October 19, 2018 Arts & Culture Surviving Unrequited Love with Ivan Turgenev By Viv Groskop I found out about Ivan Turgenev’s existence at a crucial moment. There had been a very small leap for me between obsessing over Anna Karenina in my midteens and deciding that learning Russian was my destiny. There was, unsurprisingly, an even smaller leap between becoming obsessed with learning Russian and becoming obsessed with unsuitable men who spoke Russian. This culminated in my acquaintance with a man whose name—Bogdan Bogdanovich—translated as “God’s Gift, Son of God’s Gift.” In many ways, he lived up to his name. He was a man whom I loved with the passion that Anna Karenina first feels for Vronsky, but he regarded me with as much affection as Levin holds for the ladies who stink of eau de vinaigre. This is where Turgenev comes in. No one writes better about unrequited love. Real life is about quiet, slow, awkward moments of humiliation. And what greater humiliation is there than loving someone far, far more than they love you? This is the kind of embarrassing, self-inflicted fever that Turgenev is brilliant at describing. In August 1994, I was twenty-one years old and spending the summer by the Black Sea in Odessa, Ukraine. It was the last few months of my year abroad. That summer was a blur of strong cigarettes, black bread, tea and jam, and whispered invitations on a Saturday night. I spent a lot of time drinking samogon (moonshine), eating pig fat, and being in love. He was in a rock band. They played songs in terrible English with titles like “I’m Not Drunk, It’s Only Fucking Funk.” I was his groupie. He was my world. We went everywhere together. We kissed. We laughed. We ate pig fat. I was drunk a lot of the time, but I was never too drunk to know that God’s Gift, Son of God’s Gift, did not love me in the same way that I loved him. Luckily, while I was plowing my way through Tolstoy with a dictionary, I also happened to be reading in translation Turgenev’s play A Month in the Country. It is a cruel and hilarious cautionary tale about unrequited love. Turgenev himself experienced this unhappy state for more or less the entirety of his sixty-four years. From around the 1840s to the end of his life in 1883, Turgenev adored the married opera singer Pauline Viardot. The exact nature of their relationship is hotly debated. But it seems to me to be one of the most extreme examples of one-sided love in history. Turgenev represents his complicated feelings about this state of being through the mournful, resigned, comically self-pitying character of Rakitin. Read More
October 19, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Georges Bataille By Valerie Stivers It is an unfortunate quirk that when I try to think of food scenes in literature, one of the first that comes to mind is from the opening pages of a 1928 classic of transgressive pornography, The Story of the Eye, by the French philosopher Georges Bataille (1897–1962). In the scene in question, Simone, the female protagonist, lifts up her skirt and dips an exposed body part into the kitty cat’s saucer of milk while the sixteen-year-old male narrator looks on. Simone is wearing “a black pinafore with a starched white collar.” She says, “Milk is for the pussy, isn’t it? … Do you dare me to sit in the saucer?” “I dare you,” the narrator answers—“almost breathless.” The scene is sexy and also a perfect riff, with the cat, the body part, the milk, and the potential lapping up. Strangely, when I have this thought, a dish springs to mind as well—a terror of haute French cuisine called floating islands, or iles flottante, in which meringue towers drift lazily in a pool of crème anglaise. The meringues can be baked or poached and, in a recipe I found from The Cordon Bleu Cookbook, are served dusted with crushed pink Jordan almonds. The dish’s relevance to The Story of the Eye is that it’s made mostly from milk (starring in the passage above) and eggs, which participate in one of the text’s main metaphor chains, linked to eyes and testicles. Eggs, for the narrator, are “extraordinarily meaningful” and are used for bizarre and grotesque purposes. He explains, “Another game was to crack a fresh egg on the edge of the bidet and empty it under her: sometimes she would piss on it, sometimes she made me strip naked and swallow the raw egg from the bottom of the bidet.” Milk in the book participates in a second metaphor chain, this one of fluids, primarily semen and urine. (Coincidentally, the meringue of my iles flottante floats in a pool of creamy yellow liquid. Mmm … ) Read More
October 18, 2018 Arts & Culture Virginia Woolf’s Little-Known Biography of a Cocker Spaniel By Erin Schwartz Sawrey Gilpin, English Springer Spaniel on a Cushion, 1807 In her 1911 opus Toy Dogs and Their Ancestors, Judith Blunt-Lytton, sixteenth baroness of Wentworth, great-granddaughter of Lord Byron, wrote, “It has cost me years of research both in the British Museum and in the picture galleries of Europe to disentangle the truth from the cocoon of falsehood into which it was spun.” What Blunt-Lytton sought to recuperate from the cobwebs of history was the lapdog’s true form. Blunt-Lytton contended that many breeds had recently strayed from their roots, in large part due to the Victorian proliferation of “dog fancying”: a British term that evokes, at once, a group of people who like dogs and a group people who fluff up dogs’ fur and tie ribbons around their necks. Of the spaniel, Blunt-Lytton asserts that the contemporary model “was introduced comparatively recently, certainly no earlier than the year 1840,” and compiles visual evidence of its transformation. The spaniel in Titian’s Venus of Urbino is technically correct, as are eighteenth-century pooches painted by George Stubbs; for comparison, her book contains a mug shot of a puppy described as “noseless atrocity, bred by author,” while another dog’s portrait is captioned: “noseless toy spaniel, with wrongly carried ears and bad expression.” Read More
