Can Xue’s book shares with film. I also think of Fellini’s Satyricon and its use of the ancient mode of storytelling in which a character begins to speak and the narrative darts swiftly after them down the rabbit hole of the story. In Can Xue’s Love, all the characters are connected to each other. There’s no one story I can tell. And they are laughing about it, too. At their own inconstancy, their changeability. At the outset, you meet Cuilan, a widow, so you think it’s about her. No … but it’s way more about her lover Wei Bo. Wei Bo appears at her door to say that something has come up and he can’t keep their date. Weeks pass and he never returns. Cuilan treks off mournfully to her ancestral home. Her relatives (who have all become mysteriously mangled and wizened since the last time she saw them) are hardly welcoming. Then they begin speaking about Wei Bo, which feels inside out, but the world already is. The countryside is destroyed. In the relatives’ house there’s an ambient, estranged type of hearing that’s become commonplace. People chattering out the window, there’s a banging upstairs even if there isn’t an upstairs. At night her relatives are in a tree fighting and laughing and one falls, hits the ground with a thud. She goes out to investigate and everything goes silent at once. Next day (while practically pushing her out the door) her cousin offers this, “Our daytime and nighttime are two completely different days. If you always lived here and never left you’d be able to sense this. It’s too bad you won’t have the chance.” Read More
November 16, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Singing, Sequins, and Slaughterhouses By The Paris Review Still from On Body and Soul. “I would like to sleep / with you, to enter / your sleep,” go a few lines from Margaret Atwood’s 1981 poem “Variations on the Word Sleep,” and I recently found myself repeating these to myself as I watched On Body and Soul, the 2017 drama written and directed by the Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi. The film—which won the Golden Bear at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival and has recently been released on Netflix—centers on the intense, off-kilter romance between two slaughterhouse employees, Endre and Mária, who discover through a series of work-related mishaps that they in fact share the same dream every night, one in which they appear to each other as deer in the woods. What could have been a twee cinematic disaster—Mária, with her nervous tics, is the sort of female character a lesser director would portray as nothing more than quirky—is saved by the brutality with which Enyedi juxtaposes Endre and Mária’s interactions with cuts of animals being killed, dissected, and turned into something far more sterile than their original bodies. To sleep beside someone requires a certain level of trust, of intimacy, and by the film’s shockingly violent ending, Enyedi successfully explores the dissolution of the self essential to both dreaming and desire. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
November 16, 2018 At Work Between Two Languages: An Interview with Yoko Tawada By Alexandra Pereira Yoko Tawada (b. 1960), who writes in Japanese and German and has been translated around the world, studied Russian literature in Tokyo before hotfooting it to Hamburg: “Russian writing was just the greatest, but I couldn’t study in the Soviet Union for political reasons, so I got a job in Hamburg.” She settled in Berlin, and has now published numerous novels, plays, poems, and essays. Her latest novel, The Emissary (translated by Margaret Mitsutani), won the inaugural National Book Award for translated literature this week. Among the finest of Tawada’s works are short stories about adapting to new cultures, both physically and linguistically. The daughter of a nonfiction translator and academic bookseller, Tawada learned to read in over five languages; she speaks English, but doesn’t write it. “I feel in between two languages, and that’s big enough,” she told me. Her stories often turn on feeling outside the culture, as an immigrant, as a citizen witnessing great national change, or even as a tourist. In between collecting several other prizes, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Kleist Prize, and the Goethe Medal, Tawada has fashioned the dream bohemian existence for herself in Berlin, writing forewords and books and collaborating with the likes of Wim Wenders and Ulrike Ottinger. When we met at Denmark’s Louisiana Literature Festival this past summer, I made it a personal mission to ask Tawada polar bear questions she hadn’t heard before. Tawada, who has a long-standing interest in the Cold War and socialism, based the protagonist of her best-selling Memoirs of a Polar Bear on the Berlin Zoo’s star resident, Knut, who was born and raised in captivity, and died in captivity as well. “Danish sounds quite polar-bear-ish,” the author said. Tawada peppers her speech with German phrases and portmanteaus. She is cheeky, full of light, and modestly, sagaciously witty. INTERVIEWER When do you write? TAWADA I look like a person who cannot think when I wake up, because I’m still quite between the sleep and the dream and the waking, and that’s the best time for business. Read More
