October 3, 2018 Arts & Culture Obligatory Readings By Alejandro Zambra I still remember the day when the teacher turned to the chalkboard and wrote the words test, next, Friday, Madame, Bovary, Gustave, Flaubert, French. With each word, the silence grew, and by the end, the only sound was the sad squeaking of the chalk. By that point, we had already read long novels, almost as long as Madame Bovary, but this time, the deadline was impossible: barely a week to get through a four-hundred-page book. We were starting to get used to those surprises, though: we had just entered the National Institute, we were twelve or thirteen years old, and we knew that from then on, all the books would be long. That’s how they taught us to read: by beating it into us. I feel sure that those teachers didn’t want to inspire enthusiasm for books but rather to deter us from them, to put us off books forever. They didn’t waste their spit extolling the joys of reading, perhaps because they had lost that joy or had never really felt it. Supposedly they were good teachers, but back then, being good meant little more than knowing the textbook. As Nicanor Parra might say, “Our teachers drove us nuts / with their pointless questions.” But we soon learned their tricks or developed ones of our own. On all the tests, for example, there was a section of character identification, and it included nothing but secondary characters: the more secondary the character, the more likely we would be asked about them. We resigned ourselves to memorizing the names, though with the pleasure of guaranteed points. Read More
October 2, 2018 Redux Redux: The Whims of Men By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. This week, we bring you Toni Morrison’s 1993 Writers at Work interview, Grace Paley’s short story “The Little Girl,” and Sally W. Bliumis’s poem “In the Women’s Locker Room.” Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134 Issue no. 128 (Fall 1993) I only know that I will never again trust my life, my future, to the whims of men, in companies or out. Never again will their judgment have anything to do with what I think I can do. That was the wonderful liberation of being divorced and having children. I did not mind failure, ever, but I minded thinking that someone male knew better. Read More
October 2, 2018 At Work The Adoptee’s Perspective: An Interview with Nicole Chung By Julie Buntin Nicole Chung (photo: Erica B. Tappis) By the time I received Nicole Chung’s proposal for All You Can Ever Know on submission at Catapult, I was already—like so many others—a fan of her work. Her essays about identity and family in places like the New York Times, Longreads, and The Toast had left a permanent groove in my imagination. When something happened in the news, I’d wonder what Nicole thought about it. To read one of her articles was like diving into clear water after months of wading through flotsam: here was moral and stylistic clarity, and writing with purpose. Nicole’s sentences have led me to a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be human. You can imagine how I felt when I learned our bid for her debut memoir had been accepted. Even as a proposal, All You Can Ever Know had an urgency of intention that can take years to wrest from a manuscript. Nicole’s voice is so distinct, she could write compellingly about pretty much anything. But in making the story of her transracial adoption and the search for her biological family her subject, she has done us all a great service. There are so few narratives of adoption from the adoptee’s perspective. Despite having known many adopted people, I had never read or heard anything quite like Nicole’s story before. After years of working together, Nicole and I sat down to have a formal conversation about her story, the evolution of her book, and what it means to both of us to be both writers and editors. INTERVIEWER I know that as a child you struggled to find stories that matched your experience of growing up adopted. Did this absence of comparable stories present a challenge for you as you worked on the book? CHUNG Yes—people ask me for recommendations all the time, and it’s difficult to know what to say, especially if they’re looking for books that kids and teens could also read. The majority of the books that deal with adoption—both fiction and nonfiction—are written by non-adoptees. I don’t think I read any adoption stories when I was growing up, except for Anne of Green Gables and a few others from a different era, when adoption wasn’t the institution it is today. I certainly never got to read anything about transracial adoptees like me. Read More