October 18, 2018 At Work A Reckoning Is Different than a Tell-All: An Interview with Kiese Laymon By Abigail Bereola Heavy: An American Memoir is Kiese Laymon’s third book. The first, Long Division, a novel, and the second, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, an essay collection, were both published in the summer of 2013—one in June and one in August. Laymon’s work is known for its honesty and courage, as well as for the way he reckons with his own past and our collective national one. In Heavy, he takes the stuff of his life and renders it on the page. Laymon discusses violence in many forms, gambling and addiction, the treatment of black students at predominantly white institutions, and more. He also discusses weight and bodies and the way all these things lend themselves to a heaviness that can be both physical and emotional. There’s a fable-like quality to the storytelling: it imparts its lessons in layers. Laymon and I spoke on the phone as he was making the twelve-hour drive from Oxford, Mississippi, to Tampa, Florida, to meet with booksellers. The sounds of the highway occasionally made themselves heard in the background. In conversation, he is genuine and open, turning questions back around to his interlocutor with sincere curiosity. His work forces us to ask: What if everybody wrote like this to those who love and hurt them about the ways they have been loved and hurt? What would that do, and what would it look like? Until then, we’re just lucky that Laymon shows us a path toward reckoning. INTERVIEWER What does heaviness evoke for you? LAYMON Heaviness evokes fear and desperation and, most importantly, a soulfulness. For me, it’s not one thing. I think I thought it was one thing before I started the book, but as I worked on it, I began to embrace the soulfulness in heaviness. It’s something most people try to avoid, but it’s also something that I need to make it through the day. Read More
October 18, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: A Love Poem without Clichés By Claire Schwartz 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, Claire Schwartz is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I am one of you. I have been for a while. I am also jaded and worldly and often write with plenty of saltiness, irony, and smarty-pants-ness (enough to be taken seriously). I teach my students to “avoid cliches like the plague.” I tell them to keep their crushes out of their poems at all costs. I tell them to find new words for new feelings and to always surprise themselves with what they pen and present to others. But lately, I’ve fallen in love. I’ve fallen in love and all I have are platitudes. Percy Shelley is not helpful. W. B. Yeats is not helpful. Christian Wiman is too sad. Most of the contemporary poets I read are too angry or skeptical for what it is I actually feel—relief and an overwhelming joy that I have found a human such as the one who last week surprised me with the delivery of a baby pumpkin (a baby pumpkin, poets!) just because. Give me fresh eyes. How do I write of such happiness and adoration while … “avoiding clichés like the plague.” Yours, Dumbstruck Poet Dear Dumbstruck Poet, You don’t have platitudes. You have a baby pumpkin! And you do have fresh eyes. Love gives them to you. What you need now is to give yourself permission. Finding ways to wrap this ineffable feeling in language requires innovation. Words can’t ever entirely hold that thing, not really. That’s why there are so many poems trying to say, I love. E.E. Cummings: “love is more thicker than forget …” June Jordan: “I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED / GENOCIDE TO STOP” Ross Gay: “Here is a cup of tea. I have spooned honey into it.” There are so many shapes to that failure. There are so many things of beauty created in that attempt. Read More
October 17, 2018 Arts & Culture The Erotics of Cy Twombly By Catherine Lacey Cy Twombly in Grottaferrata, 1957 ©Betty Stokes Early in Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly, author Joshua Rivkin confesses that the book “is not a biography. This is something, I hope, stranger and more personal.” What, a reader may wonder, could be more personal than a biography? Chalk is one answer to that riddle. Cy Twombly, a prominent abstract artist whose popularity has only grown since his death in 2011, is best known for his large, abstract paintings—“passionate splashes of color … curves of white chalk looping through darkness.” Rivkin describes the artist’s work as an actualization of “the bewildering slipstream between thinking and feeling.” Twombly’s most staunch admirers are ecstatically unnerved by his canvases; a woman once spontaneously kissed one painting, leaving behind a lipsticked print. (She was, as lovers often are, unrepentant.) But, outside the art world, Twombly’s messy, seemingly thoughtless style inspired confusion and disdain. His scratchy, hectic paintings have led the unimaginative to shrug, “My kid could do that.” Rivkin is intensely focused on the “complex arrangements of love and domesticity” that filled Twombly’s life—from his early love affair with a married Robert Rauschenberg, to his impenetrable and improbable marriage to the Italian heiress Tatiana Franchetti, to his decades-long entwinement with his assistant and rumored paramour, Nicola del Roscio. Read More