November 16, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Bohumil Hrabal By Valerie Stivers Ditie, the hero of Bohumil Hrabal’s (1914–1997) I Served the King of England, begins his adventures as a “tiny busboy” under the chapter heading “A Glass of Grenadine.” He is a small man, common, filled with naive enthusiasms, a stealer of change who falls in love with prostitutes and decorates their bodies with flowers. The term picaresque seems made for him. His adventures start outside Prague in the early part of the twentieth century and, over their course, he becomes a waiter, then the owner of a hotel, somehow growing up without denting his innocence. What he does learn, with trademark exuberance, is the ways of the wealthy and powerful people who come through his doors. He watches a boss knock the chef down for putting caraway seeds in the médaillon de veau aux champignons. He waits on a general who drinks Germany’s Henkell Trocken sparkling wine and eats “oysters and dishes of shrimp and lobster,” simultaneously stuffing himself and “sputter[ing] in disgust.” The president of the country displays equally inexplicable behavior, hiding in a children’s playhouse in the hotel’s yard with a Frenchwoman. The couple have sex on a “mound of hay” and order a twee faux-pastoral snack—“a crystal jug full of cool cream, a loaf of fresh bread, and a small lump of butter wrapped in vine leaves.” Ditie observes, “I had always thought that a President didn’t do things like this, and that it wasn’t right for a President to do things like this, and yet here he was just like the other rich people.” Ditie doesn’t serve the titular king of England (the highest possible honor, which befalls a waiter friend of his), but in a scene of culminating absurdity, he waits on a table while local officials fete the king of Ethiopia with a grotesque turducken made of a camel, two antelopes, twenty turkeys, fish, and “hundreds of hard-boiled eggs to fill in the empty spaces.” The meal is consumed with Zernoseky riesling, to moans of pleasure from the guests. Read More
November 15, 2018 At Work Building a Monument: An Interview with Natasha Trethewey By Lauren LeBlanc Natasha Trethewey (photo: Nancy Crampton) Two-term national Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winner Natasha Trethewey was born in her mother’s hometown, Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966. The daughter of Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, an interracial couple who traveled from Kentucky to Ohio in order to be legally married, Trethewey shares her birthday with Confederate Memorial Day. I was previously unaware of the holiday, which is still celebrated across the South to commemorate the deaths of Confederate soldiers. Upon the inauguration of Barack Obama, pundits announced we had entered a postracial era. Roughly a decade later, it is easy to say that white supremacy is stronger than it’s been since the civil rights movement. Talking with Trethewey on the phone, we noted the different ways that signals and symbols of white supremacy—beyond the obvious statues and memorials—continue to stand in plain sight. We are both daughters of the Deep South, and we discussed the old department stores that once lined Canal Street in New Orleans, such as Maison Blanche. Remarking on a Washington Post review of a John Grisham novel, Trethewey said, “One thing he mentions is a dismissal that I hear, too. You write about race. Aren’t there larger or more important subjects to write about? But this reviewer said that Mississippi writers in different genres all write about race because not writing about race in Mississippi is like writers from Arizona not writing about the desert. How can I not?” Trethewey stands witness. It would be impossible for her not to. In 1985, her stepfather murdered her mother, and she traces her desire to become a poet to her grief. This dedication to survival and memory have informed her five poetry collections, as well as her nonfiction book, Beyond Katrina, a book that should be read in conversation with Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and Men We Reaped. Trethewey’s Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Native Guard confirmed her as the guardian of the histories that must be retold. This collection chronicled one of the first African American regiments during the Civil War. Her exquisite and brutal lyricism as well as her commitment to truth makes Trethewey one of the most important American poets of our time. Her new book, Monument, is a collection of both new and selected works. It’s a vibrant and timely book, deeply aware of our nation’s chaotic moment and its historical resonances. The most recent poems ripple with questions that have always informed her work: “Why is everything I see the past / I’ve tried to forget? … Do you know what it means / to have a wound that never heals?” and “How, then, could I not answer her life / with mine, she who saved me with hers?/ And how could I not—bathed in the light / of her wound—find my calling there?” She interrogates the black experience in America, the trauma of domestic violence and murder, and the destruction of the Gulf Coast. Trethewey is a tremendously empathic and enthusiastic force in our nation’s bleak period. Her words settle with profound gravity, yet her laughter is quick and comfortable. Read More