October 2, 2018 Arts & Culture My Mother and Me (and J. M. Coetzee) By Ceridwen Dovey I was born the year J. M. Coetzee published his third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians. My mother read this dark, disturbing novel, with its many scenes of torture, as she breastfed me at night, while my older sister slept and the house was quiet. It was 1980. The apartheid government had declared a state of emergency in the face of growing internal revolt, and my parents were thinking of leaving South Africa again. My mother nursed me in the spare room so the lamplight wouldn’t wake my father, and as she read, her somatic response to the words on the page would have coursed through her into me: elation and despair, trepidation and longing. I feel I’m still marked by that embodied encounter with Coetzee’s writing, via my mother, as a newborn. Coetzee, who anticipates everything, would say I am inhabiting action in imagining my way back to my neonate self, though even he allows for the possibility of flickerings of insight into other selves or our own younger selves. Several years later, when I was no longer a baby and my mother was on her way to becoming the first scholar to publish a book on Coetzee’s work, I formed one of my earliest visual memories. It is of the striking cover of this same novel, which lay on the kitchen table in our home in Melbourne, Australia, surrounded by the detritus of a midday meal: half-eaten sandwiches, apple cores. A picture of a white man on his knees, washing a pair of jagged black feet that have been sawed off at the ankles. Read More
October 1, 2018 Arts & Culture Schiele, Shoes, and Kavanaugh By Larissa Pham “Old World Bootie” for sale at Modcloth If you arrived at your formation of taste in the late aughts to the early teens—right around the time that hipster became a social category and twee was a kind of music and it was conceivable that an attractive stranger might ask whether you wanted to come back to their place and listen to their records—then you might know this shoe, if you don’t already have a pair lying around. Surely you have seen it on the feet of models or mannequins in Anthropologie, Modcloth, or any other retro-leaning, trendy store. Black or brown leather, with a tidy, stacked heel, fastened up with buttons or more often tightly laced in a neat bow, these boots—booties, in cutesy copywriter parlance—hug the shape of the foot, making for a pretty, petite, old-fashioned silhouette. Sometimes known as an Oxford heel, they’re self-consciously vintage yet contemporarily ordinary—not out of place in 2010, 2014, 2018, though they might strike some as a little … twee, these days. They’re Wes Anderson boots. Indie-pop boots. You-used-to-buy-graphic-tees boots. Imagine my surprise, then, while visiting the Met Breuer’s latest drawing show—“Obsession,” an exhibition of nudes by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Pablo Picasso, closing October 7—to see these very shoes preserved in time, in their first incarnation, an instant of fashion history trapped in amber. Though the show ostensibly features three artists, all household names, it’s Schiele who steals the show, taking up most of the exhibition’s wall space as he links Klimt—albeit tenuously, and really only chronologically—to Picasso, who’s shunted to the exhibition’s last room. The show, intended to showcase the collection of the aesthete Scofield Thayer, tracks a loose narrative of figurative drawing and, within its selection, the entirety of Schiele’s blazing, short career. Read More
October 1, 2018 Arts & Culture The Surprising Story of Eartha Kitt in Istanbul By Hilal Isler Eartha Kitt in Istanbul, 1949 One month into their marriage, my parents leave Turkey for good. It’s my mom’s first time on a plane. They fly from Ankara to Brisbane, an Australian city where they don’t know anyone. The trip takes two days. Their tickets are one way, paid for in cash. The year is 1975, and Australia has recently rescinded its White Australia policy. My parents are among the first nonwhite immigrants allowed into the country. British Airways tells them they can bring up to forty kilograms’ worth of things. When they pack, my parents are more strategic than sentimental. They pack clothes, bedding, albums—but only a few, because photo albums are strangely heavy, and the other kind, the kind on vinyl, too fragile to make the trip. The first record my parents purchase in Australia has a picture of a black woman on the cover: just her face, a hint of cleavage, painted lips but no smile. Her hair is pulled back, coiled against the nape of her neck, and she’s looking away from the camera, wistful. I am five, maybe six years old, and I enjoy staring at that album cover. I believe the wistful woman is Turkish. She sings in Turkish. She sings this one song,“Üsküdar’a Gider İken” or, as the track is listed incorrectly on the front, “Uska Dara.” It’s an old Turkish/Macedonian folk song. At the time, I don’t wonder why Eartha Kitt, who was born into extreme poverty on a plantation in South Carolina, is singing about sailing up and down the Bosphorus with her male secretary. I just know that those nights on which my parents, tipsy off cheap Australian red, dance to her voice in our apartment are the best kind. Read More